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You’ve probably had this happen to you before: you are visiting a website and there is a link that reads “download the manual”, after clicking the link you notice that it’s a link to a .pdf file. The file takes forever to open, scrolling is really slow and the search function takes ages or your browser freezes up completely. Is the Adobe Acrobat format really that bad? I think it’s a pretty nice file format, but reading these files in the internet browser is not my preferred method. Sure you can right-click the link and select the “save as” option, but often I click before I realize it’s a .pdf file.

If you have downloaded any e-books from our books section, you probably noticed that the .pdf files don’t open in your browser, but instead the ‘save as’ window will show. After the download finishes you can open the file with Acrobat Reader and enjoy the e-book with smooth scrolling and fast working search option. In addition to the forced download, a counter is being updated each time someone downloads a book. The number of downloads can be seen in your sites statistics page by default, but by keeping a separate counter you can also show the number of times each file has been downloaded on your page (I have not added that to our books page yet, but might at some point)

If you wonder how I have done this and want to add the same functionality to your own website, you can have a look at this very simple tutorial. You can probably get this to work without any programming experience at all. Your visitors will thank you for it!