scribd
- From: Ben Crowell <bpcrowell07@[redacted]>
- Subject: scribd
- Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:08:09 +0000
Scribd.com is an interesting new web site that aims to do for
the print medium what youtube did for video. Anyone can upload
a text in a convenient format, and then it will be converted
into a variety of other formats and made available to the public.
The focus seems to be mainly on texts that the author has
intentionally made free, rather than old public domain texts.
By default, the user is given a web interface to a copy of the
text in Adobe's Flashpaper format. Flashpaper may be on the way
to extinction, but if you're using a browser and OS in which its
interface works properly, it can be a convenient way to browse
through a long online text. In any case, they supply each book
in a variety of formats, including mp3 audio done by a
text-to-speech system which is IMO pretty good. Like youtube,
scribd does not seem particularly effective at getting rid of
copyright-violating content, but they do have a process by which
a copyright owner can get their own book taken down if it was
posted without their permission. They have a variety of methods
for finding books: the full text of each book is indexed by
Google; the person who posts the book can label it with tags;
and they're starting to create groups into which people can
classify books. Their FAQ is coy about their business model; I'm
guessing that the plan is to achieve an insanely high google page
rank, and then start putting ads on the site. Some possible
applications are free webhosting for an author who doesn't want
to pay for it; producing an audiobook for yourself for free from
a PD text; or unlocking a DRM'd PDF file, which appears to be a
side-effect of posting a PDF on the site.