I’ve noticed that a few publications in our area have gone to a flip book format with their websites.  I’m wondering how good of an idea this is.

I would think that the sites are sacrificing search engine readable content because each page has been converted into a graphic or a flash file.  While the site becomes more “interactive”, we’re still talking about 40+ pages of content (on these particular sites) that you have to “flip” through with no searchable features.  Is this  counter productive to a user friendly site? Do I want to sit and flip through a book page by page online or do I want to just click on what I want to read and move on?

Many of the pages have a ton of content on them, making the text on the page virtually unreadable unless you zoom in on the page, which just adds more clicks.

On the plus side,the site is impressive looking from a graphics standpoint and it is kind of cool to see the 3D page turning in action, for about 3 minutes. Other forms of media including audio and video can be added to the pages, making the user experience a little less monotonous. You can control your content as text and graphics won’t be able to be lifted from the page as easily, which is another plus.

All in all, I suppose that since the publications in question  plan on keeping a print presence,  offering a website  similar to their printed product would benefit  their printed product, but only their printed product.

To me, it seems that a page flipping website is just a backward step in technology.