There are some good services on the web that will turn PDFs into books and booklets and some services that will even allow you to create embeddable booklets online, yet few are quite as simple to use as Simple Booklet. Simple Booklet is a new service offering free online booklet creation and publishing.

To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet.

Each page of your Simple Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you’re done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet. (In my testing, when embedding Simple Booklet you cannot resize it and have it still display correctly. You need to have a large online canvas like that found in Wikispaces to display your booklet correctly). You can see my short story here.

Thanks to Vicki Davis for the link.

Applications for Education
Simple Booklet could be a good tool for students to use to publish multimedia stories. Students could use Simple Booklet to create a small portfolio of their work using videos, images, sounds, and text. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about having students create more in-depth research analysis by combining critique of written and audio/visual content they find online. Simple Booklet could be used for that purpose.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Youblisher – Publish PDFs as Online Magazines
Booklet Creator – Turn Any PDF Into a Booklet
Yudu – Publish Your PDFs as Online Magazines