Flip page

Flip page refers to the effect of flipping through the pages of a digital document as if it were a physical document. A flip page application is often made in Adobe Flash and requires the Adobe Flash Player to run in a browser window. The benefit of having a flip page document is that it affords the user experience of reading an actual copy of a physical document or magazine.
The technology is commonly used by traditional publishers that want to create (and spread) a digital version of their physical document/paper/magazine.
The illusion of having a tangible document on your computer is supposedly more powerful with the flip page function since it mimics the natural way of browsing through a physical document, yet at the same time allows the user to use the traditional electronic benefits like searching through a document, jumping to a certain page, links to external websites etc.
History
In May 2002 Tony Hogqvist from the company Perfect Fools was one of the first to combine masking, skewing and alpha gradients effects in Flash to simulate a page "curl" effect so it appeared that the image actually curled as the page was turned.
In July 2002 Sean O'Shell of PixelWit.com won an open source contest on ActionScript.org with his free open source PageFlip software.
Mid 2004, Iparigrafika added a brand new feature in their flip page application, allowing the users to tear away pages and they reintroduced transparent pages which originally had been featured in the Perfect Fools' application.
Today (2010) Iparigrafika's open source software is still available, but most publishers turn to companies like aXmag, Pagegangster, Instant Flipbook, FlippingBook, Flip PDF, Pageflipper, Pressmo or client based software like eMagCreator and PageFlip to convert their documents into flip page applications, due to their easy 'pdf to flash converter' that makes the document Google search engine friendly.
2009 Youblisher integrated the flipping effect into its publishing network.
SVGflip is a open source proof-of-concept to turn SVG documents into flip docs.
MegaZine3 is a Flash driven pageflip engine. It includes GUI, video, sound and more. MegaZine3 is free for private use. This supports common features such as liquid scaling, zoom, multiflip, sounds, video, dynamic XML based content definition, page caching, JavaScript interaction, internal links, fullscreen, thumbnails and more.
Codebox.es has an online tool for creading a flash flip page book from pdf file.

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