New

We've just added Canva page templates to the Simplebooklet Edit tools. Now, when you add a new page to your Simplebooklet, you can choose from the 1000s of templates designed by Canva. It's a great and easy way to get professionally designed layouts to add to your Simplebooklet.

When adding a Canva Design template to your Simplebooklet, you choose the type of design you want to add, then we'll open the Canva design tool so you can customize it with Canva's amazing library of tools. Once it's ready, you just tap the SAVE TO SIMPLEBOOKLET button and your new page is added to your Simplebooklet.

What's even better is you can edit it as well. Simply tap the Canva button beside the page, and it will open your page in the Canva Designer so you can update it (correct spelling mistakes, change fonts). Once you've made your update, save it back to your booklet and you are good to go.

We think you'll find this a very powerful new tool to create additional pages in your Simplebooklet or even to help you get started on a new Simplebooklet from scratch.

New

We've been hard at work this past month completing a number of new feature updates to Simplebooklet. These include the ability to upload video and audio narration for your pages (instead of live recording on your webcam), a new licence free video library to add more video content to your pages and add some ambient experiences, a new free forever plan option at the end of the sign up trial period, and the ability to set youtube and vimeo videos to autoplay and auto stop on page flip.

Video and Audio Only Narration Uploads

Previously, you could only record video and audio narration directly from your webcam and computer microphone. We've now added the ability to upload your own video (mp4) and audio only (mp3) files to your page narration. This should open up a lot more opportunities to use narration as a big part of your booklet presentation.

Great use cases include realtors recording video clips inside the property and then adding them to the property feature sheet, clips from actual stage presentations added to powerpoint presentations, and video recordings of individual instructors for each page of an e-learning guide.

You can record your video or audio on any device (computer, mobile device), then upload the video file into the NARRATION tool found in the DESIGN tab. You can have one narration per page in your Simplebooklet.

Video Library

Videos are a great way to set a mood and create ambience around your page presentation. Now you can search for a video by mood, subject matter, or location, and then add that video to your page. These videos play automatically and can be set to loop, creating a wonderful piece of ambient content on your page.

These videos can be fully styled with the style tool. So your videos can be different shapes and sizes to best fit within your page. Use them to replace generic images on your page.

Videos also support our animation feature. You'll be able to have videos appear after a delay on page open, fade out on a tap, and even bounce or wobble to attract a reader's attention.

Auto play and Auto Stop

An often requested feature, we've now made it possible to set your videos from youtube and vimeo to auto play on page open. This means when the user flips open your page, the embedded video will automatically start playing. Its easy to add this option, just toggle the auto play button when you add your video to your simplebooklet page.

Also, videos will now automatically stop playing when the user flips the page. Previously, videos would keep playing in the background, but now they pause and can be picked up from the last point a reader was watching.

Free Trial Period and Free Plans

We've updating how we introduce new users of Simplebooklet to our platform. As of right now, anyone who signs up to Simplebooklet will automatically start in a free trial of the PRO plan for 14 days. We hope that this gives people a good amount of time to "kick the tires" of Simplebooklet and see if it will work for their organizational goals. We do not require a credit card or any other details from you.

At the end of your 14 day trial, you can choose to sign up to a paid plan or downgrade to our free plan. Our free plan lets you have 1 booklet available for sharing and publishing and does include the simplebooklet watermark in the navigation bar and the last page of your booklet. The free plan is forever, however, you do need to confirm once every six months that you are still actively using the booklet. We want to make sure that your content isn't orphaned and misleading people on the web. You can always switch to a paid plan at anytime.

New

This is one we're very excited about. You can now animate any element on your Simplebooklet. This means you can set a photo, text, buttons, videos, and more to animate based on a number of actions. Probably the best way to see what we mean is to view this example booklet with multiple animations taking place.

You can make animations do almost anything.

1. Choose from dozens of different animations, from zooming, flying, fading, wobbling, and many more.
2. Set what causes the animation to occur, on page open or close, on mouse hover, or even on a tap.
3. Set the timing of an animation, so you can delay when the animation happens after your page opens or an even like hover occurs.
4. Set what happens when the animations finishes. You can have the element disappear, reappear, or even loop.

Animiations are very easy to set up. In the EDIT tab, you select the element you want to animate, then tap the ANIMATE button in the toolbar on the left. You'll select from the pulldown menu each action or option you want for your animation. You'll see the animation preview in your page when you select it. Make your choices and it will be automatically saved. Then view your booklet in PREVIEW to see the animation in action.

Animations work on mobile, tablet, and desktop computers.

We can't wait to see what you do with Simplebooklets and animations.

New

Hey Everyone,

We've rolled a number of new features and some improvements today on Simplebooklet. I'll list them out here.

