Pentagonal Pool on Issuu

For whatever reasons, few readers of this blog seem to click through on the links to my Blurb book previews, and even fewer (for all practical purposes "none") ever actually buy anything. Now, I don't have any serious designs on your money – I gave up on the idea of generating income from my efforts a long time ago – but I do like my work to be seen in its most congenial and coherent form, that is, as a book. I enjoy having my best work to hand "curated" in hard-copy book form – in fact, I've come to regard it as essential – and I put a lot of time and effort into designing and sequencing these books. It seems a shame that so few others ever get to appreciate them.  

For which reason I thought it might be worth signing up for Issuu, the online PDF "flipbook" service. Using Issuu means that I can embed the PDF versions of my existing and future Blurb books into my webpage or blog posts as high-quality flipbooks. Also, given that selling hard-copy versions seems to be a doomed enterprise (as I'm afraid Blurb itself may be, if the increasing frequency of discounted offers is any indicator, which would be a serious loss for us vanity publishers self-publishers) it also means that I could start to originate new books and book-like objects as PDFs only, and make them freely available as Issuu flipbooks. The quality of these flipbooks is much higher than Blurb's previews – you're seeing the real thing, not a downgraded rendering of it – and when run as a full-screen display they can be very impressive.

How well this would work within the design constraints of the blog can only be seen by publishing a test post live, and this post is it. So, as a "proof of concept" I thought the PDF of the revised edition of Pentagonal Pool would work well, as the book was designed to take advantage of Blurb's "layflat" format, which is ideal for images that are spread across two facing pages (a "double truck", in publishing-speak). The hard-copy layflat format does make for a very attractive publication, but also one that is prohibitively expensive; the PDF flipbook should work just as well for a double-truck presentation, if not better, and at zero cost to you.

Want to see how it looks? Here it is: you can either run it within the the blog page, or – if you click the little circular device in the centre – you should get the full screen view. From full screen press <ESC> to get back to the blog.

Until this post is published and live, of course, I won't know myself how well it actually works. I'm still figuring this out, and I'd be grateful to hear of any problems you experience in using it.

BTW, I do have two spare copies of the layflat hardback of this publication, both of which come in an utterly OTT foam-lined presentation box. I'd be prepared to sell them to anyone interested for £65 each plus p&p (they're currently £85 each via Blurb).

OMG, have I just made an inadvertent Black Friday offer? Sorry about that... 😎