RealRead tackles Web publishing of large documents

Creating large documents such as catalogs for the Web is often a real labor for bricks and mortar businesses. The problem is that these organizations have years of experience with the development of content for print media and to extend it to or replace it with Web publishing is not only expensive but also complex and hard to integrate with their traditional workflow practices.

Today I have an interesting solution to this problem: RealRead published by RealRead.

RealRead takes content in Adobe’s PDF format and creates a series of high fidelity JPEG images that are rendered by a client-side Java applet. But that’s not all – the product also supports any links defined in the PDF version that point to bookmarks internal to the document or URLs to be loaded into an external browser.

The user experience created by RealRead when it is presenting, say, a catalog is very much like reading the real thing: Click on the right hand page image and the “pages” turn visually emulating a book (check out the demos).

There’s also a customizable control bar that provides navigation (go forward, backward, first page, last page, table of contents) as well as enlarge the left or right page, search contents, print, help, and launch a Web browser to the content owner’s Web site. Note that the RealRead technology only supports static images but a RealRead document can embed another RealRead document.

The RealRead technology has been used not only for catalogs but also books, magazines, manuals, newsletters and annual reports. Conversion from PDF to RealRead is fast at roughly 10 pages per minute and the final content can be indexed directly by Google, which is an important feature for catalogs and other sales and marketing materials.

An issue with RealRead is that the page images are of a fixed size so on my monitor (1279 by 996 pixels – yes, an odd size but it is in a virtual machine under VMware Workstation) small text on pages is hard to read. I wound up having to use the page enlarge controls.

These page enlarge controls pop up a separate applet window again with a fixed size rendition of the page, which on my monitor was now larger than the screen size. Also, the pop-up applet has no controls although clicking on any embedded link elegantly exits the window and changes the main display to the target page.

Using Java applets also has an overhead as it spawns an extra window when the applet is launched that displays a RealRead splash screen. You can’t close this window either – doing so causes the applet to exit.

My biggest concern is for end users who don’t have Java installed. RealRead displays a less than completely helpful message and a link to Sun so you can get the needed software.

In fact, in the battle for market share Macromedia’s Flash technology (which is installed on around 98% of all PCs) far outreaches Java’s desktop penetration and has fewer support issues. This is a problem for RealRead because while RealRead argues that its solution is far cheaper to publish content in than Flash, Macromedia’s recent product, Flashpaper, provides the advantages of Flash deployment with the ease of publishing PDF content and could seriously impact RealRead’s market opportunity.

RealRead offers its system in three different forms. The first provides software for converting PDFs to RealRead and server software that requires Windows (2000, 2003 Servers) or Linux (Red Hat Enterprise ES2.1/ ES3) along with Tomcat 4.1.30 and Java2 SDK Standard Edition 1.4.2_03.

The second provides only the conversion software and RealRead provides the hosting service, while the third scheme is where you simply send your PDFs to RealRead and it converts and hosts for you.

Pricing is based on use and is quite complicated as you’ll see in RealRead’s pricing guide. A simple example where you provide the server and do your own conversions is a single document with unlimited pages priced at $3,000 for the first year and $1,500 for subsequent years. For the RealRead hosted services pricing is based on expected traffic.