Real3D Flipbook – 3D Flipbook, PDF Flipbook, PDF Viewer, PDF Embedder
Description
Real3D Flipbook turns any PDF into a realistic 3D flipbook. Pages bend, cast shadows and turn like paper – with a mouse, a finger or the keyboard. Add it to any post or page with the Real3D Flipbook block or a shortcode, open it in a lightbox, or switch the same PDF to a plain scrolling PDF viewer by changing one setting.
Your PDFs stay on your own server: no conversion service, no account, no per-book fees and no watermark.
Live demo · Try your own PDF · User manual
Create a flipbook in three steps
- Go to Real3D Flipbook > Add New and upload a PDF or a set of images.
- Pick a view mode. The live preview updates as you change settings, at desktop and phone size.
- Add the Real3D Flipbook block to a post or page, or paste the shortcode. The shortcode also works in Elementor, Divi, Bricks, WPBakery and other page builders.
Everything in the free version
No limit on the number of flipbooks, pages or file size, and no watermark.
- Realistic page flip – WebGL pages that bend and cast shadows as they turn, with an optional hard cover
- Six view modes – from the realistic 3D flipbook to a plain PDF viewer, switched with one setting (see below)
- Lightbox, inline or fullscreen – open a flipbook from a button, link, thumbnail or image, or show it in the page
- Open PDF links as flipbooks – optionally turn the PDF links already on your site into lightbox flipbooks
- Mobile-friendly – swipe to flip, pinch to zoom, single-page view on phones
- Live preview while you edit – see every change at desktop and phone size
- Block and shortcode – the Real3D Flipbook block for the block editor, and the
[real3dflipbook]shortcode for the Classic editor and page builders - Organized – an automatic cover thumbnail and a permalink page for every flipbook, plus flipbook categories
- Your toolbar – zoom, thumbnails, table of contents, share, print, download and fullscreen; show or hide any button
- Right-to-left books for Arabic, Hebrew and Persian
- Extras – page-flip sound, auto-flip, a preview of the first pages only, HTML content on pages, import and export as JSON
- Translation-ready – language packs load from translate.wordpress.org
View modes
- Realistic 3D flipbook (WebGL) – pages curl and cast soft shadows as they turn. Drag a corner or click to flip.
- CSS 3D and 2D flipbooks – a lighter page flip without WebGL.
- Swipe viewer – slide pages sideways, made for phones and tablets.
- Scroll viewer – continuous scrolling, like a classic PDF reader.
- Simple viewer – one page at a time.
What you can publish
- Digital magazines and newsletters – an issue readers can page through, zoom and share.
- Product catalogs and price lists – on any page, or on a WooCommerce product page with the WooCommerce add-on.
- Brochures, menus and flyers – restaurant menus, real estate listings, event programs.
- Ebooks, manuals and reports – long documents with a table of contents, zoom, print and download.
- Portfolios and lookbooks – flipbooks made from images instead of a PDF.
Switching from another PDF plugin?
Real3D Flipbook can display the shortcodes of PDF Embedder, DearFlip, 3D FlipBook, Wonder PDF Embed and PDF.js Viewer as flipbooks. Turn it on under Real3D Flipbook > Settings > Overrides and your existing posts keep working, with no editing. Watch how PDF links open as flipbooks.
Trusted since 2015
The viewer behind this plugin has been developed since 2015 and also powers the Real3D Flipbook JavaScript library and the Shopify and Wix apps – trusted by 22,000+ customers.
“Issuu? Forget it! This is what you need!”
“Really Amazing Plugin – Simple and Straight Forward”
“Great Plugin, easy setup!”
Read the reviews on WordPress.org
Real3D Flipbook PRO
When you need more, Real3D Flipbook PRO adds:
- 4K zoom – pages stay sharp at any zoom level, fine print included
- Faster loading – page textures sized for each device and zoom level
- Clickable PDF links and text search and selection
- Toolbar and UI customization – 7 layouts, 3 skins, custom colors, icons and buttons
- Google Analytics and deep links to any page
- Separate settings for phones and shared defaults for all flipbooks
See Lite and PRO side by side – the same PDF in both, and you can test your own. Plans start at $49/year with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and your flipbooks and settings carry over.
