Official Adobe apps for creating flipbooks?

[VicoDrive]

Adobe has a TON of free extra software that comes with the creative cloud subscription these days. They also have a lot of mobile apps as well. Is there anything out there yet that is official from Adobe that allows you to create or save PDFs as a flipbook? I would like to be able to post something online that I can send link to clients through email for them to be able to open in a browser or on a mobile device and flip through. I would also love to keep it through Adobe and not download third-party apps or programs if possible. Thanks!

[Dov Isaacs]

No, there is nothing that Adobe provides to for such flipbook support. Those animations are not part of PDF itself and in the past they were most often provided by proprietary, platform dependent third party solutions or Flash files. Flash is EOL (end of life) and the other “solutions” are not global.

FWIW, although the rage a few years back, flipbooks are getting a reputation as somewhat passé and “cheesy” looking as well as inconvenient since they are not standard PDF files and had very limited functionality. The animations may be cute, but the restrictions of such files are hardly worth it. Why not just use PDF?

            - Dov

[VicoDrive]

Well we are a print shop and trying to do more online marketing through website, social media, email, etc...  Forcing someone to download a PDF of a catalog of your products is just too much for some people.  That and you have to deal with file size issues that can be a problem for people on limited mobile bandwith.  Also people will download PDFs from links and not have any clue out to find them on their computer or device.  Something that displays a catalog online that is a little more friendly I feel would be best.  If you think the flip book method is outdated these days, whats the next option?

I just looked at what Kroger Grocery Stores do and it would probably be a decent alternative.  Shows full sizes of each page with arrows on the side to slide to each page... https://www.kroger.com/weeklyad.  Is there any trick to something like this?

[try67]

You should contact an experienced web developer if you want something like that.

Personally, I don't find it to be useful at all. For starters, you can't search it because it's just a set of images (although that's also the case with the PDF version, but only because they didn't set it up correctly), and the size of the images makes browsing it kind of awkward. It's also impossible to print it, unless you download the PDF file (or print the entire thing).

[VicoDrive]

All good points.  I feel most people are not going to want to print something like this anyway.  Most would rather keep it as something they can look through on the screen.  I feel most people do not know how to search through a PDF either.  Although I personally would set that part up correctly, no one knows that you can do CTRL+F to do a word search or anything else like that, especially our clients.

[try67]

I don't know on what you based that assumption. I would think that most people do know that you can search a PDF file, just like you can a Word file, or a web-page.

[VicoDrive]

And yes, when we are dealing with our vendors or sending proofs to our clients and such, attaching a PDF is really the only way to do it.  When trying to do something to get some new clients or to advertise to existing ones, doing something that is easy and convient, maybe even a little flashy would go a little longer to grabbing their attention than just an email with an attachment, which many people are too scared to download anyway

[Katie Houghton]

Find a programmer and create an app. Look at epub or html5 solutions. PDFs are great but are designed for a specific need. These other options will let you move into a more interative solution. Products like Dreamweaver, InDesign, and Animate are used to create these other solutions. 

[JR Boulay]

well as inconvenient since they are not standard PDF files and had very limited functionality. The animations may be cute, but the restrictions of such files are hardly worth it

This is the Adobe point of view.

The free SodaPDF viewer can display any PDF as flipbook without loosing PDF features.

ezPDF Reader for Android can display any PDF as flipbook without loosing PDF features (and offering more functions than Acrobat Mobile).

And there are others.