Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

While I usually find the businesses funded by Y Combinator awesome I think Scribd is a bad apple. Not only is the user experience terrible it also has the smell of a bad neighborhood with all the pirated content it offers.

Today I incidentally read the current (March 2014) "Gutenberg 3.5 - Ebook Piracy Report"[1]. It seems to be from an anti-piracy lobbying group, so its obviously biased, but it mentions Scribd even before Library Genesis.

That being said: Scribd seems to be (or has been?) one of the most successful Y Combinator companies[2] and is sometimes called "YouTube of documents"[3].

   [1] http://www.abuse-search.com/Gutenberg%2035h.pdf
   [2] https://www.google.com/#q=scribd+ycombinator
   [3] https://www.google.com/#q=youtube+of+documents

This is somewhat off topic, but I've always thought of Library Genesis as a modern-day Library of Alexandria. Both contain vast stores of priceless knowledge, and both employ(ed) somewhat less than optimal means of obtaining their books.

I wonder if the individuals who wrote that report can see the similarities too. It's going to be a sad day if they manage to raze LibGen as well.

Interesting insight. I've only recently found LibGen, and it's simply amazing for conducting research.

I expect it will be attacked, possibly successfully, but other alternatives will rise to take its place.

More like the Dailymotion or the Vimeo, but I see what you mean.

I wonder if you could add a condition to a document's license, CC or whatever, forbidding it being hosted behind any kind of pay- or signup-wall?

The GNU GPL generally requires works be provided in the "preferred form" for making modifications. That might well be a hack around Scribd's methods.

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