While the Web meanwhile maintains pictures, videos and even podcasts, there are still plenty of barriers (formats, platforms, systems, ...) to overcome - if you want to integrate and deploy
document related content. There are several process steps and a lot of manual work involved - to get document content in an adequate consumer optimized way into Web applications.
Lately several companies are working on adequate document deployment formats for the Web. The transformations are flash based - f.e.:
http://issuu.com/
http://www.wai.de/epaper/Dok/
The presentations look very impressive - but are they really optimized for online usage?
They are more something like "electronic paper" - truely paper formated - 1:1 taken for online presentation (even a paging effect is built in - and gives you real paper experience). But its not an adequate presentation to consume content online. Instead of a "fit to page" a "fit to screen" technology is required , and instead of page numbers a clickable table of content, an index and hyperlinks would be much more preferable.
Since a few weeks there's a new product from the US/California based start up Scribd - called iPaper - in the market. Scribd converts various document formats also into flash based format - but the Scribd people did a lot more work to create publications that can be properly read and consumed online. iPaper runs in a Web page with no additional software and offers the following benefits:
