Over the last few months, we have been working with several magazines on our PDF to HTML5 converter (stay tuned for lots of interesting stuff in the next few weeks or come and visit our stand at the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York next month.
Several of the magazines have pointed out different advantages to the process so I thought it would be good to highlight some of these, so welcome to this new series of articles.
There are lots of companies offering various tools to put magazines online, all with different strengths and weaknesses. Some use flash, others display the page as an image maybe with an invisible text overlay to give the appearance of search and selection. All of these systems have their strengths and weaknesses. Some of them have fancy page turn effects which are not easily reproducible in HTML5.
However, the big drawback with a lot of sites is that the content is hosted on their website (and not that of the content creator). That is great for them (it gives some of them very good rankings because they are gaining all this traffic from all their customers). But it is not so good for their customers who are losing out in terms of SEO and their website rankings – as I will explain in detail more next time. In the days of walled gardens, poor HTML capabilities, and before mobile this may have made sense but not in 2013…
In the meantime, perhaps you would like to try our free online PDF to HTML5 converter (which gives you the HTML5 version to put on your own website)?
This article is part of a series where we talk about the advantages of publishing your PDF magazines online as HTML5. Visit the index and see more advantages.