I stumbled across Publitas today. It is a a very cool PDF publisher and viewer that enables the user to upload and share very large documents. It is marketed as a digital catalog, magazine, and brochure publisher and viewer, but it also works really well for large ebooks.
In the past, I've promoted ISSUU for it's simplicity, and unique viewer. I still like and use ISSUU, but recently I ran into a snag. The digital document I wanted to share with students was too large for my free account. So I thought I would just use Google. Unfortunately, the document was also too large for the Google pdf viewer. I tried Scribd, but the upload never completed. So I thought I would try adding an add-on to Drive that would open the document. That worked, but then I wasn't able to share the document through Google Classroom to send students directly to the reading. They would have to go to classroom, follow the link to drive, make sure they have the same add-on installed, then make sure to "open with" the appropriate add-on before they could view the document. I don't' know about you, but if some of my students have a multi step process just to access work, they "check out" before they even start.
So, I searched around and stumbled across Publitas. Again, it is marketed as a free pdf catalog, brochure and magazine viewer. I contemplated the obnoxious size of a catalog and concluded that there is no way my earth science open document is as large as a catalog, so it should work fine. I made an account and uploaded my first document. And, just like that, problem solved. I now have an online viewer, similar to ISSUU than can host and share documents larger than 100 MB. Best of all, it is easy to share to students. If you have the rights to a document that is too large for other online readers, try Publitas. It was quick to set up, quick to publish, and quick to share documents.
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