First off, it's not walled. Scribd lets you take your stuff off their site in a variety of ways. A walled garden implies information going in and not coming out

First off, it's not walled. Scribd lets you take your stuff off their site in a variety of ways. A walled garden implies information going in and not coming out. With Scribd, if I add a text file anybody can download it. Scribd even reformats it into a bunch of different filetypes, for easy access. The world wide web is an open repository for information. "Documents" implies things formatted for paper. That means, among other things, retaining the formatting, fonts, and layouts of the original documents. It IS possible to do this all online, but it's annoying as hell and you have to do it specially for each document you put up this way. The value added is that Scribd indexes all these things in one easy-to-find place, that it lets you access them with Flash instead of Adobe Acrobat, and that it allows you to embed your documents on other web sites. I used to do that for a creative writing blog I had. I understand not wanting to use it - I stopped using it after I got a Mac and had preview.app available for PDFs - but it still has its uses, and that's the important thing to remember. I still use it, for sharing web site mockups to friends, many of whom are on Windows and some of whom don't have a PDF reader whatsoever. There is no format that their computer will like, but they have Flash players, so I can send it to them on Scribd.