Customer story: Webcrab

How Webcrab Improves Digital Publishing with FlippingBook Publisher

Webcrab is a web agency from Vienna consisting of young professionals who support and modernize websites for their clients. Part of the company’s success is that Webcrab understands each client’s business and has an easy and efficient way of dealing with client requests.

Challenge

Webcrab’s primary goals are to help their clients look great digitally with the help of modern websites, present all their materials online in the best way, and drive attention to the content.

Some of the clients that come to Webcrab not only need professional websites, but also want to move their valuable content online. For example, publishing businesses that have tons of printed materials and PDFs want to transfer them to a new digital format. PDF versions of magazines and catalogs don’t look great on the web, they load slow and are hard to read.

Search for Solution

Webcrab searched for a new tool back in 2009. Their clients didn’t know what solutions were out there, but they wanted to move their PDFs online.

I saw flipbooks as an emerging trend. There weren’t a lot of websites that used flipbooks at the time – most just offered PDFs for download. But I wanted my clients to stand out and offer the monthly issues of their magazines in a more appropriate form online.

During their search, Webcrab team came across FlippingBook Publisher. It allowed them to make fast interactive publications with a flipping effect from plain PDFs. With FlippingBook, they could offer their clients to convert their materials into flipbooks.

After studying different options, we realized that FlippingBook Publisher was the most professional and yet simple solution. And it still is today.

Solution

Webcrab started offering FlippingBook publications to their clients. With FlippingBook Publisher, the clients’ documents included their own branding and style, and their readers could access the new interactive documents on any device and find the information they needed with a convenient search tool and a table of contents.

All these features were essential to publishers, because they wanted to make their digital materials professional and easy to access.

Instead of dealing with PDFs, which open slow and are hard to read, our clients can create interactive online documents with a great professional look.

In 2015, Webcrab started offering another solution from FlippingBook – a branded mobile app. The materials uploaded to the mobile app are easy to use and update. They also load very fast: users can open any page of a publication and start reading right away. Recently, one of Webcrab’s clients, a big Austrian publishing house, has implemented this solution into their business.

The FlippingBook mobile app gives viewers instant access to new publication issues. This way, the company’s clients can always get the latest available edition of a publication. They are able to read them wherever they want – at home, at work, when traveling. It’s like having a library in their pocket.

Here are the key values that Webcrab and their clients see in FlippingBook products:

• Better web usability than in PDFs: the content can be viewed seamlessly. There is convenient navigation and unique branding, and the materials can be easily updated with just one click.
• Faster opening: digital publications open fast, regardless of their size.
• Ability to embed interactive content (videos, images, links): interactivity engages the readers and makes communication with them more effective.
• Ability to download and share the whole publication as well as single pages: it’s very important for customers to be able to download a single page from a catalog or brochure and to print it or make notes.

Results

Now Webcrab provides FlippingBook publications to seven clients. Three of them have a big number of publications – about twenty books on their website. Among Webcrab’s clients are i-Magazin, a big publishing house, and Autlook, a non-governmental organization that makes lots of historic books.

Webcrab keeps getting positive feedback about their digital publications. Their clients are happy with FlippingBook Publisher, because it helps them have all their books digitized. The publications vary from 200 to around 1,500 pages long, depending on the book. The clients can embed their monthly issues in their website and upload them to their mobile app. These digital materials have many useful options, such as convenient navigation, easy access, and interactivity.