Vitrium Systems

There are a few PDF converter programs available online, both to download and to use as a website application. I used a lengthy word document with lots of graphics to test the speed of these free PDF converters. This is the test document I used.

PDF Converter

www.freepdfconvert.com

A free online PDF creator program that can be used with both OS and Windows operating systems. Simply upload the document you want converted to PDF and wait while your file is converted. Then download the PDF from their website to your desktop in a zipped file. It took under a minute for the word file I uploaded to be converted.

Zamzar

www.zamzar.com

Zamzar is a free online PDF converter program, no software downloads required! Simply upload the file you want to convert (or a URL), select which format you want it converted to (like PDF), enter your email address to have the converted file sent to, and click convert. It will work with any operating system. After uploading my test word document, it only took 5 minutes for the PDF file to be sent to my email.

Take a look at Michael Arrington’s review of it at Tech Crunch.

(more…)

It seems that PDF content publishers see the issue of gating content to be either black or white, gated PDFs or un-gated PDFs. They throw their arms up in the air, unable to agree on whether it is best to gate content to generate sales lead information or leave the content open. Hiding electronic content behind a web form is known as “gating” content, whether it is in the form of a white paper, data sheet or case study. Effectively, you are only allowing access to that information if the reader is willing to provide a wide range of their personal information to you. Many online marketers use this as a lead generation source, collecting as much information as possible from the reader in exchange for access to their white paper or data sheet. The downside of this lead generation tool is that up to 95% of readers will abandon a site if they come across a web form. On the other end of the spectrum, ePublishers can choose to leave their electronic content un-gated, so as to disseminate their content freely and get their ideas out there. The obvious hitch in this practice is that the publisher will have absolutely no idea who is reading and downloading their PDF documents or if anyone is even interested in them at all.

(more…)

By Nettie Hartsock, Planet PDF

PlanetPDF interviews Thad McIlroy, editor and founder of “The Future of Publishing”, about the Adobe acquisition of Omniture and his predictions for how this could alter the ePublishing industry.

Read the full interview – Adobe buys Omniture: The story beneath the story and what it means for users

After staying static for many decades and consisting mainly of annoying magazine blow-in cards and junk mail, direct marketing’s taken a whirlwind ride through the last 15 years as the Internet changes the way we all view media.

While some markets still rely heavily on paper means of reaching sales leads, the costs associated with printing, mailing, and data entry—especially in a down economy—are too much for many companies to bear. That, and restrictions set by the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have businesses rebuilding their marketing efforts by using PDF documents.

(more…)

A decade ago, Adobe and future merger partner Glassbook published Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, a 16,000-word short story, as the first major eBook. Its digital rights management (DRM) failed as hackers hacked, King got mad, Amazon ended up giving it away. The eBook—and DRM—suffered a brutally black eye.

About the same time, iTunes rose and record labels struggled to rein in MP3 music pirates, DRM as a technology got beat up badly, caught in a riptide between freethinking music consumers and bottom-line-oriented copyright owners.

Adobe, somewhat quietly, released a product called Policy Server (currently part of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), and later, Digital Editions, to rights-manage documents and eBooks. Even it wasn’t without hitches, as arguments over text-to-speech features erupted between publishers—who reap revenue from audio books—and advocates for visually impaired readers.

(more…)

1. No Paper: eBooks are “green” because it doesn’t require printing unless you really want to print it to read it. You can read your eBook fully online or through the new hand held eBook readers that let you carry a large amount of eBooks around in a digital format.

2. Easily updated: Instead of having to reprint a whole book you can easily update your eBooks but simply going into the file, making the update, reconverting the eBook to PDF and uploading it again to the site. No full printing of the book again saving a lot of paper.

3. Less ink. eBooks are green because they use less ink than required in a printing process. Printing books requires more colored inks too. You can use colorful illustrations in an eBook that don’t have to be printed in color and save on that resource. Even if your readers choose to print, they can do so on grayscale instead of using colored ink.

4. Protect Profits. Now eBooks can be protected from piracy eliminating lost profits by using a PDF protection system, like protectedpdf.  Unlike other PDF protection technologies, protectedpdf does not make it difficult for legitimate readers to access your PDFs. Authorized readers can view your protected documents using Adobe Reader V6.0 or higher, just like normal PDFs. There is no need for readers to download any special plug-ins, proprietary readers, viewers or other additional software.

5. Printing Costs. eBooks are definitely green because they save on the process of using the printing press to create a book. You don’t have to use the electricity or employee power to print an eBook as it is delivered directly to the desktop or eBook reader of the person reading the book.

6. No Inventory. You don’t have to stockpile eBooks. They are the real print-on-demand type of writing that can be downloaded when the person needs and want it.  No inventory means no wasted printing or use of storage space.

By Richard Adhikaris, InternetNews.com

Several companies have recently unveiled software products that extend the capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Read how Vitrium Systems has developed a PDF protection solution for Microsoft SharePoint users to protect files in Adobe’s PDF format.

Read the full article here.