Today we’re unveiling our new Stories experience for launch and rollout in early 2019. Issuu Stories turns content from Issuu publications into beautifully designed social media Stories designed in line with brands’ attitude, identity and narrative. Any digital publisher on Issuu can transform their PDF content to engage with a new generation of users that consume content on mobile, where readers are spending more and more of their time.
Issuu Stories are ready-made for sharing on social media, initially for Instagram Stories that Issuu curates starting with select group of publishers who can apply to be selected by contacting Issuu, then other social platforms will be available in the near future. Issuu Stories can also be shared in a mobile article format now, with select Stories curated for Issuu’s Apple News channel.
The new Issuu Stories experience allows users to have more control of their Stories. Not only can brands now design their Stories to meet their visual branding needs, but as well control and elevate their social brand identity using this new Issuu Story Creator Engine.
Using the font and image extraction functionality in Issuu’s core technology, these assets can be taken and reconstructed into Stories with no extra effort. There will also be a series of Stories templates that are unique to publishers to save time for those who want a streamlined, beautiful sharing experience, that will support video, typography, and the visual and text styling of spreads that match the original publications.
Issuu has always been very design-centric, and we are taking the ease of use of publishing on Issuu to transform from one format to another while allowing publishers to distinguish themselves visually.
Stories represent a shift in the way that content is consumed on mobile. Stories have evolved from user-generated, personal perspectives to now include Stories produced by major media and consumer brands creating millions of Stories a day. Stories are now growing at a faster rate than feeds feeds, and becoming an established media format that is used both for personal users and marketers.
Over the years, Issuu has been methodically and purposefully building up its digital publishing tools and services to enable content creators to connect their long-from content to audiences. Creating Stories is now becoming a business that brands need to incorporate into their marketing, social media and content strategies. Social media is aligning with deeper more engaging content so there is a real need to integrate long-form content as stories for social sharing.
The growth of the Story format aligns with Issuu’s core strength of reconstructing print content into professional digital content for the long tail, representing millions of global publishers that need an online platform for their content and an easy, design focused way to distribute their content across in the mobile and social optimized Stories format.