Flex-Ebooks is an all-in-one platform for creating and publishing interactive content experiences. Like websites, Flex-Ebooks is built on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript; but unlike websites, they are linear in nature - more like a magazine or book.
With Flex-ebooks, you can quickly create stunning internal and external communication assets your audience would enjoy reading and easily produce sales and marketing collateral that are immersive and media-rich which your readers can interact with on any device.
Flex-Ebooks is the perfect platform for making interactive and engaging business documents rather than creating them as PDFs. A few examples of such documents would be:
— Annual Reports
— Sustainability Reports
— Anniversary Books
— Case Study Reports
— Corporate Brochures
— Marketing Collaterals
— Product Manuals
— User Guides
— Toolkits
— Playbooks
— Factsheets
— Product Catalogs
— Information Kits
— Course/Training Material
— Employee Guidebooks
— Framework Documents
and much more…
PDF documents have been the de-facto method to publish and deliver content for over 3 decades. They still are the closest format to reproduce your brand’s visual style in the best possible way. However, today we live in a digital world. A whopping +70% of people consume content on some kind of digital device.
Your content in PDF format is not responsive and it's next to impossible to read them on mobile devices. They don’t translate to a great online viewing experience either. Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. We do not recommend PDFs for online content consumption.
Unlike tools such as PDF, Word, and PowerPoint, with Flex-Ebooks, you get all the advantages of online hosted content, namely the ability to track engagement with Google Analytics, present content perfectly on any device (responsiveness), personalize content, and many more convenient distribution options.
Flex-Ebooks publications allow you to add rich media like full-screen background videos and animations. They can include forms, calls-to-action, and other interactive elements. And they’re accessible anywhere, rendering perfectly on any device.
The bigger benefits, however, lies in cost-saving (compared to print) and in the ability to track, measure, and analyze your content’s performance. You can accurately see where your readers are coming from, which pages they engage with most, what they click on, where they leave, and then use that data to make your next edition more engaging. None of these can be achieved by using traditionally printed documents.
Well, there are so many reasons why. Here are a few big ones.
Mobile-Friendly:
With the increasing popularity of mobile devices like the tablets and smartphones, the consumption of data on these devices has far surpassed the desktop. PDFs don’t respond to the multitude of mobile devices and screen sizes. PDFs do scale, but in scaling they make the font size too small to read and the orientation isn’t optimized for full-screen viewing. Navigating through a large PDF document has also proven to be cumbersome on these devices.
Integrate Videos:
PDF is a static document. You cannot add videos or moving images to your PDFs. Not only do videos grab people's attention but they also keep you engaged. They strike a deep connection and elicit strong emotional responses that make people want to share, comment, and like. Videos get 1,200% more shares than text and images combined.
Integration of other features like transitions, animations, live content, which the users nowadays expect as defaults due to their exposure to these features on the web, cannot be achieved on a PDF document.
Update Content:
Once the PDF is created and distributed, you cannot update the content on the PDF. This results in multiple versions floating around. How do you keep track of them? With Flex-Ebooks, there is only one publication and you and your team can collaborate to effortlessly keep them up-to-date any time of the day.
Flex-Ebooks allow you to rapidly design and develop content online. When developing on website platforms, we are talking of weeks and months, whereas with Flex-Ebooks, we talk days and weeks. Besides that, on an average, users tend to interact with Flex-Ebooks publications 3 times longer than a typical web page.
This is because Flex-Ebooks are designed to be snack-able and media-rich. Their stand-alone, linear format gives them a story-like feel and encourages readers to continue reading through each of the consecutive pages.
On Flex-Ebooks, you will not find other snippets of information and links on the page, that distract your reader away from your content. If you have an important piece of content that deserves more attention than a regular website page or blog post, then Flex-Ebooks is the perfect way to showcase it.
Flex-Ebooks and websites share the same technology but their use is very different. A website is like a spiderweb where everything is connected to everything else. Flex-Ebooks are more like presentations in that they're linear, and users navigate through one page or one block of content at a time.
Oh yes, of course! Flex-Ebooks use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript just like any other website. Besides that, Flex-Ebooks is also a full-featured CMS (content management system) and can also be used to create a fully functional out-of-the-box e-commerce solution with its very own payment gateway.
No! Flex-Ebooks is like a website. In the sense that they are device and platform-independent. You can view them using any web browser on the desktop or mobile device on any platform, be it Windows, MacOs, Linux, iOS, or Android.
