Perhaps I'm missing something but wasn't the "publishing documents on the internet" problem solved long ago by The World Wide Web? Or is the purpose of Scribd to recreate the magical experience of reading various dead tree formats, even though it doesn't actually do that?
It isn't solved until it is wrapped in a proprietary, inaccessible, bloated format like Flash. Or rendered within Javascript so you can get cool page-turning effects. Or put in a PDF inside a PowerPoint which can then be downloaded via a link on a site. Or... I am out of asinine ideas.
Or a company might decide to try to solve the problem by gathering and indexing all of these documents so they are more accessible than if they were spattered over thousands of locations, unsearchable, and cost time and money to find.
So I can trade hard-to-find but easy-to-consume for easy-to-find but hard-to-consume? That isn't really my definition of "progress". Oh, and in reality, these documents are actually less accessible once they are indexed and put in Flash, if we're using the definition of Web Accessibility.
I would also like to be given an example of something that you found hard to find via normal means but was easy to find via one of these document repositories. I am still wildly unconvinced of your general claim. Google is pretty good at the whole text indexing thing.
Every time there's a Scribd-related post on HN, the comments are negative and repetitive. I don't use the service either, but:
1. It's successful, at least in terms of traffic, so it's worth watching and perhaps learning from.
2. The web hasn't obliterated the old document formats (yet). Not everyone that has content in those formats has the time or inclination to replicate the layout in HTML, so Scribd is making distribution easier for them. It may not be solving your problem but it is solving some people's problem.
People here usually have a soft spot for YC funded startups; not sure why Scribd's treated like the disowned member of the family.
1. It's successful, at least in terms of traffic, so it's worth watching and perhaps learning from.
The lesson here is that if your concept is extremely general, you'll have success. Scribd went after a niche that was completely underused, and props to them: they got just as big as that plan would predict. That said, it's still not a good web site. It's not a particularly good role model for people who want to build their own web site, unless said people have an idea that's just as large, and large ideas are hard to come by.
2. The web hasn't obliterated the old document formats (yet). Not everyone that has content in those formats has the time or inclination to replicate the layout in HTML, so Scribd is making distribution easier for them. It may not be solving your problem but it is solving some people's problem.
It's solving the problem, but again: not well. Google's suite of PDF-to-HTML and slide displayers do a much better job of this than Scribd's iPaper does. Why that system hasn't been used yet for a public site I don't know: perhaps Google's scared of getting supersued again.
As I said on the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521565) the real challenge is making PDF displays convert to HTML. I'm certain it's possible: hell, with SIFR you could even keep the PDF's embedded fonts. That's a really interesting challenge (and it's one that I'm working on, though its implementation will be radically different than Scribd's much more all-purpose viewer). The end result is that you'll get something that requires no custom displays, because it just works the first time.
People here usually have a soft spot for YC funded startups; not sure why Scribd's treated like the disowned member of the family.
We encourage YC startups. Note how rarely we attack DocStoc, which is way, way worse than Scribd is. However, HN isn't a site of happy encouraging people. We're all critics of everything, which is awesome. There are also pretty vehement Reddit critics, a few J.tv critics, a lot of people who make fun of OMGPOP, and on and on. So think of this like tough love. We'd love to love Scribd, but we won't tell it we do until it rehabs itself up. (I also suspect there's some jealousy of its success, along with some annoyance that they don't need to take our advice, good as it is, because they're a behemoth without our help.)
I hope you're aware of sIFR speed issues when you're replacing multiple different instances of text. It dramatically slows down the browser. (And when dealing with PDFs, I wouldn't be surprised if on average you had to use 20+ sIFR flash objects.)
What do you mean, different instances of text? Do you mean different types of text that get rendered differently? Or does this apply also when you work with a large block of text that's all rendered a single way?
Basically, each block tag (h1, h2, h3, p, li, etc.) would create a new instance of sIFR, thus creating a new flash object on the page. For example, you can't use just one flash object for a long stream of text, if that stream of text is divided into paragraphs, because sIFR cannot internally give you the necessary margins or tabbing required for marking paragraphs.
The only case where you would have one flash object is when you have a single column of text which has the same font, same leading, and no margins throughout. Unfortunately, that won't happen very often.
The main problem I have with Scribd is that it is often out-ranking the original documents in search results on Google and elsewhere. In order to find the document in the format I want, I have to redo the search with "-site:scribd.com".
The second problem with scribd is that gives you two choices for viewing documents: too tiny to see in a tiny little box with a bunch of junk surrounding it in the browser window, or full screen and blurry as hell. Their comparisons with Adobe Reader are laughable when Reader has been displaying everything perfectly since the 90's.
