Yudu Freedom is a new on-demand publishing service that lets you turn a PDF file into a live, Flash-based Web page within minutes. Like Scribd, Yudu Freedom allows you to publish documents in an interactive, page-turning digital format and host them online at no cost. It is fast and simple to use Yudu Freedom. You first upload your document in PDF format. After uploading your file, you will be sent an email with the link to your publication, along with a jpeg of the front cover and HTML code which will allow you to embed the publication on your Blog or website. Basically, Yudu Freedom service converts your PDF file into a Flash publication which is simple to upload to a website or blog, distribute via email or save to a digital storage device.
You can use Yudu Freedom to create digital publications with up to 16 pages each at no cost. The files can be viewed a little faster than with Adobe’s Acrobat reader, and it runs entirely in Flash with neat page turning effect. The digital publications you create can contain images, audio, video and links back to your Web site. I think the service is great for teachers and students who want to create brochures, newsletter, instructional and learning guides, how-tos, ebooks, reports, manuals, photo books, CVs, portfolios and more. If you need to produce materials that go over the 16-page limit, you can step up to Yudu’s fee-based services, Yudu Pro and Yudu Express.
Like Scribd, Yudu Freedom has also a built in search tool, zoom tool, and a thumbnail viewer. The best part of the Yudu Freedom is that you don’t need to sign up to use the service. You can simply upload the files and leave your e-mail address and it will send you a link when it’s done processing. However, Yudu is lacking the support for other document formats and the capability to embed PDFs on third party sites. In comparison, Scribd supports many document formats (PDF, Postscript, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Rich text, plain text, and other OpenDocument formats) and allow you to share it anywhere with its iPaper service.
On the Yudu Freedom Website, it states “We want your readers all over the world to enjoy this interactive, online reading experience. We’ll let you publish for free, forever, providing that you follow our 3 simple rules: 1) No adult content, 2) offensive material, and 3) No copyright abuse. We let you and fellow Freedom readers report abuse on each and every publication if they aren’t Freedom-friendly. If we agree, YUDU will take publications down without notice.” I think this is a great policy and it makes Yudu a better place for online document publishing for teachers and students.
With Yudu Freedom and Scribd, anyone can now make professional digital publications. Yudu Freedom’s document viewer is simple and fast. You can view my first test on Yudu Freedom in action simply click on the image below.
Hi,
what a good article thanks to bringing this technology to my attention. I noticed all links are live did you put them in or did YUDUfreedom do this automatically?
This software has is to create and functional for both educators and students from elementary through college years. A teacher can now instruct students to create a school newspaper or reports that everyone can share. Since you can add photos and videos to the site, your project instantly becomes interactive with the ease of the control buttons. I have used many of the conversion programs to create powerpoints for class notes, this may be better. I am looking forward to creating and assigning a publication to my class to evaluate the pros and cons of this new feature.
I can imagine that this will be a great way to share photos and videos as a family meeting place online. After having read this article, I have contacted a high school friend. She and I have discussed writing a book for years. This software stops the procrastination! This is the solutions to our issue of living in different states while having access to the project for review and editing. For our purposes, this is better than a wiki. We can create and post PDF file pages to our book to be edited for review and change while still maintain the look of a traditional page.
Some of the questions that are coming to my mind are: can we create individuals chapters and is there an index for large works, can you decide on who does or does not see your publications, and how much space is assigned to a user. I am excited about the opportunity to work will this product and will signup and start uncovering some of the questions above.
Hi Steve,
I’m part of the team behind Freedom, and first let me say thanks for your review! We always welcome new opinions, especially when new features that we’re missing are suggested
In correction to some of the information in your article – YUDU Freedom was previously limited to 16 pages (we were trying out the technology, and didn’t want to open the floodgates, so to speak).
Freedom is now unlimited (as you’d hope from the name!) in terms of the number of pages you can upload (we didn’t need the limit after all).
Great also to hear about the various other file formats, we’re looking into this at the moment (we’ve had quite a few people asking for this in the last few days) – we’ll put an update on our blog [www.yudufreedom.com/blog] with more news as it becomes available.
It’s exciting to hear about this application. I introduced Yudu Freedom to my boss and she loved it. I think we are about to start using it regularly. There are so many applications out there that are free and help in so many ways unthinkable. I do so many things in publishing here at work, that I am constantly finding ways to make files interactive and fun. Now, I can turn in a file that is live and in a flash –based web page in no time.
This is great. I can publish my file, which has to be PDF. Then all I have to do is wait on the email to click on the link to my file. Follow that link to picture and the HTML code of the file. I can embed that HTML code in my website or the blog here at work and wallah, I have an interactive flash-based file on my page. This is so cool.
The only downside to this is only on the user side. I mean that if the user does not know how to embed code in the webpage or a blog or distribute in an email then it’s a major problem. LOL. Other than that, this application is straightforward.
I can see this application going a long way and people like me, are going to continue to use it. It’s fun, user friendly, and delightfully entertaining to people that use it. Students and teachers can use Yudu freedom to create a lot of desktop publishing files.
It’s also exciting to see that one of the gurus behind Yudu freedom responding to this blog.
This is a several months later.. I am a colleague of Tom’s and i wanted you to know that the yudufreedom project has gone through a huge step change. There was a lot of positive feedback about yudu freedom and also a lot of requests from people who wanted a place to store their publications, share them, sell them, enhance them and that’s what we’ve been working on over the last few months. I suppose that this interest and demand in completely in line with the growth of user generated content and the overlap with social media. Freedom has gone through quite a transformation in fact so if the project and concept was of interest to you go read our blog at http://www.yudu.com