Scribd Launches iPaper???

[Ducani]

I stumbled on this today and while the headline was catchy....
Well tell you what. Check it out first, its called iPaper and its from Scribd www.scribd.com and then let me know what you think of it.

Here is a quick description...
" iPaper is a lightweight alternative to Adobe Reader that streams documents in your web browser similar to YouTube videos. It's fast, free, and won't crash your browser. iPaper also lets you put ads in documents for the first time ever."

D.

[ryanhellyer]

I'm loading their home page now, the demo is taking quite a while to load though. I'm guessing this is another of those supposed PDF replacements. They usually use Javascript or Flash to generate the document and then output to the printer with a print only style sheet.

They're no PDF replacement though. They take longer to load and can never print exactly what you see on screen - PDF can.

[ryanhellyer]

From what I can see, it just takes your document and converts it to Flash format. Which in itself is a handy thing to be able to do. But there are plugins for Word, Powerpoint etc. which can do this quite well anyway, or so I've been told.

I would much rather just download a PDF instead of going down this route. That way I can save it if I want to too and I don't have to wait for their silly reader to load. I already have a PDF reader, so I don't see much point in downloading a new one every time I look at a document.

There's no accessibility benefit with this approach as you still need Adobe Flash to view it. A better option would be to convert your document to HTML and upload that. At least it will (if the coding is good) be well formed and accessible to a wide range of users as an HTML document. And you can always supply a PDF as well for those who prefer that option.



Actually, are there any benefits in using this approach? I can't think of any at all.

[BigAlReturns]

Sounds a lot like GoogleDocs, or am I missing something?

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

Sounds a lot like GoogleDocs, or am I missing something?

Google Docs is for editing documents. This is for displaying documents on the web which is quite a different kettle of fish.

Google Docs is a replacement for Word, Excel etc. whereas this is a replacement (albeit flawed one) for Adobe Acrobat.


Or perhaps I am missing something?