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Comment by kanzure | Hacker News Reader

Wow, academia.edu only shows images of pages of pdfs, instead of giving you the actual pdf? I didn't know that. That's absolutely unacceptable .. if true- and a later comment shows that this is only half-true. So it's not as completely ridiculous as I thought, but this wasn't an over-reaction anyway. Companies tend to do terrible things to pdfs.

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No, that is incorrect. If the user has uploaded a copy of the PDF, we both show it on the page as an HTML 5 conversion and offer the PDF file as a download.

I see that you have a download link, but it doesn't work.

    $ wget -O file.pdf http://www.academia.edu/attachments/27796552/download_file

    --2013-01-13 12:55:35--  http://www.academia.edu/attachments/27796552/download_file
    Resolving www.academia.edu... 50.16.203.88
    Connecting to www.academia.edu|50.16.203.88|:80... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
    Location: http://www.academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs= [following]
    --2013-01-13 12:55:35--  http://www.academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs=
    Reusing existing connection to www.academia.edu:80.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
    Location: http://academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs=&tcw=1 [following]
    --2013-01-13 12:55:36--  http://academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs=&tcw=1
    Resolving academia.edu... 50.16.203.88
    Reusing existing connection to www.academia.edu:80.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
    Location: http://www.academia.edu/cookies_required [following]
    --2013-01-13 12:55:36--  http://www.academia.edu/cookies_required
    Reusing existing connection to www.academia.edu:80.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: unspecified [text/html]
    Saving to: “file.pdf”

        [ <=>                                                                                                                           ] 27,784      --.-K/s   in 0.1s

        2013-01-13 12:55:36 (284 KB/s) - “file.pdf” saved [27784]

The HTML 5 conversion is shown to all visitors, but you have to be a registered user to download the file. You're being redirected to a login page here.

> you have to be a registered user to download the file.

Why?

To help Academia.edu grow, of course. Think about it this way:

Sure, at a personal level, it might be slightly annoying to you to have to create an Academia.edu account. But Academia's entire value is in the users, content, and community which have built up around it. If viral hooks like "signup to download" substantially grow the Academia community (and I believe this one does), then the value which they will create for you in having an accessible library of the world's research will far offset the small annoyance of having to sign up.

You help Academia grow by increasing the userbase, forcing users to log in puts up a barrier where none is needed. People come to academia.edu (to which I'm sympathetic, I submitted the link) for the papers, not to make an account.

Don't put yourself before the content, that's the same mistake everybody else is making in this space.

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