{"id":15314,"date":"2015-11-27T07:29:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-27T06:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=15314"},"modified":"2015-11-27T07:29:54","modified_gmt":"2015-11-27T06:29:54","slug":"issuu-at-25-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2015\/11\/27\/issuu-at-25-million\/","title":{"rendered":"Issuu at 25 million"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, a creative seeking contemporary visual inspiration might trawl a university library’s new journal shelves. Now there are 25 million magazines online at Issuu<\/a>, free-to-read and in handy flip-book format. The art \/ design \/ fashion section of Issuu is a fascinating insight into what editors have cared enough about to produce a proper designed and curated magazine for. Issuu is especially good for fashion students, with middleweight industry magazines such as WWB<\/em> and MWB<\/em><\/a> publishing on Issuu…<\/p>\n

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The highly curated nature of many Issuu magazines means that spotting subtle forward cultural trends may be easier than amid the manic\/nostalgist jumble of Pinterest.<\/p>\n

Issuu’s native search box isn’t great, at least for the sort of one-word searches its users are likely to use. “academic”<\/a> plunges one into a wasteland of old university course catalogs and redundant student guides. “Scholarly” is only marginally better.<\/p>\n

Sadly the flipbook format, of medium res jpgs<\/a> + javascript, is usually unfriendly to Google Search. Unless you’re the editor of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities<\/a><\/em> magazine or the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College<\/a><\/em>, both of whom obviously know how to extract the fulltext and invisibly add it to each issue’s flipbook page. <\/p>\n

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Many other publishers, such as Texas Wildlife<\/a><\/em> magazine, don’t seem to know how to get their magazine’s text indexed by Google. Even if they did, one suspects that it may not be the greatest search experience — searching against a whole run-on block of text, that’s been auto-extracted from a PDF. <\/p>\n

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What about getting a date-ordered single page of a title’s issues? Publishers on Issuu can at least, if they wish, produce ‘stacks’ from their magazine issues. Japan’s International Academic Forum<\/a> (IAFOR), for instance, does this here<\/a>. But their sub-stack for IAFOR journals<\/a> is rather lumpen and fails to present ordered runs of their titles. Luckily, in their case, the issues are also online in PDF<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The similar jumbling of dates at Issuu for the Illumination: the Undergraduate Journal of Humanities<\/a><\/em> stack suggest that re-ordering titles by publication date, rather than by upload date, may not actually be possible? Just my guess.<\/p>\n

Regrettably Issuu doesn’t let Google index http:\/\/issuu.com\/*\/stacks\/ Or perhaps the Googlebot just didn’t feel the need to do so?<\/p>\n

Occasionally one gets only a truncated preview at Issuu, such as the venerable British Journal of Photography<\/a><\/em> or the previews of the V&A Museum books<\/a>, but most titles appear to be complete. Sometimes a little too complete<\/a>, hem hem<\/em>. Issuu might add a useful icon or two: indicating ‘sample only’ and ‘flagged by users as possibly pirated’.<\/p>\n

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Issuu’s somewhat mainstream tilt nicely complements pdf-mags.com<\/a>, a similar well-established free magazine flipbook site that veers more towards the indie fashion \/ artzine \/ perzine end of the spectrum. The print-focussed MagCloud store, until recently owned by HP, also has a modest ‘free to read online’ section<\/a>…<\/p>\n

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Creative students and faculty will still benefit from grabbing an armful of current print magazine from the library shelves — especially the elite photography, architecture\/design, fashion and fine art publications. But thanks to Issuu and their ilk now the rest of us can also have a similar experience, albeit minus the likes of Vogue<\/em>, Aperture<\/em> and similar.<\/p>\n

(Update: my fuller survey of titles on Issuu<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, a creative seeking contemporary visual inspiration might trawl a university library’s new journal shelves. Now there …<\/p>\n

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