History of the Flipbook

The title of this post is "History of the Flipbook". Before you read too much further, I don't really know the history of the flipbook. I only know my history with flipbooks. I would imagine that they have been around since maybe the 40's or 50's though. In those days, flipbooks would have been made on an offset press with each sheet collated by hand. Much more labor intensive than the variable data type printing we use today. As a matter of fact, it's only been maybe the last 5 years that we could produce them in an efficient way.

I first saw a flipbook at Peter and Karen Cronin's house. Peter has always had fun and unique ideas. He had some really old books that he had saved for years. One was of Elvis Presley. These books would surely have been assembled by hand. Peter had a very clever idea using Nashville celebrities and hopefully will act on that idea soon.

That meeting started my obsession with flipbooks. We had the technology to produce these books, I just needed to figure out the front-end. Our partner from Xerox introduced me to a man who had been doing this for several years. He had already figured out the processing so we made a deal and the rest is history.

We can produce a single flipbook from a 10 or 15 second video for under $15.00. 10 years ago, that book would have cost $500.00. That doesn't include the video. 10 years ago, we couldn't shoot video on a cell phone. I wonder what we will be doing on our cell phones in another 10 years?