This looks quite interesting. Even more interesting to see it come from a company that's done as much to damage the web and offend the notion of UI as Scribd. I personally will never forgive Scribd for encouraging people to post documents with them and then demanding a sign-up to get the pdf. It just has this spammy "re-hosting other people's content surrounded in ads" feel to it. Scribd should never have been made.
Quite a few apps do this already. Hasn't the Android browser been doing this for yonks now?
This technique is already used in the wild, Android devices have been doing this forever, Windows Phone 7 as well, although I'm not sure on the iPhone, I recall someone describing the effect even in their browser. The 'problem' is this is opt-in behaviour, so only a few apps use it, while it should be a default behaviour for any kind of formatted text.
Whoa - I was looking for a hyphenation and join-back tool earlier today, and couldn't find anything even remotely useful. Scribd has a pretty good record of contributing to open source: any chance you'd make that component available? Alternately, is there something off-the-shelf that's almost as good?
I'll try! I'm a big fan of open source, and I actually have a long list of components I want to open-source at some point, like for example Scribd's PDF to html5 conversion software.
Back in September, Microsoft demoed a similar Windows 8 thing they called "semantic zoom". Obviously it requires the app to understand when zooming is taking place so that it's possible to do something smarter with it than just magnifying the pixels.
Terrible typography, even worse than Kindle, etc. That's what you get when you try to reflow text with no hyphenation and only a crude linebreaking algorithm. Also, as others have mentioned, there's nothing new here.