[schoudha]

Yes, Scribd has had great success and everyone in the HN community should be happy for them. However, there's a legitimate criticism to the direction Scribd is taking - it's arguably bad for the web.

What is the mission? All documents are created offline, uploaded to Scribd and displayed via iPaper? I think we already have a great framework for distributing text information - HTML (Although Scrib's traffic may indicate otherwise). It's flexible, it's fast, and it can be viewed on any device, it can be indexed easily, etc... Think about how much better nytimes.com is then the New York Times newspaper.

Instead of creating new standards, the industry should be trying to help people create HTML formats as first class objects. With that said, it would be really cool to bring all the books/magazines from the past to the internet (books.google.com).