Responsive:
Flex-Ebooks is built on the latest Html 5 technology and CSS. It's responsive by default, i.e., it is designed to reflow the content automatically so that the content is readable on all devices (desktop, tablet & mobile phones) and on both orientations (horizontal & vertical).
Online 365:
The document is hosted on the web. It means that it is accessible 24x7.
Search:
As the document is hosted on the web, not only can it have an easy search feature built into the document, it can be made searchable on all the major search engines as well.
Bespoke Design:
Flex-Ebooks technology allows us to create unique and beautiful designs for the document. They don't have to be dull and boring as the other online ebook platforms.
Videos, Animations and Interactions:
We can integrate videos, animations, transitions, and active web objects. This adds a complete new dimension to your document. You can design any kind of custom user interaction.
CMS:
Flex-Ebooks are built on a CMS platform. This means that as a client, you have access to all your content and have the ability to show and hide content; add, delete, update or modify it any time, any number of times. In a fast-paced world, being ready on time and the ability to make changes in real-time is crucial.
Multiple Editor:
You can have several editors collaborating and editing the documents.
Navigation:
All areas of the document can be made easily accessible by adding intuitive navigation and menus, allowing for a better user experience.
Analytics:
Powered by Google Analytics, a complete analytical overview of your document is collected in real-time - the number of views, which region your viewers are coming from, devices used to view the document, etc.
Interact:
You can provide options to capture comments and thoughts from your users by adding surveys and forms.
Social Media Friendly:
It’s very easy to share content with social media channels.
Document Hub:
One subscription of Flex-Ebooks can be used to host one document or multiple documents. It can act as your corporate document hub.
Integration | API Support
A lot of other great online services can also be a part of your Flex-Ebooks solutions, like Infogram (infographics), Typeform, or Survey Monkey (forms, surveys and data collection) to name a few.
Yes, you can use your browser’s print feature to directly print to a digital printer or save the webpage as a PDF for printing. As Flex-Ebooks publications are responsive and dynamic web pages designed for the screen, printed versions may not appear exactly as they do online.
Flex-Ebooks are live publications on the web, so you can drive traffic to them as you would with any other page or piece of online content. Apart from adding it as a link to your website, emailing the URL and distributing a QR code along with your printed material, social promotion, paid search advertising, display advertising, and email marketing are the other common ways our customers promote their publications.
Flex-Ebooks are built with SEO in mind which means search engines will index your content and you’ll receive organic traffic as well unless you choose to turn this feature off.
No. Unlike some other tools which simply create static online flip-books, Flex-Ebooks’ distinguishing feature is responsiveness — the ability to adapt and rearrange layouts according to the screen size of the viewer. While this requires you to upload and place assets like images and text individually, it creates a much better experience for the reader.
No. Just like websites, Flex-Ebooks’ publications exist online and require an internet connection to view.
If required, we can enable Google Analytics for your Flex-Ebooks subscription. All we need is the API key from your Google Analytics account. You can also create and place forms in your publication to gather information from your visitors. You can use them to gate your content and generate leads, or to collect feedback elsewhere in your publication.
The Standard account will allow you to collect 1000 form submissions. If you need more, we can upgrade you to the Plus account where you can get unlimited form submissions.
Our mission is to make the best Ebooks possible, so we go the extra mile to create custom templates for your projects. But if you prefer to use an existing design or template, we have a large selection of professionally designed block, page, and publication templates that you can use. We can also help determine the right one for your use-case.
No. Designing an online document in HTML requires experience in coding. We remove this obstacle and take on the headache of custom designing your publications and developing the HTML templates for the different responsive sizes. This helps us to rapidly develop documents, allowing you to focus on the content that needs to be communicated.
Yes, you can use your browser’s print feature to directly print to a digital printer or save the webpage as a PDF for printing. As Flex-Ebooks publications are responsive and dynamic web pages designed for the screen, printed versions may not appear exactly as they do online.
No. You don’t need any training to edit your Flex-Ebooks. Once you sign-up, you will be provided a simple Editors Guide, that will guide you through all the features and get you up and running in no time.
You don't need any coding experience to use Flex-Ebooks. With an Editor access, you have full access to the content at all times. Editing content is as easy as editing on a Word document. You also get the privileges to change images and videos, and even add new ones. Moreover, you can add and remove pages, change URLs, and add/modify SEO settings on the fly.
