4 ms·

I'm a heavy scribd user and i think that is great to share documents, you can create groups and start discussions, find similar books and people that share your

by kaos 18y ago

I'm a heavy scribd user and i think that is great to share documents, you can create groups and start discussions, find similar books and people that share your tastes. You can't do that with acrobar reader.

evgen 18y ago
No, you can't do that with acrobat reader, but you can do that with this fancy thing we call "the web". You can even create a site in which users can submit documents they would like to share with other people so that the group can discuss the contents of the documents; the documents themselves can stay in their native pdf format and remain hosted on the authors site. Alternatively, you can decide to annoy your users by filtering attempts to share such documents through another site you are trying to pimp...
- kaos 18y ago
  then you would be reinventing scribd, it saves a copy of the original pdf and you CAN download it.
  - mcculley 18y ago
    Am I missing something obvious on scribd? I saw no way to download the original PDF on the scribd page. I was as annoyed as the original poster when this paper (HPL-2007-193) was on HN and I tried to save it so that I could read it later. I ended up doing Print->Save As PDF from scribd. When someone later posted a link to the original PDF, it was much nicer looking, smaller in size (4MB versus 164KB), and had the original metadata (e.g. authors, description).
  - evgen 18y ago
    The "site" I was describing was HN, so I guess my sarcasm was a bit too subtle. Additionally, you can only get a copy of the original PDF if you register. I can understand why they went with this sort of bait-and-switch tactic, but it is slimy.
rplevy 18y ago
When scribd loads a pdf as a flash only page (the links from Hacker News for example go to the flash only) there is no way to download it. But I have seen scribd pages where they have a row of icons above the embedded flash and one of them is a download link. Personally, the only problem I have with scribd is the use of Flash. I think I would actually use the site if it presented pdfs using javascript and images, much like Google books. You could still search the book, just as Google books does, because it searches the text on the server side and returns images of the pages with highlighted text. I think this does add something new to PDF in that it makes it possible to share a book online without allowing easy download if there is interest in doing that.

by kaos 18y ago

evgen 18y ago

No, you can't do that with acrobat reader, but you can do that with this fancy thing we call "the web". You can even create a site in which users can submit documents they would like to share with other people so that the group can discuss the contents of the documents; the documents themselves can stay in their native pdf format and remain hosted on the authors site. Alternatively, you can decide to annoy your users by filtering attempts to share such documents through another site you are trying to pimp...

kaos 18y ago
then you would be reinventing scribd, it saves a copy of the original pdf and you CAN download it.
- mcculley 18y ago
  Am I missing something obvious on scribd? I saw no way to download the original PDF on the scribd page. I was as annoyed as the original poster when this paper (HPL-2007-193) was on HN and I tried to save it so that I could read it later. I ended up doing Print->Save As PDF from scribd. When someone later posted a link to the original PDF, it was much nicer looking, smaller in size (4MB versus 164KB), and had the original metadata (e.g. authors, description).
- evgen 18y ago
  The "site" I was describing was HN, so I guess my sarcasm was a bit too subtle. Additionally, you can only get a copy of the original PDF if you register. I can understand why they went with this sort of bait-and-switch tactic, but it is slimy.

rplevy 18y ago

When scribd loads a pdf as a flash only page (the links from Hacker News for example go to the flash only) there is no way to download it. But I have seen scribd pages where they have a row of icons above the embedded flash and one of them is a download link. Personally, the only problem I have with scribd is the use of Flash. I think I would actually use the site if it presented pdfs using javascript and images, much like Google books. You could still search the book, just as Google books does, because it searches the text on the server side and returns images of the pages with highlighted text. I think this does add something new to PDF in that it makes it possible to share a book online without allowing easy download if there is interest in doing that.