Global Copy And Replace

This is a new way to update booklets in connected and team accounts. If you create and copy a booklet from your account into another account, previously there was no way to make an update to that copied booklet. Well now you can. Any booklet you copy from your main account to any of your team or connected accounts (or all of them), you can now update them all at once.

From the copy button on the dashboard, you select if you want to create this as a new booklet or replace a previous version you've already duplicated into team or connected accounts. Think of it like version control. You made a copy of a booklet in your team accounts, you want to update it, so you update it in your account, then use the copy then replace feature to update all the versions out there.

Mailchimp

You can now add a mailchimp popup to replace the lead gate. This means your mailchimp subscribe form can appear at any point in your Simplebooklet pages and collect data that immediately gets added to your mailchimp list.

To use this new feature, go to the DESIGN tab and tap the popups tool. You'll connect your mailchimp account and start collecting data right away to your list.

Secure Links

We've updated how our secure links work. Now, we can automatically set the secure key to make your Simplebooklet only accessible from the page you share it from. So if a person tries to share your booklet any other way than from the page you have it embedded or have the link, it will not open but redirect them to a page of your choice. This is great if you have content on simplebooklet that is for members only or is in a paid section of your website or even for an intranet.

To make your link secure, all you have to do is, from the PUBLISH tab, add in the website domain of where the booklet will be accessed from, and add a URL that unauthorized viewers are sent to.

Team Notifications

Now, when you add a team member to your business account, they will receive an email welcoming them to your team with their login credentials. No more notifying them manually.

Updates and Enhancements

We continue to update and enhance our user interface. We're improving our form fields to be more obvious and intuitive, as well as providing more content to help explain the features found on Simplebooklet in our homepage and support pages.

Improvement

Video narration is very popular with our Business plans. As such, we didn't want to restrict this capability to only our Business plans, and are making it available to our PRO plans as well now. PRO plans can now record up to 15 seconds of video narration per page of their booklet. Business plans can continue to record up to 1 minute of video narration per page.

New

We've released a new update for the map view in Collections. This is the feature where you can display your collection of Simplebooklets on a map and the booklets are placed based on their address.

This new update will allow you to put in a distinct physical address for each brochure you create. Previously we used the address you would add in your Business/Contact Card, but that didn't work in situations where the business card and the brochure required different addresses (for example with property feature sheets for realtors or menus for franchises).

To set up the correct address for your brochure, open it in the DESIGN tab and select Navigation. Then select COLLECTION ADDRESS and enter in the location address you want your brochure to appear in the map view of your collection.

Now when someone views your collection in the map view, your brochures will appear in the correct location.

Improvement

Just a quick update today. We've rolled an improvement to our lead gate tool. Now you can select to have the lead gate appear on any page in your booklet. So a reader can flip through the first 2 or 3 pages, and then you can popup a lead gate requesting their email address or other information before they can continue to flip through your booklet.

To use this feature, open your lead gate in the DESIGN tab, then select a page you want it to appear on.

Stay tuned for some bigger updates next week.

New

We're excited to release two new updates today. A new Paywall Feature so you can charge people to access your Simplebooklet content with no fees, and a new way to quickly access Canva designed templates to import into your Simplebooklet account.

Sell Your Simplebooklet

Sell your magazine, newsletter, elearning course, or any content you publish on Simplebooklet. Readers from all over the world can purchase access to your booklet directly. You have total control of when the paywall appears and price you charge. Collect your revenue through Paypal. Simplebooklet doesn't charge any fees on your transactions.

You can add your own logo, your own price, a short description, and choose which page it is shown on in your booklet (so you can provide a preview of a few pages before they arrive at your paywall). All pages after the display of the paywall are hidden.

Once a purchase has been made, the reader is given a password they can use to access the booklet from any device. You can manage and track access of these purchases from the purchase management button in the publish tools.

You'll need a Paypal account and a Simplebooklet Business account to use this feature.

Canva Templates

You can access canva templates right from the Simplebooklet dashboard. It's now an option in the dropdown menu when starting a new Simplebooklet. Select the Use A Canva Template to get started.

You'll be able to choose what kind of template to start with and then will go to Canva to create your content. When done, make sure you have added the simplebooklet plugin for canva and export your new template design back to your Simplebooklet account so you can design the presentation and start sharing it everywhere.

BUSINESS plan update

We've made a change to how our Business plans work on Simplebooklet. Now, you can add an unlimited number of team accounts to your Business account. We are no longer charging for additional team accounts. This means you can add as many team members or clients to your Business account.

