E-Book System’s patented “Digital Flip” technology makes electronic books and e-albums behave like real-life books. This unique approach lets users view books on their computer as if they were reading a traditional book.
FlipAlbum is the page flipping and image-sharing software you need to create these digital flipping books. This program lets you organize, view, edit, and arrange collections of digital images into virtual digital albums. FlipAlbum is very much like digital scrapbooking. You can put one picture on a page, or group several together. You can use borders and annotations, and can add as many little personal touches as you like.
The program’s installation is quick and straightforward. A new user can easily create a flip book by dragging images into the on-screen book. The software automatically adds a thumbnail to the index in the front of the book and table of contents at the end of the book. Users can rearrange the order of the photos in their album using the easy drag and drop feature. While the program is fairly easy to use, it is more powerful than a first glance reveals. Photos can be cropped into different shapes, edited, rotated, and put into frames and borders. Multimedia files like music, video clips, and animation can be imported. To take full advantage of this program’s capabilities, the average user will definitely need to use the enclosed manual, which fortunately is clearly written. Like scrap booking, the more time you are willing to invest, the more detailed, unique, and impressive your finished albums will be.
FlipAlbum is well suited for the mature surfer. It is easy for beginners to understand, and what could be more apropos for the button-busting doting parent or grandparent? These albums could serve as ultimate brag books. FlipAlbum can make anyone, parent or not, popular with family and friends when sharing the latest photos of fun happenings.
FlipAlbum Gold lets you share your albums via e-mail or upload your FlipBook to the Web. Click on the upload button to upload your albums to www.myflipbooks.com, photos.yahoo.com or your own Web site.
In order to view an album your friends will need to download the FlipBrowser viewer. In view of the ease of use and stability of the product, this is not a problem. The viewer is free and is quite small (only about 2 Mb). It installs quickly and easily.
If you flip over the FlipAlbum, you might want to check into the entire family of products based on the flip technology. All of which have free download trial samples to tempt you. FlipAlbum 5 Standard is currently available from the FlipAlbum Web site for $24.95. FlipAlbum 5 Suite is $49.95 and FlipAlbum 5 Professional is $139.95. The Suite version and the Professional version allow you to burn your albums to a CD for easy distribution. The CDs can be viewed on a computer or can be viewed on a television that has one of the newer DVD players attached. These CDs make great surprise presents. I made one for my car-loving husband with photos of all of the cars that he has owned, and this CD has become a prized possession.
The FlipAlbum Professional may seem a bit pricey, but it ads the ability to sell or distribute the CD albums. The images can be encrypted to prevent unauthorized copying, you can add watermarks and/or copyright information, you can password protect the album, and had even enable/disable end-user printing. If you are a professional photographer or multimedia artist this is a great way to display, promote, and market your images. The FlipAlbum Professional program may be way to make a little extra money as well. With this program you can create professional catalogues, promotional packages, graduation yearbooks, and grandparent brag books for others.
While this program will run on a 300 MHz Pentuim II, for best performance you will want to have at least a Pentium III machine with 128 MB RAM. Sorry Mac users, this is a Windows only program.
