By: You've got a closet full of brochures. A shelf of product catalogs. Binders of training manuals. Filing cabinets of sell sheets that sales reps were supposed to hand out but never did because the information was outdated before the boxes arrived from the printer.
Somewhere in your organization, someone is paying to store boxes of printed collateral that nobody is using.
This guide is about moving that stuff online. Not because print is dead (it's not), but because print as your primary distribution channel for most business materials is wasteful, slow, and impossible to measure. Digital solves all three problems, and the transition is simpler than most people expect.
Why Move Print Collateral Online?
Cost
The obvious one. Printing is expensive.
A 12-page color brochure costs $1-3 per unit at scale. Print 2,000 of them and you're spending $2,000-$6,000 before shipping. Then your product line changes and half the information is wrong. Reprint. Another $2,000-$6,000. Repeat quarterly.
According to Keypoint Intelligence, the average enterprise spends 1-3% of revenue on printing and document management. For a $10 million company, that's $100,000-$300,000 annually. Not all of that is marketing collateral, but a significant chunk is.
Digital distribution costs almost nothing per unit. Upload once, share infinitely. Update without reprinting. The per-unit economics aren't even comparable.
Speed
A print run takes 1-3 weeks from final approval to delivery. A design revision adds another week. Shipping to branch offices or sales reps adds more time. By the time the printed piece reaches the person who needs it, the information might already be stale.
A digital document updates in minutes. Upload the new version and every link, QR code, and embed points to the current content. No lead time. No shipping. No "we're still waiting for the new brochures" excuse from the field sales team.
Measurement
This is the big one. And it's the one most people don't think about until they experience it.
Print collateral has zero analytics. You print 5,000 brochures. You hand them out. Did anyone read them? Which sections did they look at? How long did they spend? Did the brochure contribute to the sale?
You have no idea. You hope it helped. You assume it was worth the money. But you're guessing.
Digital collateral with analytics tells you everything. Who opened it. How long they read. Which pages they focused on. Whether they came back. Whether they shared it. For the first time, you can measure whether your collateral actually works.
Environmental Impact
A mid-sized company printing catalogs quarterly produces thousands of pounds of paper waste annually. Digital eliminates that. It's not the primary reason most companies switch, but it's a real benefit and increasingly a factor that customers and employees care about.
What Should You Digitize First?
Not everything needs to move at once. Prioritize by frequency of updates and distribution volume.
High Priority: Frequently Updated Materials
Product catalogs top the list. Products change. Prices change. Availability changes. A printed catalog is wrong the moment any of these change, and for most companies, something changes every month.
Price lists are similar. If your prices change more than once a year, a printed price list is a liability. Customers quoting from outdated prices creates friction that digital eliminates.
Sales decks and presentations. Reps should always be presenting the latest version. A digital deck shared via link guarantees they are, because there's only one version and it's always current.
Medium Priority: Moderate Update Frequency
Brochures and sell sheets. These change less often but are distributed widely. Converting them means you never run out, never ship boxes, and always have the current version available.
Training materials and manuals. Especially for organizations with multiple locations or remote employees. A digital manual viewed as a flipbook is accessible from any device, updatable without redistribution, and trackable.
Onboarding documents. New hire packets, welcome guides, company handbooks. Updated once or twice a year, but distributed to every new employee. Digital means the latest version is always what they see.
Lower Priority: Rarely Updated, High-Touch
Brand books and style guides. These change infrequently but are referenced often. Digital works well here for accessibility, but the urgency is lower.
Annual reports. Once a year. High production value. Often worth keeping in print for board meetings and investor relations, but a digital version extends the reach significantly.
The Conversion Process
Step 1: Audit What You Have
Make a list of every printed material your organization produces. Include:
- Document name and purpose
- How often it's updated
- Annual print volume and cost
- Who uses it and how it's distributed
- Whether a print-ready PDF exists
That last point matters. If you have the PDF, you're 90% of the way there. If you only have the printed piece, you'll need to scan or recreate it.
Step 2: Gather Your Source Files
Collect the print-ready PDFs. These are the files that went to the printer. They're already designed, formatted, and proofed. For most materials, you can upload these directly to a flipbook platform without any modification.
If you don't have PDFs, check with your design team or print vendor. They usually keep the files. If the files are truly lost, scan the printed material to create a PDF. Phone scanning apps like Adobe Scan produce surprisingly good results.
For collateral that only exists as images, you can use a tool like Flipbooker's images-to-PDF converter to assemble them into a single document.
Step 3: Upload and Convert
Upload each PDF to Flipbooker. It converts automatically into a digital flipbook. The layout, fonts, images, and design are preserved exactly. What was a static PDF becomes an interactive, page-flipping document that opens in any browser.
No redesign required at this stage. Your existing print design works as a digital flipbook. The format translation is direct.
