New

We continue to work hard in improving the features and capabilities with Simplebooklet. This week, we're introducing a new Simplebooklet feature and some user interface updates to improve your experience.

Video Simplebooklets

You can now create a Simplebooklet from a Video. This is great if you want to present a video on it's own Simplebooklet microsite, then add it to your collection. Basically, it takes your video url, creates a single page Simplebooklet of that video, then allows you to customize the microsite page the video is displayed on.

It's great for sharing videos outside of youtube, google drive and vimeo, so you can put your own logo and URL on the video you share, while also customizing the actual display of the video. Since it's also a Simplebooklet, you can layer additional content on top of the video (such as hotspot links, text, buttons) to make your video have clickable actions.

It's also a really useful tool for adding a video as a standalone piece of content on your collections page.

To try using this new tool, go to your Simplebooklet dashboard, and select UPLOAD VIDEO to get started.

User Interface Updates

We're always working on improving the placement and presentation of our tools to make it easier to make and share your Simplebooklets. In doing so, we've cleaned up the toolbars in the EDIT and DESIGN tab, plus made some updates to various popups and modals around the platform.

Speed Improvements

The bulk of our effort over the summer was working on improving the load times of your Simplebooklet. In doing so, a lot of this takes place in the background so your readers will see the benefits in improved loading and responsiveness of your Simplebooklet.

We have also made it possible for you to activate or deactivate some of these improvements. To turn on or off these new features: Lazy Image Load, Loading Indicator, and Deferred Page loading, go to the DESIGN TAB and select PAGE ACTIONS. You can toggle each one on or off depending on if you want to use it or not.

As well, stay tuned as we plan on a big release at the end of September.

New

A quick update to let everyone know we've made a significant improvement in the load speed of larger booklets on our platform. We are now using a faster process to display content, revealing the current on screen content of a booklet before the entire booklet is loaded. This allows your reader to start reading and flipping pages even if the entire booklet has not loaded into their account.

This is applied to all new and existing booklets in your account, so there is nothing to adjust on your part.

New

Though I haven't been updating our release notes as often as I should, this post will encompass all the latest we've added in the past two months.

New Features

We've made some big feature additions to simplebooklet in the last two months. These include:

New Transitions

We've updated our transitions to give you more options. You can now turn on or off the center fold shadow in the soft page flip transition. You can also display double page booklets with the first page being double page (previously it could only display as a single page before opening as a double page display). This should give you more

New Languages

We've added Swedish and Korean to our language options in the navigation elements of your booklet.

Collections

Can now be customized to hide all sharing and title options, and only display the cover image on the collection page.

Improved Canva Integration

You can now replace a Canva designed booklet straight from Canva. Update your design in Canva, then use the simplebooklet plugin to replace the existing booklet with the new version. You can also edit canva designed pages with canva directly in the simplebooklet edit tool. Tap the small canva logo in the top right of your page, and we'll open that page in the familiar canva editor.

With Canva, you can also add new pages to a booklet in our EDIT tab but use the Canva editor and templates to create the new page. Simply tap the NEW PAGE button, and select a template from Canva, edit in their inline authoring tool, then save it as a new page in your simplebooklet.

Crello Integration

We've added crello to our authoring integration tools. It works similar to Canva, in that you can now use Crello templates to create a page (or multiple pages) in your Simplebooklet, and take advantage of all their great authoring and design features.

Upload Your Own Narration

You can now upload an audio or video file from your computer to use for your per page narration. So record yourself on your phone, add it to your page, and then set it to autoplay when that page is first opened. We've found video narration makes a huge improvement in engagement with your cusotmer and brings an unique authenticity to your booklet presentation.

User Interface Improvements

We want simplebooklet to be the easiest and the simplest tool for turning PDFs into amazing online content easily shared from a single, branded weblink. So, as you have probably noticed, we've made a number of user interface improvements to our platform, for both the author and the customers you publish to.

New Preview Screen

We've improved our preview tool. It gives you a better sense of what your booklet will look like to the typical reader in a typical browser on a laptop.

Better Onboarding

We've made a number of improvements to the steps and explanations for those just starting out with Simplebooklet.

Clarity on Plans

We want our plans to be as transparent as possible. So we've restructured how you choose a plan and what you can do with that plan. Now, when you choose a plan, you first select how many booklets you'd like to start with (these are the number of booklets you can have published live simultaneously). You can add more to your account as you need them and replace any of them at anytime.

Once you know how many booklets you want to start with, you can decide which plan features you will need. For example, if you want to sell your simplebooklets, you'll want the Business plan. If you want to collaborate with others, you'll want the Business plan. If you want to apply your own custom domain and videos, you can start with the PRO plan.

We've also made it clearer the benefits of switching to an annual plan.

Performance Improvements

We're doing a lot around the performance of our booklet loading speeds, resolutions, and animation functionality.

New Image Management

We've now implemented webp (google's image format) with fallback to jpg for older browsers. What this means is we are able to reduce the size of most images by close to 70%, yet actually improve the quality of the image being displayed. This will not only improve what your reader see's on the screen, but also reduce the bandwidth required to send your booklet, and therefore speed up the loading time of your booklet.

Also, for an older browser, we'll still maintain the jpg images to ensure that your photos and images load for those visitors as well.

Code Overhaul

This is a bit of an ongoing process. We're removing a lot of legacy code in our app to improve the loading speeds for the visitor. We're also implementing just in time code practices as well so your booklet isn't carrying extra code for features you aren't using.

Loading Speeds

A big improvement we're hoping to release within the next week mainly affects larger booklets with many pages. We're adding the ability to open and start viewing pages before the entire booklet has been loaded. This should speed up the time between loading the URL and when a reader can start interacting with your Simplebooklets.

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.