Die, Scribd. Die.
wdr1.com
wdr1.com
But to make this debate a little more productive, we should think about what the core problem is. It's that many people feel a need for monolithic page structured documents that always look the same (aka. document fidelity).
If we have learned anything from the web it's that data (semi structured in this case) and presentation aspects should be separated. So what we need is a file format that includes both, similar to an HTML file with an embedded stylesheet, only with much more sophisticated visual primitives.
I've read the PDF spec top to bottom. It can do that and a whole lot more, but its design is anitquated in my view. It's bloated beyond belief and encourages incredibly bad documents to be created. Documents that don't even include the the text proper as sequence of unicode codepoints. Documents from which you cannot deterministically derive the sequence of words it contains.
I know Microsoft is very unpopular here, but their XPS format is a much better solution to the problem of document fidelity. If nothing else I hope XPS at least forces Adobe to come up with a radically redesigned PDF format and a less bloated and more stable reader plugin.
All of this does not solve the UI issues caused by embedding these documents into HTML. In my view, the best solution is simply not to do it. Let's keep them separate for download by people who have a need for it. If Scribd wants to be part of the solution instead of the nuissance they are, they should translate PDFs to HTML, just as google does, only better.
Seems like the platform is viral as such. Not viral as in alpha geek, but viral as in HIV.
Also, I think a lot of folks forget that pdf is just one of the documents they convert. Many of their documents were originally Microsoft Office documents that they've converted to pdf and flash. Again - I'd much rather be able to take a peek at a MS Word doc than have to download it and open it with Microsoft Office on my mac.
For me Scribd makes browsing the web much more seamless. I don't get interrupted by having to download files and open them in another app, then close them, delete the file if I don't want it, then get back to browsing.
Given their user count and traffic, I'm guessing there are many others that feel the same way, but aren't as vocal about their experience because it's so seamless. It's a bit surprising to me to see such vitriol towards an app that provides free hosting to millions of documents converted from all different proprietary formats so they can be easily viewed.
I suppose that is what bothers me most about scribd. PDFs are easy to read for me in Safari, but when someone links me a scribd document, I gotta scroll both the document and the page or maximize my browser window to read a scribd document comfortably, I can't just have select text working without clicking a button, I can't view documents the way I want to (two pages side-by-side continuous). Sometimes they'll link me a scribd document of a PDF available widely from the original source, or a PDF of a webpage, and often it'll be outdated. And of course, Scribd is inaccessible with voiceover (the screenreader), which is absolutely not fantastic when the original document was fully accessible. Of course that wouldn't be a huge problem if it were simple to login, except with all the flashy web2.0 that's not terribly simple either.
You can make the point that I can create a scribd login to download files, but creating a new account on a site I don't even want to visit just to download something is irritating. Definitely not my definition of "easily" viewed or a "good" experience.
I'd like to get a Mac as soon as I can afford it, but that moment is a long time coming.
Maybe the moment is sooner than you think!
Really? I use acrobat reader, and when I click a link the PDF just opens instantly on another monitor. If you have to manually download and open PDF files you're probably doing something wrong.
I'm a big fan of scribd and my experience as a user is much more pleasant with a scribd document than pdf or ppt or anything else. I could spell out the reasons, but I'm sure this guy will write another followup explaining why I'm wrong and if I cared about DRM and kitten-killers and all that's evil in the world, I would have to force myself to hate it.
So he doesn't like its usability, he doesn't have to use it. Let me point out that scribd is seeing steady growth according to quantcast and others. Ultimately, the market is going to provide the answer.
Scribd requires you to sign up for an account to access the original document, basically requiring you to sign up for their "service" when it is beyond obvious that the one thing you want is to avoid it.
I call major BS on that.
I miss Usenet.
When I first used scribd, I remember seeing two scrollbars on the right (this author says left ("And it introduces confusing functionality (TWO scrollbars on the left!? WTF?)"), which is weird, because vertical scollbars rarely, if ever, appear on the left). Then I realized that, since the scribd flash widget takes up the entire screen, the Ad Block Plus firefox plugin was adding its little "block" icon/tab, which was really making the widget larger than the size of the browser viewport. So there was the scrollbar created by the scribd interface, and the browser's scrollbar. Disabling Ad Block for scribd.com appears to have "fixed" this.
1) PDFs act like balls on certain computers, and they can't be embedded. Plaintext lacks the layout abilities without heavy customization.
2) Copying and pasting isn't what text is all about. Very often the point of text is letting you read. And Scribd handles reading pretty well.
