[ilamont]

I have content hosted there too and value the "open access" spirit, but would also like to see Scribd develop a viable business model. An alternative is the service will close down and everything -- both free and archived -- will go away.

Another question: Besides an archive paywall, what else could the company do to build revenue (such as professional services, print-on-demand, etc.)

[acqq]

> I have content hosted there too

Can you please or anybody else explain me why you see any added value of scribd at all? I see it only as an annoyance. If I'd like to read a pdf I'd prefer to click on the link and read it, not to go to some suspicious site which demands from me to sign up there only to do what otherwise would be one single click.

As far as I know the only "advantage" of the service was to make content infringement easier (a site for documents which is like youtube was for videos), and that the site owners expect people to pay for access to it is hardly surprising. But I like other mechanisms more.

My suggestion for everybody who is the owner of his own documents and wants to upload them: host them as the normal files on the normal sites, unless you do want people to pay for access to them.

[_delirium]

I don't use it myself, but reasons people I know have used it:

1. They don't have webspace and want to put a PDF somewhere online.

2. They do have webspace, but are worried, possibly unnecessarily, that it'll cost them too much money if they send out a link to a big PDF to a large-ish mailing list.

3. For Mac users, where PDFs don't load in a plugin in the browser by default, they want to be able to link to a PDF that opens in the browser instead of popping up an external viewer.

4. And, yes: They have a PDF that is at best gray-area which they want to distribute without hosting it themselves, like a scan of a book chapter for a reading group.

[narkee]

>3. For Mac users, where PDFs don't load in a plugin in the browser by default, they want to be able to link to a PDF that opens in the browser instead of popping up an external viewer.

FYI, PDFs absolutely load in the browser by default.

[_delirium]

Hmm, is that only for Safari? On my OSX machine, Firefox pops up PDFs in an external instance of Preview by default. Presumably I could install the Acrobat plugin, but it doesn't seem to come with it, or to be able to find one already installed on the system. But if Safari does show them inline, then I agree I was wrong about the "default" behavior, since Safari is the default browser.

[gammarator]

Better: use this plugin: http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

It uses the native Quartz PDFKit backend.

[blasdel]

Hilariously, the official Acrobat plugin now only works in Safari on OS X — the only browser that absolutely does not need it. I think the change happened during the Intel transition, so you can't easily use an old version either.

[gthank]

Firefox on the Mac is a decidedly second-class experience. I still use it from time-to-time because of extensions, but Chrome, and especially Safari, are far more pleasant out-of-the-box experiences.

[ilamont]

There are several reasons why I use it:

- I can post papers or other documents that other people might value but not otherwise be available, such as court docs, academic papers, etc.

- I can embed the documents easily in my blogs (and before at the publication I worked at)

- I don't have to worry about hosting. I could easily upload the PDFs to the Web server my school grants me, but after I graduate, it's gone, and I have to find another solution and change the links.

[acqq]

Post "papers of other documents": You can upload them on your free web account (like, Google Sites)? Unless you don't have the right to distribute the documents, they will remain there.

Embed: Who really needs embedded PDF? What for? To have it harder to read? Just give me the plain link, thank you.

Hosting: See the first paragraph.

OK, anybody knows some better reason?

[Andrew_Quentin]

The best reason is really so that people who are not that computer literate, that is most people, like a student who does not know much about computers, but has a file that he owns to share, he can put it on there.

If someone is literate sufficiently with the internet to know how easy is to get hosting, and how cheap, then really there is no reason.

[njharman]

This is the fundemental fail of scibd and why ive written them off from the start.

their value depends on users being ignorant.

[acqq]

Actually a lot of very successful products bet on users being lazy, and a lot of very profitable industries intentionally keep the customers as ignorant as possible.

Both assumptions are common and valid business strategies.

[jasonlotito]

> You can upload them on your free web account (like, Google Sites)?

To be fair, that's what he did at the time. This account also had some added features he valued.

[acqq]

I see jasonlotito, you write about the main article author. As far as I understood, he tried to use the free university hosting but it was for him "cumbersome" to upload there and to follow the stats. His added values were only easier upload and easier following of the number of "reads."

Note however that he does "self publishing" experiment. Enough readers here would be able to make him one click upload script in less than 10 minutes. Ditto for parsing the logs. I don't feel sorry for him for choosing scribd and feeling how he feels now.

[jasonlotito]

He was also concerned that after leaving the university, they would take down the docs, and the links to them would then be broken.

I'm just wondering how the suggestion to use Google Sites or another free service is any different then using Scribd?

[jakevoytko]

One idea: host a simple document conversion service. Pay money, upload a PDF, download an HTML5 page. Lots of documents on the web are better hosted on the creator's servers, like restaurant menus and research papers. I see they have an embeddable API, but (A) they don't push it very hard, and (B) it has a higher barrier to entry than just downloading a webpage.

Another idea: Cut out the middleman and sell a "print to webpage" plugin for Windows.