3 ms·

I still don't know what Scribd is for, either. I guess if you had a flash-enabled browser but no PDF reader then it might be useful. That population is probably

I still don't know what Scribd is for, either. I guess if you had a flash-enabled browser but no PDF reader then it might be useful. That population is probably very small. However, the author could have been a bit nicer.

pmjordan 18y ago
EDIT: to those who are downvoting this post, I'd be really interested to hear why you think I shouldn't have posted it. The place where it could really help is on embedded/mobile devices, where Flash is more widespread than PDF readers. However, the iPhone for example doesn't support Flash, and I suspect most other current-generation phones don't either. Now, if Scribd converted as much as possible of the PDFs to (X)HTML/CSS and the rest to highly optimised images (tiled, and picking PNG or JPEG appropriately), that would be much more useful. Actually, even a version that just renders the documents as tiles of images would be quite helpful for devices that don't have PDF viewers, as the loss of copy & paste isn't going to be important on those devices. Extra points for detecting the browser's display area height & width in pixels and getting the server to serve up appropriately scaled images. (where supported by the device of course) That said, I used to dislike Scribd a lot more when I was having severe problems with Flash (on Linux). Opera 9.5 seems to have solved those apart from the bugs in Flash itself, but at least it's not taken the browser down with it for a while now. (running the plugin in a separate process with high niceness helps, and I can kill that when flash decides it needs 100% of one CPU after closing the page) I'm still using the Greasemonkey/User Javascript for real PDF links on HN though. KPDF easily beats both Scribd and Adobe Reader in terms of usability and UI.
- axod 18y ago
  The iPhone shows pdfs brilliantly as it is though. God I'm glad the iPhone doesn't support flash as well.
maurycy 18y ago
I use Scribd for finding copyrighted and stolen books. :-) It is way easier to type "Linear Algebra Done Right" in the search, instead of installing some eMule, Napster, or whatever is popular right now for this purpose. (don't know, never used P2P networks)
mtts 18y ago
Even if you don't have a PDF reader, there's still Google's chache that will display PDF and Word files in HTML just fine. Scribd is completely and utterly useless. In two years time we will laugh about the little startup that thought it could improve the internet by displaying perfectly readable documents in a cumbersome flash interface (my biggest annoyance: scrolling using a scroll wheel doesn't work - where's the improvement in that?).
- parenthesis 18y ago
  Scrolling with a scroll wheel works for me.

pmjordan 18y ago

EDIT: to those who are downvoting this post, I'd be really interested to hear why you think I shouldn't have posted it. The place where it could really help is on embedded/mobile devices, where Flash is more widespread than PDF readers. However, the iPhone for example doesn't support Flash, and I suspect most other current-generation phones don't either. Now, if Scribd converted as much as possible of the PDFs to (X)HTML/CSS and the rest to highly optimised images (tiled, and picking PNG or JPEG appropriately), that would be much more useful. Actually, even a version that just renders the documents as tiles of images would be quite helpful for devices that don't have PDF viewers, as the loss of copy & paste isn't going to be important on those devices. Extra points for detecting the browser's display area height & width in pixels and getting the server to serve up appropriately scaled images. (where supported by the device of course) That said, I used to dislike Scribd a lot more when I was having severe problems with Flash (on Linux). Opera 9.5 seems to have solved those apart from the bugs in Flash itself, but at least it's not taken the browser down with it for a while now. (running the plugin in a separate process with high niceness helps, and I can kill that when flash decides it needs 100% of one CPU after closing the page) I'm still using the Greasemonkey/User Javascript for real PDF links on HN though. KPDF easily beats both Scribd and Adobe Reader in terms of usability and UI.

axod 18y ago
The iPhone shows pdfs brilliantly as it is though. God I'm glad the iPhone doesn't support flash as well.

maurycy 18y ago

I use Scribd for finding copyrighted and stolen books. :-) It is way easier to type "Linear Algebra Done Right" in the search, instead of installing some eMule, Napster, or whatever is popular right now for this purpose. (don't know, never used P2P networks)

mtts 18y ago

Even if you don't have a PDF reader, there's still Google's chache that will display PDF and Word files in HTML just fine. Scribd is completely and utterly useless. In two years time we will laugh about the little startup that thought it could improve the internet by displaying perfectly readable documents in a cumbersome flash interface (my biggest annoyance: scrolling using a scroll wheel doesn't work - where's the improvement in that?).

parenthesis 18y ago
Scrolling with a scroll wheel works for me.