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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

So what's the point of sites like scribd and slideshare? They host your slides and display them on a crappy js viewer that's almost always worse than the browsers built in PDF viewer. They also enforce lock-in by preventing you from exporting to a portable format eg. PDF. On top of that some of the sites (i know for a fact that scribd did it at one point) charge you for the privledge of viewing their users' content, or force you to add to their existing catalog by uploading whatever docs you have. I'm not sure why anyone would use them over dropbox or google docs.

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I subscribe to scribd. My use case is finding impossible to find documents on the web. About once a month I'll need something; a marketing study, example spreadsheets, documentation, manuals, etc. Scribd seems to have vacuumed up a ton of things older site had that are no longer available on the web. The interface works for what I need it for.

As a crude workaround, you can try...

curl -O http://image.slidesharecdn.com/PATH-TO-SLIDES[1-50]-1024.jpg && convert *.jpg PRESENTATION.pdf

...to save a local copy. You need to view the page source for the URL and adapt the bracketed number of slides, but I used this previously and it worked well enough. I won't log in or even create an account so this is how I do it instead.

Many years ago I reverse-engineered scribd's SWF-based PDF viewer, and was able to get a nearly-perfect conversion to PDF (since they were both vector formats). They seem to have recently replaced it with an HTML-based one and disabled the path to the SWF version, which makes such perfect conversion impossible --- you can rasterise a vector, but vectorising an image is never going to be perfect, especially an artifacted JPEG.

Searching now, it seems someone else has written a bit of public documentation (non-English) about it: https://github.com/jrlambea/scb_file_anatomy

Thank you for that. I use the following tactic to get out a presenation I need using Excel, Notepad, InternetDownloadManager.

What helps a lot, is copy and paste to an excel, like this Cell A1: http://image.slidesharecdn.com/PATH-TO-SLIDES Cell A2: 1 Cell A3: .jpg then pull the A2 till the number of the slides (e.g. 50) So you end up with 50 lines. Then copy all that 'table' and paste it to a Notepad Then Replace (Ctrl+H) the 'tab' to null Then Ctrl+A and Copy from the notepad Then paste it to IDM Download all Have a good life.

In your sheet, you can also do this cell A4:

=A1&A2&A3

Then just copy Column A4. Now you don't need to replace tabs or such.

Note: This will give you path like ...SLIDES1, SLIDES2..., SLIDES10 etc. If you want 1,2,10 to be 01,02,03; Use this instead of A2, TEXT(A2, "00")

I dislike them too but in case you’re really asking, the point is discoverability (content marketing for long tail topic), and analytics/lead capture + vanity metrics (number of views and downloads being a visible metric to any viewer). I’m puzzled it’s worth that much though.

Yes, it's all about discoverability. I don't normally look at my vanity metrics (as you correctly put it) but I definitely get views by just sticking stuff up there. And it's just an easy way to put presentation content up without any real effort. (Also easy embedding if I want to also put a link up on my blog.)

And conversely, if I'm looking for talks on a topic, it's a good place to search for them.

That said, Slideshare isn't a big deal to me one way or another. Especially if it looks like it's going to largely go behind a paywall, I'll just start self-hosting PDF and promote through other means.

> They also enforce lock-in by preventing you from exporting to a portable format eg. PDF.

I think this is the point of these services.

its about what their clients and users use them for.

they have an audience that wants both. its not about what that audience could do, its never about what that audience could do.

> I'm not sure why anyone would use them over dropbox

the irony is that the same thing was said here about dropbox when it was introduced. this is really the icing on the cake to your comment. HN will never live this down.

Scribd has an excellent collection of modern sheet music. I don’t know if there is a place with a comparable collection.

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