I think a lot of people (me included) just though of Scribd as a YouTube of documents -- taking advantage of unlicensed material to juice up Pagerank, and then somehow converting that into a revenue stream. It also seemed kind of annoying to launch a Flash player just to view a PDF in a now, double-scrolling window, however I'm reminded, while reading this technical post, about the Ycombinator interviewer who said: "where's the rocket science?" Clearly, we're seeing some smart developers tackle a tough problem, and for a broad audience. I think they have a bright future!
I'd like Scribd a lot more if they'd make downloading the document easy. My general process of opening a scribd link is:
1. Oh, an interesting looking article! Hopefully it will be in HTML or PDF so I can read it!
2. (browser tab freezes) Oh shit, it says "scribd.com" in the URL bar.
3. Interface finally loads; the fonts are broken, scrolling doesn't work, and it's only barely readable.
4. I begin the frantic search for the "download" button. On most sites this is easy to spot and use, but on scribd it seems to move around from day to day. Sometimes it's big and green, others it's small, white, and hidden somewhere on the page.
5. Scribd demands I log in to download; it doesn't support OpenID, and I can never remember which throwaway account/password I used, so I just register again.
6. Finally, it lets me download and read the document.
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How about this instead? Scribd should offer a "direct link" to the PDF, and then it would be easy for users to submit these links to external websites (HN, Reddit, etc).
Not everybody has personal hosting; sites like YouTube or Scribd are nice because they'll worry about the costs of DNS, bandwidth, storage, backups, etc without any charge.
I disagree; Megaupload, Rapidshare, Mediafire, etc are basically black holes in the Internet. Files go in, but what comes back out is not usable.
First, most of them have wait timers. After opening their page, the user must wait 60-120 seconds before downloading.
Second, they're plastered with ads. And not Google text ads, but awful '90s-style popups / popunders / flashing seizure GIFs. Ad blockers are useless, because the sites are written to prevent the download link from working when ads aren't visible.
Third, most (all?) of them don't handle Unicode correctly. Upload a file in anything except US ASCII, and you'll be lucky if even the file extension comes across intact. For example, Преве́д.zip could come out "Ð�Ñ�евеÌ�д.zip" or "Преве́" or nearly anything else.
Lastly, sites like Rapidshare are known for imposing download limits, such as "2 files per hour" or "max 50 Kb/s". This is hugely annoying when trying to download a half-dozen 30MB files.
Depends on a site, but taking MU and going point by point:
- first - wait timers: Megaupload has a timer which takes ~1min. to count down - that's quicker for me than dealing with scribd's registration.
- second - ads: I haven't noticed, I use adblock and never seen an ad on Megaupload. Not sure what's the current status of Scribd, but disabling scripts brought out a lot of spam words years ago (maybe they don't use it anymore), so annoyance is pretty much the same (or isn't there, depending on your view)
- third - unicode: We're talking about pdf-s. They have their own tags, for example for the title which makes the name pretty much irrelevant. Unless you're downloading a book with "Author - Title.pdf" name, you're most likely going to run into "some_serial_number", "ModelNumberDescription_code" for manuals, "thesis.pdf" or some other internal convention. Actually zipping the file allows you to see the original one.
- fourth - limits: Megaupload has none that I know of and I get >200kB/s most of the times.
So it might be very subjective, but even considering all the crap download pages give us, I'd take a Megaupload-ed .pdf over Scribd any time.
+ After writing this, I got back to scribd and tried to download something - it's MUCH better than it was before. I only had to scroll through 2 pages and find a small link at the bottom and it opened a new window. Right now, for me it's only as bad as MU.
I don't really see how Scribd will be able to maintain any appeal if Chrome polishes up their in-browser PDF rendering, which basically loads instantaneously and seems to render things fine. (The HTML transmogrification is cool, but if PDFs are fast, why do I need it?)
My point was that, I don't know that they have any legitimate appeal now, but they seem to be smart, and they're building a IP portfolio in an important space, so they might be able to switch gears or sell their IP. Heck, they might see the writing on the wall and maybe that's why they're writing these technical blogs, to gain exposure for their IP and technology.