3) You can let people download the PDF from Scribd. That's what I do with a lot of the textbooks I find: download, convert to Kindle format.
4) Scribd isn't perfect, but saying there's no point to it is silly. It's a repository for documents. Therefore, there's a purpose for it. You might not need that purpose, but it exists.
5) If Scribd is amassing a following of an enormous size, and it is, then insulting it for not being meaningful is a stupid thing to do, unless you've done something that's so much better. I use Scribd to find textbooks, literature, gaming manuals, and much more, and I used it to display my novel, with a PDF download option. It's useful for me.
Um isn't the world wide web an open repository for documents? And quite a good one at that?
What's the value add? Why choose to put documents in a single companies walled garden?
Also, in regards to your other point, I find Dropbox's "copy public link" mechanism to be a far easier way to share content than to upload it to any website (not just scribd), because I don't have to use a browser in the first place. The content is already uploaded and ready to be shared.
Scribd at least is far more instant.
The world wide web is an open repository for information. "Documents" implies things formatted for paper. That means, among other things, retaining the formatting, fonts, and layouts of the original documents. It IS possible to do this all online, but it's annoying as hell and you have to do it specially for each document you put up this way.
The value added is that Scribd indexes all these things in one easy-to-find place, that it lets you access them with Flash instead of Adobe Acrobat, and that it allows you to embed your documents on other web sites. I used to do that for a creative writing blog I had.
I understand not wanting to use it - I stopped using it after I got a Mac and had preview.app available for PDFs - but it still has its uses, and that's the important thing to remember. I still use it, for sharing web site mockups to friends, many of whom are on Windows and some of whom don't have a PDF reader whatsoever. There is no format that their computer will like, but they have Flash players, so I can send it to them on Scribd.
So Scribd may be nice on Windows, but really the correct solution would be for either Microsoft of Adobe or both to fix PDF on Windows!
From Adobe Acrobat 5 to 6 the changes were truly horrible, and the reader became bloated as heck, which made me stay at Acrobat 5 for quite a while since Acrobat 6 seemed to offer no real added value while pretty much every PDF on the internet worked in Adobe Reader 5.
Since version 7 though it seems like they got back on the right track, and I honestly don't get what people are bitching about.
Exactly. Being able to download a document in a robust format, and view it in the tool of my choice,. at my convenience, is an epic win. Forcing me look at complex media in a browser is misguided at best.
Given me a downloadable .mov anytime over flv.
> "I can’t save it like the PDF. I can’t print the whole thing. Fk, I can’t even copy and paste!"
But I can READ it much more easily. And 90% of the time, all I want to do is read it. Take a quick glance at it, maybe skim it. And Scribd means I don't have to fire up a PDF viewer just to do that. The Flash videos analogy is apt. Youtube's flash videos aren't good for movie watching, or downloading videos, but they're perfect for quick 30-second clips. That's what Scribd is for documents.
Windows does not have a built in pdf viewer, and the pdf viewers you can get aren't good. But the solution seems totally wrong.
The real solution is to make a really nice pdf viewer plugin for windows.
And speaking of OS X, "firing up a viewer" and bloat makes no sense with PDFKit in Safari where for me downloading and displaying the PDF in my browser is just as fast if not faster than scribd for a lot of the documents I'm looking at. If you were using the embed/email/social aspects of scribd, then fantastic, but scribd gives me nothing useful otherwise and instead just pisses me off with the various problems one can and does encounter.
Youtube succeeded because Real, Apple and Microsoft had a fragmented market with all sorts of formats for video, and no central place to aggregate these videos (with the exception of, say, Apple's movie trailers page). Flash videos became popular because nobody had the patience to download entire videos before watching them, or to install RealPlayer/Quicktime/Windows Media Player and have a subpar experience as a result. Put youtube and flash video together and the answer is obvious. However, you don't have the same kind of issue with PDF except for certain bloated viewers on certain platforms and subpar integration (which, I admit, the embed feature of scribd can come in handy occasionally).
If your argument were about powerpoint presentations nobody bothered to export to web/pdf, I would then agree that this type of service is useful, but I would also like to point out slideshare. Slideshare does have an accessible website to a large extent and provides a service not well served on any platform. I'm aware Scribd does PPTs too, but I feel Slideshare displays and handles them better. Scribd could learn a thing or two from them.
When I did my pretty popular Sequoia spoof, I just used docstoc due to the embed. I hadn't really used Scribd since the very early days and they didn't have an embed back then so I didn't really think of them. I found out later that their ppt to ipaper conversion is awful so it wouldn't have worked anyway, but that's beside the point.