My new buddy… yWriter (tips and tricks)
April 2, 2011I’m not PC Literate…Can I still Self-Publish?
May 12, 2011
Made more updates to my website. I wanted to convert the excerpts of my books to a “flip page” type of style. I found two sites which I tried out.
I tried this site first:CodeBox, which converted my PDF file to a Flash file automatically and it was …you know me… FREE!
But my problem was that there was a wide open space and, when you zoom in, you have to move the entire page all over the place to read it. I then played around with the settings and came up with: Page width 150, Page Height 297, Preset Standard A4. That got rid of the big space. I also found out that you can’t double-click and open the index.html file while it’s still zipped, or you’ll get the error below on the webpage. So make sure you unzip before you try it out.
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PDF2FlashPageFlip Book To view the book, you need the latest Flash player. |
I then found this site Flip Builder. And it looked pretty good. Yes, I had to wait a bit for it to be emailed back to me (a few hours and one the next day), but it looked just like I wanted for a software that’s FREE. When you zoom in, you still have to move the entire file, but I liked the the “flip-page” sound and the many button options on the bottom. It also displays how many pages are in the file. NOTE: IT WILL ONLY ALLOW YOU TO LOAD 20 PAGES!! But 20 Pages was enough for me for an excerpt of my books. The maximum size for CodeBox is 10 Megabytes, so my novel, The Made, which is 1.75 Megabytes and 448 Pages, will fit.
With both options, you can rename the index.html file to whatever name you want and it will work. You really need to do this because your website already has a “index” file, so make sure to rename.
BookBuzzr
Here’s another application which I ran across while viewing other author blogs. I haven’t played with it myself, but it does have some nice features. Also the flip page part is FREE. So check out BookBuzzr as well.
So, you wanna see my pages flip? Take a look! And click on Excerpt to view the books.
Researching about your website, you should always keep it fresh and not let it sit like a brochure. Always update. But I keep trying to make improvements and so that’s why I do it. 🙂
And if you don’t want to bother with the PDF flip stuff, just remember that Kindle has a sample option you can turn on for your novels, and Smashwords (my book links below) has an online Preview.
Until Next time!
10 Comments
Hmm, I see only “To view the book, you need the latest Flash player.”
Another interesting flip page engine is http://pressmo.com – conversion of first ebook is for free
Everyone can access the Free Adobe Flash Player from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. And it’s free. There’s a lot of websites that requires a Flash Player and since it’s free…no problem. Also, I like these sites because every eBook is for conversion is free. And did I say Free? That’s my favorite word 🙂
Kvisoft page flip software can create the effect of flash flipping ebooks as you need. And the templates created by this flip book software are well-designed and looking beautiful. It’s worthy to have a try.
http://www.kvisoft.com/flipbook-maker/
Kvisoft looks pretty cool and it works with a Google Analytics account ID to measure traffic to the page (and I LOVE GOOGLE stuff!!). It is $97, but for those who do a lot of flip pdf page stuff, it might be worth it to them. I, myself, only need it for excerpts, which is just a few pages, so I don’t need to own software to get it done. So I create this blog for those who want something free for just a few pages. However, Kvisoft looks like a user friendly type of thing that if I did buy something, it looks like a prime choice.
Besides codebox, there are some free yet powerful free flip page converters, like Issue, Flipsnack, Free Flash Page Flip, and more.
I think these free tools could help us do some simple conversion. The page-flipping effect looks amazing. Ha~. I don’t think it’s necessary to buy some commercial ones if you don’t have some high-level need. However, for making more professional flipping books, some economical application is recommended, like XFlip http://www.xflip.com/
Yep. Yep. For professionalism, you’ll have to spend money somewhere and sometime. But for a simply sample of text, free is the way to go…if you can find it with the options you want.
Flipsnack states it has a watermark and you have to pay to get it removed (Pay with “points”?–I hate points but some sites use them like Dreamstime that I use for my book trailers. They remind me of those tickets for carnivals and you end up paying out a lot of money on “tickets”. If you don’t know your math you won’t realize you paid $5 for an 8oz coke). It’s 15 pages long.
FlashPageFlip uses only jpeg or SWF files, which, for a novel of text, would be very tedious to make a picture of each page. However for graphic artists, this would work. You’ll have to size each picture correctly though, and know HTML to update it. There’s a very nice video instructions (no sound) to help out.
I don’t know about xflip. Some of the links don’t work (like the tutorial page) which makes me think of “fly-by” type of website. I couldn’t get any idea what the software actually looks like. It’s the same price as Kvisoft mentioned in a previous comment, but it just doesn’t seem to have that same “professional” look about it. However the samples look AWESOME. Don’t just view ONE sample magazine because they each have their own feel and look and tastes about them. Also different sounds for flipping the pages. I likes sounds! 🙂
I was using CodeBox and have just tried to open the website to publish another book and the link is broken. Does anyone know anything about this?
I just tried your link and that works, so I’m not sure what happened!
Hi there, Naomi. Glad you stopped by. Yes, CodeBox is good, but for some reason, FlipBuilder is currently down. I emailed them about the site on August 19th, and they said they online service was temporarily unavailable. Shortly after that, they put up the website to put your email account on the list to be notified when they’re back up and working. I hope they come back soon because I have two books I would like to convert. As a work-around, I’m pointing excerpts of my books to my Smashwords website, but I want the flip-page for my personal website. It’s been about a month now since the service has been down. Hope we don’t have to wait that much longer for it. Hopefully the first 20 pages remain free as well!
Thanks for all your advice and knowledge. I have been researching the flipbook options for a while now. I work for a company that has one on our website from Codebox but the quality of realism isn’t as good as many others. Our brochure is 28pages and it seems you cant get something for nothing!