Online PDF Viewer Tools

We’ve been looking into online PDF viewers for a client for a while now, trying to find something suitable. I was excited to read TechCrunch’s review of Issuu “Finally a web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck”. But, it might look good, it might be faster than the others but for what we need, it does suck.

What did we need? We needed to be able to control where the publication was published, namely only the client’s website. It needed to be easy to use. It had to not need Flash. And, lastly, if it was storing the document we had to look into their data protection/privacy policy (see our note on the Safe Harbour Agreement). And, of course we had to consider the ‘look’ of the embedded PDF.

There was only one viewer which did everything we needed - Google Viewer. But, the end result doesn’t look brilliant and doesn’t have the magazine feel of Issuu.

The only other option which came close was Scribd. - you can make up to 50 000 documents private and it looks a lot better than Google and you can choose between scrolling and a slideshow view. The problem was Point 7 of their privacy policy

FOR USERS VISITING THE SCRIBD PLATFORM FROM THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA OR OTHER NON-U.S. TERRITORIES, PLEASE NOTE THAT ANY DATA YOU ENTER INTO THE SCRIBD PLATFORM WILL BE TRANSFERRED OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AREA OR SUCH OTHER NON-U.S. TERRITORY FOR USE BY SCRIBD AND ITS AFFILIATES FOR ANY OF THE PURPOSES DESCRIBED HEREIN.IN ADDITION, BECAUSE SCRIBD OPERATES GLOBALLY, WE MAY MAKE INFORMATION WE GATHER AVAILABLE TO WORLDWIDE BUSINESS UNITS AND AFFILIATES. BY PROVIDING ANY DATA ON THE SCRIBD PLATFORM, YOU HEREBY EXPRESSLY CONSENT TO SUCH TRANSFERS OF YOUR DATA TO THE UNITED STATES OR OTHER COUNTRIES.

Which means that if you take data privacy seriously, we lose out in Europe. Again. Anyone have any suggestions? (sh)

*update! issuu has introduced ‘Paper Mode’ which doesn’t need Flash - we’ll be looking at this over the coming weeks