We even allow you to add Html embeds for features like forms and infographics from independent service providers like Infogram, Typeform or Survey Monkey.
Contact our support team to enquire about other possible integrations.
You can easily insert videos that are hosted on YouTube or Vimeo. You can then use them as videos that play automatically, or as embedded videos that users can play when they're ready. Refer to your Editor’s guide for more information.
Our designers and developers have decades of experience working with brands. They will ensure your publication complies with your brand guidelines. If you don’t have a brand guideline, we can help develop one for you, like we have done for many of our customers in the past.
Once we have designed your publications template and content, we will upload your corporate assets like logos, colors, custom fonts, etc. These will be available to you when you are ready to edit your content.
By default, our Standard license comes with 3 users, and the Plus license allows 10 users. If you still need more, you can purchase extra user seats and further customize the service.
Yes. By default, there are a wide variety of fonts available. You can choose any Google font or we can also upload your own custom fonts if they are available in the .woff format.
Your document is auto-saved every 10 seconds of activity or 1 minute of inactivity and on every 20th, auto-backup is created. But if you want to create a restore point or do a roll-back at any time, call us and we can get it done for you.
No. Flex-Ebooks files are hosted on a global network of secure servers and use state-of-the-art content delivery network (CDN) to ensure your readers get the best experience regardless of where they're located. However, you can configure your domain or a subdomain to access your Flex-Ebook document. This helps make your Flex-Ebooks document an extension of your corporate online presence.
For most companies, their corporate website is a critical asset that requires a high level of security and control. Corporate websites and the domain names are interlinked to so many of the company’s critical business services like Emails, CRM, ERPs, etc. They are strictly controlled by IT experts and, user access to develop content and modify content on the main website is hard to achieve.
By using a subdomain, you create a hard wall between your company server and your Flex-Ebooks servers. Your Flex-Ebooks server is now independent of the corporate website providing you the peace of mind that the security of the companies critical services is not compromised.
Yes. We can help you get a domain if you don’t already own one. If you plan on buying one, we would recommend services like GoDaddy or Google domains.
You decide! If you want your publications to be freely available on the web, we offer all kinds of SEO features and social sharing options. Alternatively, you can gate your content with encrypted passwords, lead generation forms or social logins so that visitors must submit their contact details to access your publication.
Yes. If you're working with sensitive internal information or content that is meant for a limited audience, we offer robust security features. You can secure publications with usernames and passwords, whitelist IPs, and prevent the search engines from indexing your content.
Absolutely. The SSL certification is built into your price.
Yes. We offer the possibility to download an entire publication for hosting elsewhere on the WordPress CMS platform, but you will lose all editing & collaboration features that make Flex-Ebooks a powerful solution.
Yes, fully. Our company follows all GDPR guidelines and we also provide tools at an extra cost to help our customers comply.
There are two cost components to your Flex-Ebooks - Hosting subscription and Design development.
Hosting Subscription Cost
You need an active Flex-Ebooks subscription to use Flex-Ebooks. This covers the cost of the hosting and collaborative features. There are 4 plans for you to choose from.
See our pricing page for more details.
CMS - Standard
AED 200 pm
CMS - Plus
AED 450 pm
Ecommerce - Standard
AED 450 pm
Ecommerce - Plus
AED 950 pm
Designing Development Cost
Every Flex-Ebook publication is custom designed with your budget and marketing/communication objectives in mind. Our experienced designers will work with you to determine a bespoke tailored solution that has your budget and objectives in mind. As with every other design project, our support team will need to review your brief and work out the cost for the design and development of your Flex-Ebook. See our pricing page for more details.
Yes, we offer an Enterprise License which can include many additional features, custom integrations, and special development requests. Please contact support@flex-ebooks.com for more details.
You can pay the subscription cost monthly, or choose to pay for the entire year in advance. Monthly payments are available only through online credit card payments. Annual payments can be made through bank transfers. We accept all major credit cards, checks and bank transfers.
If you find yourself needing additional features, it is possible to purchase add-ons at any time. For annual subscriptions, you can downgrade your plan up to 1 month before the end of a billing cycle, in which case changes will come into effect after the current billing cycle is over.
You can cancel your account up to 1 month before your subscription renewal date. If you decide to cancel your account, please contact support@flex-ebooks.com.
Your publications will remain online until the end of your subscription. After that, they will be taken offline. Your publications will remain in your account for 90 days, so if you choose to renew your account within that time, they will still be there.