Posted by Paul Ryan, Editor, Anthill Magazine

An army of very clever people have been thinking long and hard about how best to integrate print media in the digital world. Some abandoned ship long ago, while a few loyal souls appear determined to stick to their post and go down with HMAS Old Media.

Perhaps the simplest concept is to have print, in all its page-turning glory, embedded online. Several companies have been offering this service for a while now, but they generally produced clunky, counter-intuitive renderings of the original print versions. The experience sucked, and publishers were mostly charged an extortionate price for the pleasure.

Thankfully, a slick, free Danish service called Issuu is finally delivering impressive results. Anyone can upload their PDFs, which are converted to flash and displayed on Issuu for public or private access. You don’t have to be a magazine publisher - your promotional materials and books will work just fine. Click the edge of the page and it turns, revealing the next spread (almost like the real thing). Issuu recently upgraded its technology, meaning higher compatibility with a variety of uploaded documents. So now most print documents can be read as they were originally intended.

We’ve been testing Issuu for a while and we’re pleased to offer you a sample edition of Anthill on Issuu to browse through. If you dig it (and Anthill), you can even embed it in your own website/blog or on your Facebook/MySpace profile. We’ll be adding more back issues over the coming weeks.

Check it out. It’s free and captures at least some of the magic of print that generally lost in online content.