Scribd

Scribd is a free social document sharing platform that offers its users the ability to search, read and publish almost all kind of documents raging from e-books, presentation, essays to academic papers, newsletters, photo albums, sheet music and casual notes. The application offers a free platform where users can publish their content in simple yet powerful way. This website has a huge community of enthusiastic readers and publishers who keep on providing quality content to it. The biggest advantage of Scribd is its size and the range of content available in its continuously growing open library and community generated content. Scribd also offers a document management system which is secure, yet flexible, thus making it a perfect choice for users with varied, restrictive and private content. Many value added services and products are available for commercial organizations as well as multimedia and educational publishers. Scribd offers the user, the ability to upload documents in varied formats like Adobe PDF, Microsoft word, text file, HTML, PowerPoint presentations, excel spreadsheets, open office documents, JPEG etc. It also gives user the ability to embed the uploaded documents in various blogs or any external websites with keeping the same formatting options. A user can host his document on an individual and unique URL on scribd which makes promoting the document easier by just giving the URL. For uploading the document, scribd offers a choice of four uploaders and an unlimited storage space. Documents uploaded in scribd are effectively indexed on search engines like google, providing better readership. The content published in scribd can be automatically converted to PDF, Word or plain text formats. Finding and analyzing document that are similar to the published document is easier with scribd. Viewer information depending upon location, google referral etc can be found in scribd. A user can receive feedback and also have full document copyright by making his documents available under creative commons license. A scribd user can create a profile and make new friends and fans by publishing new quality content. Categorization of content makes it easier to search and retrieve content from thousands of documents available on scribd. Founded by Trip Adler and Jared Friedman and co founded by Tikhon Bernstam, Scribd was started in September 2006 and officially launched in March 2007. With a claimed monthly traffic figure running into millions and the number of unique visitors also lying in the same bracket of magnitude, this website has a collection of over 17 billion words in its library. Scribd is mainly different from other such applications as it allows the user to upload documents in a variety of file formats like .doc, .PDF, HTML, Plain text, spreadsheets, presentations, JPEG etc. Users of scribd can maintain the copyright status of documents or make their documents available under creative commons license. Each document published in scribd has its own URL so that it becomes very easy to share documents. With the use of blue and white for menu and the background, scribd looks clean and uncluttered website. The use of black facilitates a clear and user friendly website which can be read for long hours at stretch. Even though website contains a lot of thumbnails and previews the loading time of scribd.com is above average. On clicking the signup button on the top right side of the website, the registration screen pops up. This has to be filled with the email address and a password with an optional username. The process then continues with the next step which takes the user to a ‘Tell Us About Yourself’ page, using this screen is very easy and self explanatory; this screen can also be skipped for filling the information later. E-mail address is checked by sending a confirmation mail to the e-mail address provided at the first step of the registration process this also completes the registration process. There is no credit card related information demanded throughout the registration process. There are no pricing plans available on Scribd. This website totally runs on a free platform and it utilizes Google advertisements for revenue generation. As the information available on scribd is free, versatile and varied, it is suitable for everyone, irrespective of their age or nationality. Scribd also features a ‘text to speech’ engine which makes it suitable for the visually impaired users too.