Self-assembly PDFs put the Ikea into the Business of Infomation

On the day that our new build a library service went into public beta, Guy Kawasaki happened to write

This starts a process that builds a custom PDF—pretty cool. However, in this case, the process gets in the way of disseminating information, but there are good uses for this capability. For example, when you want only one part of a long manual.

Our new library service allows our users to assemble a book by selecting from our analysis, providing some basic info, and then it all comes back to them "bound" in a nice PDF with a pretty cover page. It's ideal for folks to impress their bosses :-> And ideal for our marketing folks to target specific individuals with neatly wrapped content on something that interests them. They did this before, but it took them an age to prepare the content.

It's the first thing we launched for a year or so that generated big interest - I had 30 mails in my mailbox with suggestions, plaudits and even - shock horror - a bug report. And we only rolled it out to part of the client base on the beta site!

Anyway, it's nice to have your most recent project praised by a Major Guy, even if he wasn't doing it on purpose.