Add-ons
- Page Editor – add links, videos, sounds, YouTube and Vimeo to pages with a visual editor (requires PRO)
- WooCommerce – show a flipbook on the product page
- PDF Tools – convert PDFs to images for faster loading (requires PRO)
- Elementor and WPBakery – a flipbook element for your page builder
- Bookshelf – responsive bookshelves of flipbooks
- Preview Mode – show the first pages to visitors and the full book to logged-in users
Support
Questions or problems? Open a topic in the support forum. If Real3D Flipbook works well for you, a review helps other people find it.
Installation
- In your dashboard go to Plugins > Add New, search for Real3D Flipbook, click Install Now and then Activate.
- Go to Real3D Flipbook > Add New, upload a PDF or images, adjust the settings in the live preview and click Publish.
- Add the Real3D Flipbook block to a post or page, or paste the shortcode shown in the Publish box.
To install manually, download the zip and upload it under Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.
Screenshots
Realistic 3D page flip (WebGL) – pages bend and cast shadows as they turn.
Swipe viewer – flip pages by swiping on phones and tablets.
Customizable flipbook viewer – toolbar buttons, colors, background and more.
CSS 3D flipbook – a lighter 3D page flip without WebGL.
Scroll PDF viewer – continuous scrolling instead of page flips.
Faq
No. Real3D Flipbook Lite has no watermark and no limit on the number of flipbooks, pages or file size, and it includes the realistic WebGL page flip, every view mode, the lightbox and the block. PRO adds 4K zoom, faster loading, clickable PDF links, text search, UI customization, Google Analytics and deep links – see the Lite vs PRO comparison.
Add the Real3D Flipbook block and pick a flipbook, or paste its shortcode, for example [real3dflipbook id="1"]. Each flipbook shows its shortcode in the Publish box, with a Copy button.
Yes. Paste the shortcode into the builder’s shortcode or text element. The Elementor and WPBakery add-ons add a dedicated flipbook element.
Yes. Set the flipbook’s Mode to Lightbox. It then opens from its cover thumbnail, or from any element with the CSS class you choose, such as a button or a menu link. Fullscreen mode is also available. To show flipbooks on WooCommerce product pages or on a bookshelf, use the WooCommerce or Bookshelf add-on.
Yes. Set the view mode to Scroll for a continuous PDF viewer, or to Simple for one page at a time.
Yes. Flipbooks are responsive and touch-friendly: swipe to turn pages, pinch to zoom, and a single-page view on narrow screens. The Swipe and Scroll view modes are made for phones. If a browser has no WebGL, the realistic 3D mode switches to the CSS 3D page flip automatically.
Yes. Under Real3D Flipbook > Settings > Overrides, turn on PDF link conversion. Links to PDF files then open in a flipbook lightbox, optionally only links with (or without) a CSS class you choose.
Yes. Under Real3D Flipbook > Settings > Overrides, Real3D Flipbook can take over the shortcodes of PDF Embedder, DearFlip, 3D FlipBook, Wonder PDF Embed and PDF.js Viewer, so existing embeds show as flipbooks.
No. Your PDFs stay in your Media Library, on your own server. There is no account to create and no per-book fee, unlike hosted services such as Issuu.
Yes, the toolbar has Download and Print buttons. You can turn them, or any other toolbar button, off for each flipbook.
Yes. Turn on Right to left mode in the flipbook settings, or add rtl="true" to the shortcode, for Arabic, Hebrew or Persian publications.
No. Real3D Flipbook handles large PDFs with hundreds of pages and loads them page by page, so readers can start right away. Your server’s upload size limit still applies.
For PDFs, export at about 150 dpi with JPEG image compression and web optimization turned on. For image flipbooks, use web-optimized JPG or WebP images of around 2000 px.
The plugin is translation-ready and loads translations from translate.wordpress.org. You can help translate it.
Post in the support forum. The user manual covers every setting.
Reviews
Best Free DPF Book Reader Plugin
By 
Mohsin Alam (mohsinworld) on June 2, 2026
This plugin solve my needs. Thanks
Great plugin, very effective
By 
what1 on May 8, 2026
Excellent plugin, functionality and great support and documentation. Updates and improvements with each version.
One of the best ways to display your PDFs, books and documents.
To get more features and options, definitely go for the Pro – 100% worth it.
Highly recommended.
Really Amazing Plugin – Simple and Straight Forward
By 
FARAZFRANK on December 30, 2025
I used this on one of my client websites, it do the job as it is displayed and work straight forward. I really recommend this free pdf book embedding plugin for everyone.
Great Plugin, easy setup!
By 
Harald Kaintz (dermonotone) on May 9, 2025
Really great plugin for making flipbooks! Easy setup, tons of features and very good support!
