All Looks – No Brains

There’s a fair amount of buzz on the Interweb this week about Issuu, a free do-it-yourself digital edition service from Europe. (Warning: When you let people upload their own content to a portal like Issuu, some of that content may not be suitable for all eyes.)

The folks from Issuu hit a home run in the PR department, getting written up at both TechCrunch and by Robert Scoble, who both fawned over the sleek UI which – truth be told – is gorgeous.

But here’s the thing: once you get past Issuu’s looks, what else is there? The content – though locally searchable – isn’t indexed by Google or Yahoo, like a Nxtbook. There’s no way to embed rich media, like a Nxtbook. And if there is any tracking information available to publishers, it isn’t mentioned on the site. And that’s just the beginning.

Pfauth sums it up perfectly: Web 2.0 is also about finding stuff, just ask David Weinberger. And an online pdf file sounds a bit 1.0 to me. You can’t link to a particular article and people can’t tag a page on del.icio.us or Fleck, or comment wherever they want. And don’t even think of embedding a YouTube video. It reminds me of the newspapers in the early years of the Internet who just published their articles on-line and that was it.

This doesn’t mean that Issuu doesn’t have a place. As the digital edition market has matured in the past several months, we’ve seen greater segmentation. There are products that offer more which do more and provide more ROI which cost more (like Nxtbook) and there are do-it-yourself solutions that require you to do the work and provide fewer features, which results in a smaller ROI. Those players at the shallow end of the pool had best pay attention to Issuu because if there’s one thing customers who like to pay a little like more than paying a little – it’s paying nothing, and Issuu offers them that opportunity. Meanwhile, Nxtbook customers will continue to reap the benefits of a product that’s designed for complete Web 2.0 integration and revenue generation.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble stopped by, asking for a sample link in this post. Here’s the latest copy of Project Analog, made from a PDF.