Put Your Documants Online with Scribd

August 8th, 2007 | Joel | Web Services

I was reading Full Circle Magazine today, an Ubuntu magazine, when I noticed a neat feature on their site. FCM publishes a preview of the full PDF within a embedded document reader, examples can be seen here or at the bottom of the page.

Scribed is a service that allows users to upload documents into their servers to assist users in publication. Scribed works in the same manner as popular video sharing sites such as YouTube. Users upload their documents to Scribed, then they are provided with a link to the document on the Scribed site and also embedding code for their website. Currently the only supported formats are:

• .odt
• .odp
• .sxw
• .sxi
• .doc
• .pdf
• .txt
• .ppt
• .xls
• .ps
• .lit
• A few others

Additional Features

All the features we come to expect from a social network are also provided, tagging, commenting, and voting for example. Never the less, two feature that caught my eyes as I read the site’s FAQ and played with the service are that the document is made available to search engines. So essentially, all the text documents you submit are in turn also indexed by Google, Yahoo, Ask, and other top-notch search engines. The second feature is that text files are also converted to audio MP3 files.

Scribd also provides the following features as published on their FAQ [1]:

• Display documents in a web browser using our custom Flash PDF player
• Perform high quality conversions between many different formats, including Word, PDF, plain text, HTML, JPEG, PowerPoint, Excel, Postscript, LIT, and even audio format
• See all sorts of detailed information on who is viewing each of your documents, including the geographic locations of visitors and how people got to your doc (i.e., Google queries)
• Publish a document online with its own public URL that will be indexed by Google and other search engines and be read by a lot of people
• Embed a long or complex document in your blog or personal webpage
• Convert a document to an mp3 that you can listen to on your iPod
• Bulk upload files (that’s right, storage is unlimited!)
• Receive “likes” and comments on your documents
• Choose among a variety of copyright licenses for each of your documents
• Discover documents related to your own using our similarity algorithm
• Analyze the text of your docs (how does your sentence length compare to the Scribd average?)
• Browse popular documents using view counts, likes, tags, our similarity algorithm, and other ways that let you find content that is interesting to you

The Count of Monte Cristo Preview

Only the first 400 pages of the book in order to avoid lag. The full book can be found here

1. [Scribd.com] - FAQ - What kinds of things can I do with documents on Scribd? http://www.scribd.com/faq#faq_question_10 08/08/07