Very complete
By 
glauciarezende on March 30, 2025
It has many configuration options. Perfect!
Good plugin but its not free version
By 
oscarminipro on November 6, 2023
Is good plugin
Issuu? Forget it! *This* is what you need!
By 
Gwyneth Llewelyn (GwynethLlewelyn) on June 28, 2023
Everybody knows about Issuu. It’s a way to publish PDFs and distribute them over the Internet with an astonishingly good look & feel. WordPress can directly embed the Issuu flipbook, and it’s a breeze to use.
We all know that. We also know that Issuu is a paid service. When you have a 150-page catalogue taking 160 MBytes to load… forget it, you cannot afford to host it on Issuu. You have to do it by yourself.
Also, Issuu may not allow all content to be displayed. They have their own reasons for flagging content as inappropriate — in some cases, to view your content, you have to demand that your viewers sign up with Issuu, too (so they can be independently validated, of course). This makes everything much cumbersome.
There are many, many PDF viewers out there. In fact, these days, most people don’t even bother with PDF viewers, because most browsers already have the ability to directly view them — no plugin, no JavaScript, nothing else is required.
“Ah,” you’d say — since you’re reading this review… “but that’s not the same as the cute animations that Issuu allows. It’s bare-bones PDF viewing — boring! Issuu, on the contrary, brings the user the experience of flipping through a book!”
Indeed it does, but what if you have no option but to host the PDFs on your own website?
Enter Real3D Flipbook!
To be perfectly honest: I have the exact same PDF (aye, it’s 150 pages and 160+ MBytes in size) side by side, on Issue and on Real3D Flipbook. I like Real3D Flipbook more. The flipping animation is nicer and more realistic (and you can even get it to play a flipping sound), using advanced WebGL features such as shading and light rendering. And it’s not an embedded iFrame — rather, this plugin directly accesses the browser’s canvas, so it gets access to more powerful tools (or so I guess). And if you’re scared of serving 160 MBytes (or more!) from your own server, don’t worry — Real3D Flipbook will only render pages on demand, as they get requested by the person viewing the PDF. They will not need to retrieve all pages in advance (of course, that also means that if you flip through a big. heavy PDF very quickly, there will be some pages temporarily rendered as blank pages, until Real3D Flipbook ‘catches up’ with the content being served).
Oh, by the way, all the above goodies come as standard on the free version (the one you can get from here). There is a paid version, which you can get from the Envato marketplace. It’s cheap, but it allows much more detailed configuration of all aspects of Real3D Flipbook, have different settings for different PDFs, and so forth. And there is an additional option to store your PDF on their CDN as well, if you’re really concerned about the load on your server.
In other words: if you’re actually recommending to a customer a solution for showing PDFs on their website, and your customer is willing to pay for such a service, then, with Real3D Flipbook, you have basically the same service as Issuu, without their restrictions — and without Issuu’s price. And you get a much cooler flipping animation! (Note that even the free version allows more basic rendering — just using CSS, for instance — which will make your pages much lighter. But that’s your choice!)
I’m aware that this plugin, while heavily recommended, is not faultless. For instance, it’s clear that it doesn’t get updated all that often. Sometimes, this is not necessarily bad — except for security issues, if the plugin already has all the functionality you need, ‘frozen’ in place, so to speak, why bother to update it, just for the sake of saying ‘hey, a new version is out?’ As an amateur plugin developer myself, that’s the path I take as well.
The settings page for the plugin, as well as the online documentation, also suffer from bad spelling mistakes and some confusing organisation overall. It’s clear, from the Envato marketplace, that this plugin stated its life as merely a jQuery-based collection of scripts. Turning it into a plugin (supporting shortcodes and Gutenberg blocks!) required further development, and it’s possible that the ‘adaptation’ of a jQuery-only plugin to work fully integrated into WordPress had its rough edges. Still, one might argue that it could have been done differently, and that both the plugin would benefit from a text revision made by a professional technical writer.
It would also be nice if the developer just updated the information about the version of WordPress this works with. I get all those warnings saying that the plugin has never been tested with the most current version of WordPress. The truth is that it works flawlessly (it was well-designed from the start!), it’s just that the developer didn’t bother to update the version on the plugin configuration files.