The third huge problem with Scribd is that they make you sign up to get the document in its original (inevitably better) format.
Not that I disagree, but boy does there seem to be some hate for scribd. I loathe using it, it's actually worse than adobe reader!
I have seen other non-technical users who enjoy the content available on the site though. Perhaps it's making inroads as an "easier" torrent book search for layman?
I do. Google Chrome and Safari both open PDFs very smoothly on Windows. Even in Firefox I am not sure Scribd is an improvement over opening plain PDF (it shows a progress indicator, but it might as well take more time to open in total).
Be rational. Most users use IE on Windows. Even if you don't like it, that's the way it is. Adobe Reader 9 loading in IE can crash the browser. Don't believe me? Google "IE loading PDFs" and you'll see the huge number of users who have problems.
Flash is reasonably reliable in IE. Additionally, Scribd has the option of embedding ads in the PDF more easily by using the player, which gives them a path toward monetization.
When creating a business, you have to be realistic. This is not a techno-utopia where the best technology always wins. In the browser wars, IE is still the current leader. You have to live with it if you want to maximize profit.
Then you should have said "Internet Explorer opening PDFs is a pain point and scribd solves that". Fair enough, although I can argue Chrome is both much better solution to this particular problem :)
Personally I think scribd solves some problem for publishers, while actually degrading the experience for a significant minority of the viewers. Their relationship with publishers have significant negative externalities, and this makes scribd at least somewhat evil.
iPaper on the Mac breaks the very clean PDF viewing that's built in. That's kind of sad because breaking things on a Mac are really hard, but Flash does it.
On what kind of system is iPaper better than Adobe Reader 9?
Adobe Reader used to be really slow. But, even on my almost-three-year-old laptop, Adobe Reader 9 if quick.
I honestly don't know why Scribd doesn't do something to improve their product when obviously so many people hate it. Scribd is one of the very, very few things about my computer that still frustrates me.
In general iPaper does a good job for smaller documents (press releases, etc.) that you just want to skim. It sucks for very complex documents, or for reading longer books online. It was never designed to be a replacement for Adobe Reader -- that would take years considering the pdf spec has the same magnitude of complexity as HTML/CSS.
Also I'm not sure what metric of 'quick' you use. The iPaper swf is around 150 kb, and the Adobe Reader binary is around 30 MB. Take a look at http://www.dearadobe.com/top_rated.php - most of the top five are related to Reader bloat.
"But these options aren’t conducive to sharing content that you’ve discovered on the web, as they don’t allow your to embed them in your blogs and websites."
A large amount of the content on scribd is actually plain text, or images. Wrapping those in a bloated proprietary flash 'player' is just evil.
Microsoft will probably buy them and wrap it all in a liberal layer of DRM and silverlight.
For me, Scribd is the caveat to "make something people want". It's undoubtedly popular with people who don't know how to share text/documents, but it's not good in the bigger picture.
Principle probably doesn't come into play when the majority of people want to consume or share information in the form of text, video and imagery. Using Scribd or Youtube is very much a proof that people have found an easy way to share their information. It seems you're confusing "don't know how" with "aren't doing it while abiding by the principles they should have".
I agree with what you wrote yesterday concerning weights and measures. "Leave people to use what they want to use."
It's different though. Youtube makes possible what wasn't already possible - sharing video.
Sharing documents online has been solved for quite a long time now. It's easy (If slimy) to create a walled garden and coerce people into using it, but it'd be nicer to just show them how to share documents online.
Seems like the issue with Scribd is that it enhances the user experience for average user, but for techies/early adopters, it makes for a far worse experience than the alternative.
How would you explain to a non-technie writer (with no knowledge of HTML or web hosting) how to share their word or pdf files? Seems whatever solution you come up would probably be similar to Scribd.
So, you say you need a format to transport a document, as one single file, from one device to another? (No talking about the beauty of hyperlinking but actually sending/storing)
And HTML doesn't offer that feature?
Ok, how about we all get together and propose the W3C to create a format BASED ON HTML, open source, free, not propietary, for everybody to use and improve upon?
How about that for an idea?
Like, instead of "Save complete page as HTML" which creates folders and hidden passages to hell, some option to save as HTMD (d for doc); where the browser serves as the document viewer with no other plugin or add on than the browser engine?
Where you can open an inspect that HTMD like we do now with "View Source"?
So when you visit a page you can "Save as HTML Doc" the whole page in one file, images included?
So we impulse a new breed of HTML doc creators, instead of PDF creators, scribd creators, nextpropietary creator, etc?
Where you can create your doc and just publish it to the web, because it is HTML and the web already knows it very well?
