1. It's successful, at least in terms of traffic, so it's worth watching and perhaps learning from.
2. The web hasn't obliterated the old document formats (yet). Not everyone that has content in those formats has the time or inclination to replicate the layout in HTML, so Scribd is making distribution easier for them. It may not be solving your problem but it is solving some people's problem.
People here usually have a soft spot for YC funded startups; not sure why Scribd's treated like the disowned member of the family.
1. It's successful, at least in terms of traffic, so it's worth watching and perhaps learning from.
The lesson here is that if your concept is extremely general, you'll have success. Scribd went after a niche that was completely underused, and props to them: they got just as big as that plan would predict. That said, it's still not a good web site. It's not a particularly good role model for people who want to build their own web site, unless said people have an idea that's just as large, and large ideas are hard to come by.
2. The web hasn't obliterated the old document formats (yet). Not everyone that has content in those formats has the time or inclination to replicate the layout in HTML, so Scribd is making distribution easier for them. It may not be solving your problem but it is solving some people's problem.
It's solving the problem, but again: not well. Google's suite of PDF-to-HTML and slide displayers do a much better job of this than Scribd's iPaper does. Why that system hasn't been used yet for a public site I don't know: perhaps Google's scared of getting supersued again.
As I said on the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521565) the real challenge is making PDF displays convert to HTML. I'm certain it's possible: hell, with SIFR you could even keep the PDF's embedded fonts. That's a really interesting challenge (and it's one that I'm working on, though its implementation will be radically different than Scribd's much more all-purpose viewer). The end result is that you'll get something that requires no custom displays, because it just works the first time.
People here usually have a soft spot for YC funded startups; not sure why Scribd's treated like the disowned member of the family.
We encourage YC startups. Note how rarely we attack DocStoc, which is way, way worse than Scribd is. However, HN isn't a site of happy encouraging people. We're all critics of everything, which is awesome. There are also pretty vehement Reddit critics, a few J.tv critics, a lot of people who make fun of OMGPOP, and on and on. So think of this like tough love. We'd love to love Scribd, but we won't tell it we do until it rehabs itself up. (I also suspect there's some jealousy of its success, along with some annoyance that they don't need to take our advice, good as it is, because they're a behemoth without our help.)
The second problem with scribd is that gives you two choices for viewing documents: too tiny to see in a tiny little box with a bunch of junk surrounding it in the browser window, or full screen and blurry as hell. Their comparisons with Adobe Reader are laughable when Reader has been displaying everything perfectly since the 90's.
The third huge problem with Scribd is that they make you sign up to get the document in its original (inevitably better) format.
I have seen other non-technical users who enjoy the content available on the site though. Perhaps it's making inroads as an "easier" torrent book search for layman?
Microsoft will probably buy them and wrap it all in a liberal layer of DRM and silverlight.
For me, Scribd is the caveat to "make something people want". It's undoubtedly popular with people who don't know how to share text/documents, but it's not good in the bigger picture.
I agree with what you wrote yesterday concerning weights and measures. "Leave people to use what they want to use."
For a stellar implementation, try clicking 'view' on a PDF attachment in Gmail.
HTML does a better job.
And HTML doesn't offer that feature?
Ok, how about we all get together and propose the W3C to create a format BASED ON HTML, open source, free, not propietary, for everybody to use and improve upon?
How about that for an idea?
Like, instead of "Save complete page as HTML" which creates folders and hidden passages to hell, some option to save as HTMD (d for doc); where the browser serves as the document viewer with no other plugin or add on than the browser engine?
Where you can open an inspect that HTMD like we do now with "View Source"?
So when you visit a page you can "Save as HTML Doc" the whole page in one file, images included?
So we impulse a new breed of HTML doc creators, instead of PDF creators, scribd creators, nextpropietary creator, etc?
Where you can create your doc and just publish it to the web, because it is HTML and the web already knows it very well?
There, my brainfarts for the day...
- Move all the JS and CSS inside the main doc.
- Convert all images to src=data:
- Some other minor tweaks
There you have it, one single file in all its HTML beauty
False. The Google Book Search API allows you to do precisely that: http://code.google.com/apis/books/
Scribd allows user uploads though, and that seems to be their biggest differentiator right now.