Last but not least, even though this is a standalone plugin, and the same applies to the paid version as well, there are extra goodies that you can install separately, buying them directly from Envato. Some of those goodies are extremely useful, while others might not be relevant. Instead of bundling them all together, you just get the features you wish to pay for. That’s certainly a very appealing business model, and one that allows the developer to continue to add functionality to Real3D Flipbook, but with external modules, additional to the ‘core’. In fact, this is the same concept that made WordPress (and, later, WooCommerce) the most-used CMS in the world: start with a bare-bones (but fully functional!) solution first, and let users pick whatever additional functionality they want — adding these in a modular way (some of which will be paid, but the bulk will be free).
Real3D Flipbook adopts the same concept (at a much smaller scale, of course). No wonder it’s so recommended on the popular reviewing sites out there. There might be quite good plugins here and there, many of which free (or at least having an entry-level free version), but none rivals Real3D Flipbook, and most don’t even come close.
Not even Issuu.
Good plugin with few small quirks.
By 
jamespond on May 14, 2020
left rogue database code after deletion
By 
wasanajones on September 13, 2019
Best Flipbook WordPress plugin review
By 
Transition Slider support (zsofic1) on July 28, 2019
Changelog
5.8
- New: reader actions are sent as an r3d-event browser event on the page – page views, zoom, share, PDF downloads and lightbox opens – so analytics tools can track them
- Change: the side navigation arrows use the same thin chevron as the toolbar icons
- Fix: a flipbook with a single image page opened on the loading spinner in the 3D view mode
- Fix: a new flipbook did not appear in the Real3D Flipbook block or in Insert Flipbook until it was saved a second time
- Fix: importing flipbooks skipped flipbooks that had been saved only once
5.7.1
- Security and stability fixes – update recommended
- New: the Preview Mode add-on works with Lite – choose who sees only the first pages under Real3D Flipbook > Settings > Preview Mode
- Change: Lite applies the global Preview Mode settings to every flipbook; preview settings for a single flipbook are part of PRO
5.7
- Security and stability fixes – update recommended
- New: “Hard cover” option (General tab) – the front and back covers are thick boards with a cloth texture, a hinge groove and a spine, larger than the pages, in a colour of your choice (“Hard cover color”); a flipbook with Hard cover always uses the WebGL view mode
- Improvement: the page shading at the spine is no longer the same on every spread – it follows how many pages lie on each side (WebGL view mode)
- Improvement: fewer blank pages while flipping, in the WebGL, 3D, 2D and Swipe view modes – the next pages are prepared in advance and the visible pages are sharpened once the book rests
- Improvement: image flipbooks show the page thumbnail in place of the loading spinner while the full page image loads, in every view mode, and open as soon as the thumbnail of the first page has arrived
- Improvement: image flipbooks use less memory in the WebGL view mode
- Improvement: a flipbook in a closed lightbox no longer keeps loading pages
- Improvement: less jumping while a flipbook loads on the page – its starting height follows the “Container aspect ratio” setting and is never taller than the browser window
- Change: new look for the toolbar – one divider line instead of a border around the bar, smaller buttons with a rounded hover highlight
- Change: more compact More and Share menus with the same hover highlight as the toolbar; on short flipbooks the More menu fits inside the flipbook and scrolls instead of being cut off
- Change: buttons that are switched on (open thumbnails, table of contents, search, bookmarks, More and Share menus, autoplay while it runs) get a grey highlight
- Change: the Simple view mode quickly fades between pages instead of switching instantly
- Change: Scroll view mode – the mouse wheel and touch scrolling beside the pages scroll the web page; only the pages scroll the flipbook
- Change: the Toolbar tab shows a simple drawing of each toolbar style, and the icon sets are called Solid and Outline
- Fix: image flipbook in a lightbox (WebGL view mode) – after closing and reopening the lightbox a page could stay on the loading spinner until the site was reloaded
- Fix: a page that was already loaded could stay blank until the page turn finished (WebGL view mode)
- Fix: a page image that fails to load is requested again instead of leaving the page on the loading spinner
- Fix: “Maximum call stack size exceeded” error in the 3D, 2D and Simple view modes when a flipbook is hidden, for example in an inactive tab or a closed accordion
- Fix: on phones the 3D, 2D and Simple view modes opened on the page after the start page for even page numbers, and thumbnails and the table of contents could open the neighbouring page
- Fix: the Simple view mode skipped a page on Next and Previous on phones
- Fix: Scroll view mode – after opening at a start page the page number showed the previous page until the reader scrolled, and Next and Previous continued from it
- Fix: the table of contents did not open when one of its items pointed to a page after the last page of the book
- Fix: on narrow screens the Share menu did not open from the More menu, and toolbar buttons could be missing when the More button is turned off