It wraps a normal Javascript library into a React component, which is very useful for many web applications.

The license is probably cheaper than having a front end dev invest time into making this embedding work well. Well-built React components can be a great business if you can entice enough people to use them and provide enough support.

In most desktop applications, you can probably get away with an iframe to do much of the same thing if you want an alternative. Just put up a static HTML file on your web server that loads pdf.js and takes a path to a PDF file to render and you're pretty much done. If you want to work around the annoyances iframes cause, this library is probably along the lines of what you'd build.

Implementing pdf.js is a lot of work. $199 for a decent implementation would be a steal.

React is basically a "State within a state" of front-end - it's so focused on single-purpose libraries that just about everything has its special, React-only equivalent. So much so, that there are people who just assume that React = front-end, even though that's very much not the case.

Draft.js is a popular example of what I'm talking about - other libraries would just wrap around a WYSIWYG solution and call it a day. Also note how this PDF component is not advertised as a wrapper, but is one in reality.

I don't know.

For people who want a React wrapper around pdf.js, there are open source alternatives such as react-pdf: https://github.com/wojtekmaj/react-pdf

For one, it's a wrapper in React, so no need to implement the glue code yourself if you want to integrate PDFs in your web app.

Also, it appears to be feature-rich and yet easy to use for simple use cases.

It's in the title. React. Everything is better with React.