I've worked for a big Scribd competitor (bigger than Scribd by some measures) and I am blown away that they would move in this direction. Those saying that they

I've worked for a big Scribd competitor (bigger than Scribd by some measures) and I am blown away that they would move in this direction. Those saying that they are not taking a great risk are missing the point in a serious way. In this business, the viewer is the company. It is your whole competitive advantage. Taking apart a PDF is nothing - putting it back together in Flash with the right appearance, cropping, individual character metainfo, hyperlinks, caching, progressive loading, etc., etc., is science. To do that you need to be very long on Flash, and they just threw away all that inventory and expertise. Which is, of course, a killer move if they can actually pull it off as they will be the first and only company to do it (again, comparing with Google's Javascript PDF viewer misses the point, as that 'just' renders images). I am just dumbstruck to see a company do such a 180 degree turn and they deserve all the credit in the world for having the guts.