We have moved to a pool model for business account booklets. Your account starts with 200 concurrent simplebooklets. You and your team accounts can all pull new booklets from this pool of booklets. When you need more, simply purchase additional booklets for your Business plan and they will be available to you and your team accounts to pull from. We found this model will actually be more cost effective to our business plans, easier to manage, and will allow you to better balance your total concurrent booklets across accounts.

General Updates

We've updated a few features and fixed some bugs.

The launch icon for your installed booklets is now updated to better select the logo from your logo library. The launch icon will pull from the menu icon you add to your logo library.

The homepage and some of the sub pages have been updated. Stay tuned as we plan to keep updating our industry and features pages to make them easier to understand and provide guides to how to use Simplebooklet in your situation.

We've added some new clip art stickers to our EDIT tool. Examples are a SOLD sticker for our realtors and SOLD OUT for our retailers and event managers.

New

First and foremost, Simplebooklet was designed to make your boring old print communications more engaging and influential. We've added features like interactive buttons, embedded videos, and a whole lot of branding. We want your content to impress people and be authentic to who you are and what you are trying to communicate.

Over the last 10 months, one method of communication that we've all come to rely on is video conversations. They don't need high production values and we've all looked into a few home offices and living rooms during this pandemic. But one thing these videos have done is given us a face to see and a confidence to believe in the communicator on the other side of the video. We wanted to bring that same authenticity to your Simplebooklet presentations. So after a lot of work, we're excited to release our latest feature, video narration of your Simplebooklet.

https://simplebooklet.com/videonarrationdemo

simplebooklet.com/videonarrationdemo

Now you can narrate your Simplebooklet using your webcam and microphone.

We've taken a different approach to our video narration tool than many others.

Per Page Narration

Instead of trying to narrate the entire booklet as a video, you can record your video narration on a per page basis. This means you only have to record your narration on the page you want it to appear.

Auto Play or Manual

You can set your video narration to automatically start to play when your reader opens to your page. By default it requires your reader to tap on your video to start playing your narration.

Auto Page Flip

Want to keep your booklet flowing? You can set your page to flip automatically to the next page after your video narration has completed. This is a great way to walk a person through a presentation or slide deck.

Some great ways to use Video Narration are suggested below:

Learning Management Content

Keep people engaged with your content by guiding readers through the content found on your page and helping them better understand what's important. People retain an order of magnitude more information via video than text.

Presentations

Take your Google slides or Microsoft powerpoint and turn it into an automated presentation system. Record your talking points for each slide and automatically flip the slides when you are done. No need to be there when your Video Narration walks your audience through your deck.

Realtors

Let potential buyers and sellers see your passion for the properties you represent. So much of real estate transactions are built on confidence and trust in the realtor, so put yourself forward and let your clients know how much you are committed to what is most likely one of the biggest transactions in their lives.

Magazines and Ad Supported Content

Create video narration for your advertisers, highlighting a sponsorship of your magazine page. Just like we're used to podcasters and youtube personalities promoting products, you can do the same with video narration.

Product Highlights

Use your video narration to point out features or benefits of your product that aren't communicated on your page. Or even if they are, most people don't want to read a thousand lines of text to get to what you know is the most important part of the decision.

Travel

A quick testimonial or a personal reference of why a destination or activity is so great will go a long way to highlighting the benefits of your hotel, activity or tour. People are more excited when they get to hear from an expert before taking on a big trip or adventure.

We are making video narration available on a limited basis right now only to our Business plans as we learn how we can continue to improve and enhance this feature.

New

We were busy over the holiday break adding new features to make your Simplebooklet's even more engaging.

Slideshow Button and Link Hotspot

Now you can add a button or a link hotspot that triggers a slideshow of images and captions to launch fullscreen from your page. It's a great way to add additional photos to your page from a click of the mouse or a tap of the finger. To add a slideshow, open your booklet in the EDIT tab, then select the image button feature or the link hotspot feature. Upload your images, add optional captions, then place it on your page. Your slideshow will play in a fullscreen lightbox.

The slideshow feature is an enhancement to the old image button and image link hotspot feature. Select those same tools and you have the option of adding multiple images to your lightbox popouts beyond just a single image.

Cookie GDPR Notification Option

To meet the requirements of some customers, we've added the option to display a GDPR cookie notification when your booklet is first opened by the user. This will display a popup window with your cookie notification and the acceptance button to continue to view your booklet. It works even if you have a password requirement or a lead gate set up for your booklet.

Automatic Page Turning for Narration

Voice narration of your simplebooklet is a very effective way to keep your audience engaged. In our efforts to improve this feature, we've added a new automation feature. You can now set your booklet to automatically flip to the next page once your voice narration has completed playing on the page. This will help keep your presentation flowing as the pages will automatically transition. To use this feature, go to the DESIGN tab and select narration, then toggle on the automatic page flip. You can set the automatic transition per page.