Scribd, the popular document sharing service that’s recently made moves into the Ebook market, has just launched the latest version of iPaper, the site’s online document viewer. Scribd originally debuted iPaper in February 2008, after deciding that the existing Flash Paper viewer developed by Adobe didn’t perform well enough or offer enough features to keep up with the quickly growing service.
The old version was an improvement on Flash Paper, with a much smaller footprint and speedier browsing, but it still left quite a bit to be desired. For one, it was still clearly very Flash and not a native browser element. And the navigation bar at the top of the viewer was unnecessarily cluttered, making the widget seem bulky. Contrast that with Google’s document reader, which uses HTML and image files, and it just didn’t feel like a natural extension of the browser.
The new viewer (screenshot below) is a big improvement. It’s still in Flash, which may be enough to turn some people off, but it manages to look like it’s native. Scribd says that iPaper 2 does this by hooking into the browser’s native widgets (the company believes it’s among the first Flash apps to do so). It may sound like a small addition, but it definitely makes a difference. The new viewer also has improved searching functionality, adding the ability to see where a search result lies in context with the text around it.
Most of the other additions are more minor: the viewer simplifies the process to share a doc through Twitter or Facebook, and the view modes are a bit easier to use. But really, the big difference here is aesthetic, and it’s safe to say the streamlined design is a big improvement. iPaper 2 is currently live on Scribd’s main site, with plans to roll out support to embedded documents in about a month.
While Scribd is the leader in this space, it has plenty of competitors that offer their own document viewers, which include DocStoc, Issuu, and Edocr, not to mention Google’s own embeddable doc viewers.
That looks pretty neat. And it looks like Scribd just became even more useful
Check the http://www.slideshare.net.
It allows 100mb file size which is not allowed by many sites.
It feels a lot better. Kudos to the Scribd team!
Hum traffic trend doesn’t look so bright for them…guess their SEO isn’t as effective as it used to be. Ultimately their SEO efforts didn’t drive high value users and I certainly don’t see this improving that. SlideShare seems to have captured a much more useful niche.
Mark: Scribd’s traffic is 7 times higher than slideshare (compete stats) http://siteanal...v&months=12
I do agree though that slideshare has captured a much more useful niche.
But Scribd is the giant in the industry like youtube is for the video industry.
They both touch a huge diversity of audience which sometimes unfortanetely includes borderline trash
OUCH!
http://www.quan...ibd.com#traffic
scribd is no youtube, theres plenty of other places to get text content.
scribd got a major SEO haircut cause they were spamming the google index with their search result pages. scribd’s problem is how to stop being a google slave, i.e., dependence on google for traffic and for adsense revenue….
@rainier
Well Google makes a lot of money from Scribd’s ad too right?
I think people at Google talk with Scribd a lot: they are big clients. It’s in google’s interest not to ignore Scribd.
People can now either upload documents to share or to sell and someone that might have uploaded a document to share might now consider selling it. People who decide to sell their doc won’t get indexed and that’s where the SEO “haircut” might comes from which BTW makes them less google slave if they have ever been. They now have a new business model (selling ebooks) which I think has huge potential.
Take a look at the quantcast #’s from @mikev not looking so good. The point is Scribd’s traffic is SEO driven and from what I hear they don’t convert to $’s well…those people aren’t buying content from Scribd. So Scribd is reliant on google adsense to drive revenue.
As rainier noted they have a heavy reliance on google to drive traffic and that isn’t working for them now. SlideShare’s traffic isn’t SEO driven so they are already in a better position. Until they start to monetize we wont know much more.
it’s a web 2.0, SEO powered, ad monetized company that is not going well, look at that quantcast chart! Scribd = pets.com of web 2.0?
i expect scribd ads would convert well. in contrast to the typical text site, scribd’s pages are of fixed length. hence the ads are always visible to the user.
slideshare has a smaller addressable market, few slideshows compared to documents. and scribd has a much stronger team as evidenced by their lance at Kindle.
@mark
You have a point: they’d sell more if they had more Social networks traffic instead of google.
Scribd selling ebooks is only 1 or 2 month old. Even if their today’s ebook results are weak. The ebook industry is very very young.
The kindle and other portable device have just started to appear and it is very likely they become popular.
Scribd is the website that I associate the best with ebooks.
@valenca @mark: About monetizing I read somewhere that they are already profitable and they have a team 20 something employee.
What does this new format offer to embedders? iPaper v1 never had enough customization to be useful for embedding documents en masse in a web page. The main problem (for me) was that you could not turn off the “Related Documents” list, and there are just certain times that you don’t want to have those with your content. Also, you could not disable copy/paste in the viewer. I like the sharing functionality, but I need more control over what viewers see with my content and what they can do with it. In my mind, Edocr’s Flash Paper embedding is much better for content in “professional” related sites, and Scribd’s iPaper is better for blogs and the like. iPaper 2 has a great new look, hopefully they’ll give publishers more control this time- I’d switch to have the social aspect in a heartbeat.
Flash Paper and Flash Paper 2 were developed by Macromedia. Adobe has not updated it.
Also, full disclosure: Tech Crunch is a scribd partner: http://www.scribd.com/partners
Tip: For anyone wanting to embed without Flash, Issuu has had a non-Flash viewer for quite some time now. Here’s an example – you can embed it from our site: http://tinyurl.com/n78vgs – (I’m with Issuu).
It still sucks! Fcuk SCRIBD! They’re a useless parasite of the internet.
Wow, big improvement on the interface! I can’t believe just how cluttered they made the first one. It has still managed to collect a very large gathering of fans during the past year or two!
I love Scribd. It’s one of my favorite websites and find I spend as much time there as any of the other productivity wasters Youtube, Facebook, etc. Glad to see they’re still actively working on iPaper.
Nice Improvement.
Not a fan of reading long material on an widget in a browser on a screen. Yuck. Was annoyed today that you couldn’t print out Chris Anderson’s “free”
Really good site.. I wish anyone can get it for their own site. Is this open source? or is there any source that lets you get same for your website?