Scribd.com is offering a rather interesting online publishing service that lets users upload portions of their blogs, podcast transcripts, documents and other material using a proprietary system. They claim over 17 million people a month view documents on Scribd.

What is Scribd?

(skribb’d) is a free, web-based self-publishing platform and document exchange community that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover electronic books, documents, presentations, newsletters, photo albums, and more.

Scribd provides:

1. A simple yet powerful method of publishing and distributing your own electronic books and documents in a variety of formats - for free.

2. A vibrant, global community of eager publishers, readers and collaborators that offer great content and constructive feedback.

3. A massive, perpetually growing library of open, community-generated and -published content.

4. A secure, flexible private document managment system.

Scribd for Professionals

http://www.scribd.com/platform/home

iPaper is a document viewer built for the modern web. It’s the first full-featured viewer that runs in a web page with no additional software. Using iPaper on your website offers the following fundamental benefits:

• Increased traffic to documents
• Enhanced security
• Monetization of your documents with contextual ads.

The Scribd Platform

This provides a set of tools and documentation that allows you to easily integrate iPaper and other Scribd features with your own website. There are three ways to integrate iPaper with your website:

• QuickSwitch - Convert all of the documents on your website to iPaper in minutes
• Scribd API - Everything you could ever want to do with iPaper, document management and searching
• Embed - Upload to Scribd and then copy and paste the embed code

The Scribd Platform is a broad set of tools and services designed to help you customize, integrate, deploy, and monetize fully-formatted documents on your website without extra software. The platform’s components - the Scribd API, the iPaper JavaScript API, and QuickSwitch - vary greatly in their complexity and specific features, so be sure to review the online documentation so that you can determine which one is best for you.

Tools

Scribd Uploader (12.8meg)

Category Feeds

Caveat

However some have complained their content has been “lifted” e.g. “screwed by Scribd”. Scribd has posted their side of the story…and I tend to believe these instances are unscrupulous people who snag content and “make it their own”. At any rate this is another interesting venue to publish your documents for both exposure and possibly contextual advertising revenue.

iPhone Compatible

You can click on a document on Scribd, and iPhone will open the document in iPhone’s native viewer. iPhone supports PDF, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and text files…yet another way to get your content out there.

Tell me what you think.

ADDENDUM: Confirmed it supports the following formats:

Adobe PDF (.pdf)
Adobe PostScript (.ps)
Microsoft Word (.doc)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
Microsoft Excel (.xls)
OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
All OpenDocument formats
StarOffice Documents
Plain text (.txt)
Rich text format (.rtf)

Popularity: 2% [?]

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