It is pretty easy to find influential people in the social media and online PR community who are great fans of Scribd. Scribd lets people upload PDF files to a central hub but then avoid the annoyance of forcing people to read the contents of the file as a PDF.
It’s annoying having to download and then scroll through a clunky PDF. Sending a blogger a PDF version of a press release is often unwise.
iPaper 2 does not present any radical changes from the original iPaper product which launched in 2008 but it certainly is a step forward. The main change for iPaper 2 is that the code is less clunky and quicker.
This is significant as iPaper readers are often set to be embeddable. For example, you can see Text 100’s Blogger Survey from 2009 embedded here on the Brinkwire blog as iPaper. By improving the iPaper reader then Scribd will encourage more bloggers to display it. This in turn will persuade more content creators to distribute and share via Scridb.
There is competition in this market too. Google’s own docs are embeddable. There’s Slideshare for presentations but also Edocr, Issuu and DocStoc for PDFs and these sites all have their own viewers.
What do you think? Do you see a near future where sites typically avoid press sections with lists of PDFs to download in favour of an iPaper or Scribd approach?
July 10, 2009
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