[snowmaker]

( I work for Scribd )

This is extremely valuable product feedback. You are completely right that the Scribd product delivered a terrible experience in this case. And the reason goes to the heart of one of the most difficult product design issues we've had: combining user generated and professional content.

An explanation is not a substitute for a fix, but in a nutshell what happened here is that you found copies of Frankenstein that had been uploaded by users. While the books we receive from publishers are ePub formatted and reflow nicely on a phone with controllable font settings, many user-uploaded works are PDFs.

We definitely do not a good enough job of messaging whether content is UGC or publisher, PDF or ePUB. We are working very hard on this. In the meantime, if you want to keep trying the app, here are some simple tips if you want to look at books only: - You can search through books only (click the books tab in search results) - Look for the "verified" badge which appears on publisher-provided material - The content browseable from http://www.scribd.com/browse/books is only publisher provided books.

I'd love to hear more product feedback - this was very helpful for us. Feel free to email me directly (email is in my profile).