Prim Perfect goes Calaméo!

There’s an exciting new way to read Prim Perfect on the web!

For a little while now, we’ve been looking at the question of ways in which we can present Prim Perfect to you on the web.

As many of you know, Prim Perfect has always been available online in pdf format. But, let’s face it, that can be a little clunky. It is also dependent on the reader organising pages, otherwise they can end up reading it one page at a time, and the impact of a spread is lost.

So we’ve been looking at technologies that take pdfs and remodel them into a more user friendly format.

One that we looked at – and one that several other magazines are starting to use – is Issuu. It has a nice reader-friendly format but, as yet, doesn’t preserve the links that we painstakingly add to every edition of Prim Perfect, so that not only can readers jump from the contents to their favourite must-read article, but also they can click on an ad or an article and get a slurl link to the store or place of interest straightaway.

So it seemed rather that we would have to stay with the pdf format.

We were discussing this on Live Journal when someone spotted our discussion and made a helpful suggestion:

Why didn’t we try Calaméo?

He also gave us helpful links so we could check out earlier publications using the format for ourselves – and we did.

Calaméo has much the same friendly interface as Issuu, but it has much more – more than we want at the moment, in fact, for you can bring across not only internal links (to another part of the magazine) and external links (to another place on the web, or a slurl to help you teleport inworld), but you can also embed audio and video files, making it an extraordinarily useful and highly interactive form of media!

Well, we’re testing it out now, and starting to load all our back issues, but we think that Calaméo is going to be our medium of choice for the present. We believe it will make life easier for our readers – and preserve all the advantages of click through for our advertisers – as well as allowing them to really indulge themselves creatively in two page spreads!

You can take a look for yourselves at http://en.calameo.com/books/000004234ab7c99a7dff8 (where you’ll see an overview) or read the publication directly at http://en.calameo.com/read/000004234ab7c99a7dff8.

And please let us know what you think!