A: Hi Temina,

Apologies for the slow reply here. I've also emailed you directly but this question deserves a proper public answer.

The short version: no, that lag isn't inherent to the product.

Our sample booklets are not fully optimised. That was a deliberate choice as we wanted them to be representative of a typical customer's file rather than a best-case showcase. Reading your question back I believe that was the wrong call. If our own shop window is the thing making people ask whether we're slow, that's on us. I'm getting them optimised this week.

Here's the honest picture on what actually drives load time, in order of impact:

1. The PDF itself. This is the big one. We don't compress or flatten your files, they render exactly as you created them. That's a deliberate design decision, because it's what keeps live text live: searchable, selectable, accessible. The trade-off is that a print-ready PDF carries far more data than a screen will ever use. Exporting for screen rather than print makes the single largest difference. Images will be downsampled to around 150 DPI, photos as JPEG rather than PNG, fonts subset etc. On a typical brochure that often takes a 40MB file to under 5MB with no visible difference on screen.

2. The viewer's device. We lean on it to render the page-turn animations, so an old phone will be slower than a desktop.

3. Distance from the nearest server.

So, a well-optimised file, on a normal device, should not take 3–5 seconds. If yours does, that's something I want to look at rather than explain away.

If anyone reading this has a book loading slower than they'd like, please contact [email protected], send the link to the book and roughly where you're viewing from and I'll be able to tell you exactly what's driving it. If it's something on our side, it's for us to fix, not yours to work around.

Many thanks

Ben