The flipbook is the page-turning PDF viewer that half the charity sector uses for magazines, annual reports and newsletters. It looks like print, animates like a book, and usually arrives via a third-party embed. It also needs replacing, and this article explains why and with what.
We say this knowing why charities love them. Your magazine was designed for print, the flipbook preserves that design, and trustees like seeing the "real" publication online. Every one of those things is true. The problem is who gets left out, and what it costs you.
Who a flipbook excludes
Screen reader users get nothing. A flipbook renders your pages as images inside a viewer. To assistive technology it is a picture of words, and a picture of words reads as silence. If your charity serves older people, disabled people, or anyone at all, some of your readers cannot read your publication. For a charity that has invested in large-print editions, as many do, there is a painful irony: the flipbook undoes on screen the care you took in print.
Mobile readers give up. A flipbook shows an A4 spread on a phone screen. Reading it means pinch-zooming across every column of every page. Most people stop by page two, and well over half your visitors are on phones.
Search engines and AI assistants cannot see in. The words in a flipbook are invisible to Google, and invisible to the AI tools people increasingly ask instead of searching. Years of articles, stories and impact reporting contribute nothing to whether anyone can find you. We have written about what it takes for AI tools to see your charity; flipbooks are close to the worst case.
You are usually renting it. Most flipbooks live on a third-party platform with a subscription. Stop paying and your back catalogue goes dark. If you have read our piece on who owns your charity's website, this is the same problem wearing a different coat.
What to publish instead
The fix is not to abandon the publication. It is to publish web-first and let print be the export, instead of the other way round.
- Each article becomes a web page. Real text, real headings, readable on any device, findable by search, and fully accessible. A magazine issue becomes a small collection of pages with a contents page, which is what it was in print anyway.
- The designed PDF stays as a download. Offer it plainly: "Read online, or download the print edition (PDF)". People who want the designed object still get it. A properly made, tagged PDF is also far more accessible than any flipbook.
- Large print becomes a browser feature. Real text scales to any size a reader needs. The separate large-print edition can retire, or remain as a print-only kindness.
The result reads better everywhere, works for everyone, and every issue you publish makes your website more findable rather than adding another sealed box.
What to do with the back catalogue
You do not need to rebuild ten years of magazines as web pages. Republish the pieces that still earn their keep: the stories you cite to funders, the guidance people still ask for. Keep the rest as plain PDF downloads on an archive page, out of the flipbook platform and onto your own site. Ownership first, elegance second. If your library of publications is large, our article on fixing a buried resources library covers how to structure it.
The honest cost comparison
Publishing web-first costs a little more time per issue than uploading a PDF to a flipbook platform, and it usually saves the platform subscription. What you gain is readers. A charity magazine exists to be read, and a format that most phone users abandon and screen reader users cannot open is a magazine that is mostly unread. That trade was never worth the page-turn animation.
If your charity publishes a magazine or annual report and you want it read by everyone, book a free 20-minute call. We will look at your current publication and map what web-first would look like for it, including what the migration honestly involves.
