The rest of us, who have regular PCs with the modern software that scribd requires, have document readers for all of the various file formats. The very worst of these readers is faster and more pleasant to use than the best scribd rendering.
Lastly, as usual, TechCrunch measures success in terms of users and investor capital. Ask yourself: Does it really make sense to measure the success of a free hosting service in terms of unique users?
But then possibly I'm biased, because without them we'd be forced to roll our own pdf/doc/xls/ppt viewer to stick inside of Twiddla. As it is, Scribd is just about a perfect fit for us off the shelf.
But you're right. They've got a bit of an oldskool business model that sort of relies on Google buying them at some point. I hope things work out for them.
The most viewed "document" on scribd of all time: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26896/SUING-FOR-TOO-MUCH-SEX
Do you think it's sane to "stream" that document? What the hell are these people thinking??? They're wrapping plain text inside flash. One can only imagine their warped mentality. Why not convert plain text to a video, upload it to youtube, and embed the video. It'd make about as much sense.
With Scribd we're a mix of benevolent and indignant. Benevolent, because it's YCombinator. Indignant, because it renders text in Flash.In both cases, though, the response is the same. Benevolence isn't being kind and wishing good luck. Look at sites with that attitude, or real life institutions, and there you'll find the places where progress becomes stagnant. In order to encourage progress, it helps to have a bit of an edge. And it attracts the right people. I plan on launching a beta preview of my current project to members here, because I want to be ripped apart before anybody else sees this. I figure it'll do me and my partner a world of good.
ONE person decides to use scribd to show some text on techcrunch, and suddenly the whole readership of techcrunch are "users" of scribd? Measuring success in terms of pageviews in a passive widget isn't a good measure.
They are quantified, and quantcast shows the vast majority of their traffic is to their destination: http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com
see scribd.com vs The Scribd Network
What is the mission? All documents are created offline, uploaded to Scribd and displayed via iPaper? I think we already have a great framework for distributing text information - HTML (Although Scrib's traffic may indicate otherwise). It's flexible, it's fast, and it can be viewed on any device, it can be indexed easily, etc... Think about how much better nytimes.com is then the New York Times newspaper.
Instead of creating new standards, the industry should be trying to help people create HTML formats as first class objects. With that said, it would be really cool to bring all the books/magazines from the past to the internet (books.google.com).
Also, flash has pretty good support for text rendering. You can embed any font into any swf file, and it has anti-aliasing and effects. There was a presentation about the new flash 10 text features recently - http://is.gd/ejKj
Fair enough for text rendering, but html is getting better font rendering also. I know which I'd put my money on. I can't even select the damn text on scribd.
But the reason I am not a huge fan is the sheer extent of copyright abuse going on there. Turning a blind eye to it - hiding behind DMCA really - is not kosher, and I frankly wouldn't want to do business that way, no matter what the profit.
> java -jar jodconverter-cli-2.2.1 yourpdf.pdf yourpdf.html
Happy now?
Unfortunately, this Flash component only handles PDFs, not the wide spectrum of document formats. If I could reliably convert Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. server side to PDF, then I would be a very happy boy.
Does anyone know of any such software that can do this? I doubt Scribd would be the one to provide it, but I would really love a simple `anything2pdf` that "just works": `cat foo.doc | anything2pdf > foo.pdf`