Step 4: Add Digital Enhancements
This is where digital starts to surpass print.
Links. Add clickable links to your contact page, product pages, or order forms. A printed brochure can show a URL. A digital flipbook can link directly to it.
Video. Embed product demos or explainer videos on relevant pages. A catalog page showing a piece of machinery becomes dramatically more useful when there's a video of it in operation.
Lead capture. Gate premium content behind an email form. Your product catalog becomes a lead generation tool, something a printed catalog can never be. For a deeper dive on this approach, our flipbook guide covers the full strategy.
Analytics. Track everything. Which products get the most attention in your catalog? Which sections of the training manual get skipped? Which pages of the brochure drive clicks to your website?
Step 5: Replace Distribution Channels
Everywhere you currently distribute print, replace with digital:
- Trade shows: QR code on your booth instead of a stack of brochures. Attendees scan and browse on their phone. No heavy boxes to ship. No leftover pile to haul back.
- Sales meetings: A link in the follow-up email instead of a leave-behind. Tracked, measurable, and always current.
- Website: Embedded flipbooks on product pages instead of downloadable PDFs that disappear into Downloads folders.
- Email campaigns: A link to the digital catalog instead of a heavy attachment that bounces off corporate email filters.
- Branch offices: One link for everyone instead of shipping cartons of materials to 15 locations.
Step 6: Measure and Compare
After one quarter of digital distribution, compare:
- Cost: Print + shipping costs vs. digital platform subscription
- Reach: Number of people who received printed materials vs. number of digital views
- Engagement: Unknown (print) vs. specific page-level data (digital)
- Freshness: How many times you updated the digital version vs. how many times you would have reprinted
- Speed: Time from "final approval" to "available to everyone"
These comparisons make the business case for expanding the program to more materials.
What About the Things That Should Stay in Print?
Not everything needs to go digital. Some materials are better in print:
Trade show giveaways with a tangible purpose. A printed piece someone takes home from a conference still has value. But pair it with a QR code linking to the digital version, so you get the tactile benefit of print and the tracking benefit of digital.
Premium brand materials. Luxury brands, architecture firms, and high-end real estate often use printed materials as part of the brand experience. The weight of the paper, the quality of the printing, the feel of it in your hand. Digital can't replicate that physical impression.
Regulated documents requiring physical signatures. Some contracts, compliance documents, and legal materials still require printed, signed copies. These are shrinking as e-signatures become standard, but they're not gone yet.
The smart approach is digital-first, not digital-only. Make digital your primary channel. Use print intentionally for specific contexts where the physical format adds value.
Common Objections (And Honest Answers)
"Our customers prefer print." Some do. Most prefer whatever is most convenient, and a link on their phone is more convenient than a brochure they'll lose. Offer both. Track which gets more engagement. Let the data settle the debate.
"Our design won't look good digitally." If it looks good as a PDF, it looks good as a flipbook. The conversion is direct. Your layout doesn't change.
"We don't have the budget for a digital platform." A flipbook platform costs less per month than a single print run. The budget objection usually means "we haven't calculated how much we're spending on print." Once you do that math, the platform pays for itself immediately.
"IT won't support another tool." Flipbook platforms are SaaS. No installation. No IT infrastructure. Upload a PDF, get a link. IT has nothing to support.
As one marketing director noted in a CMI survey: "We spent six months debating whether to go digital. Then we uploaded one catalog and the conversation was over. The engagement data alone justified the switch."
Getting Started This Week
Pick one material. The one that costs the most to print, or the one that changes most often. Upload the PDF. Share the link with a small group. Watch the analytics for two weeks.
You'll learn more about how people engage with that document in two weeks of digital analytics than you learned from years of printing it.
Then do it again with the next document. And the next.
The closet full of brochures isn't going to empty itself. But you can stop filling it.
FAQs
Can I just upload my existing print PDF without redesigning it?
Yes. That's the fastest path and it works fine for most materials. A print-ready PDF converts to a digital flipbook without any modification. You can always redesign later, but don't let perfect be the enemy of live.
What about materials that don't exist as digital files?
Scan them. A modern flatbed scanner or even a phone scanning app can produce a clean PDF from a printed brochure. The quality won't match a native digital file, but it's good enough for many use cases.
How much money does going digital actually save?
Depends on your print volume. A company printing 5,000 brochures quarterly at $1-2 each spends $20,000-$40,000 per year on print alone, not counting design revisions, shipping, and storage. Digital distribution eliminates most of that.
Will our older audience struggle with digital formats?
Less than you'd think. Digital flipbooks open in a browser with no app or download required. The page-flip interaction is intuitive because it mimics the physical format they already know. Include a direct PDF download link as a fallback.
Should we stop printing entirely?
Probably not. Some contexts still call for print: trade show handouts, in-store displays, luxury brand materials. The shift is about making digital your primary distribution channel and print an intentional supplement.