I'm trying to figure out why they're bothering to solve something that's already been solved pretty well.

eg:

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://infolab.stanford.edu...

Users won't see any difference, or care.

I do think scribd up to now has been pretty bad for the web, locking plain text documents and images up in their walled garden. Maybe they can change that, but what value can they actually add? What problem are they solving?