Scribd, a youtube for documents

It was only a matter of time until someone put youtube clones on the web that did not concentrate on movies but on other files such as documents. Scribd is one of the first sites that gives its users the opportunity to upload - or even bulk upload - many types of documents including pdf, txt and doc. Every single document can be downloaded in the same three formats even without being logged in, much similar to youtube.

The document formats however add some functionality that youtube is not able to include at the current time. It is possible to search documents for phrases which is only working if the document has not been scanned of course. One of the nicest features of Scribd is however that you can download mp3 files of the texts or listen to a slightly robotic sounding voice that reads the complete document to you. All documents can be embedded in websites

Interaction is important for sites like Scribd and they have been doing a great job to act possibilities. Users can vote for articles and leave comments. Similar documents are shown in a sidebar and every document is tagged to find even more documents that are classified in a similar manner.

I like Scribd a lot. They seem to have a problem with copyrights though. A quick search for php for instance revealed Php for Dummies for instance that should never appear on Scribd. Users do upload mag scans as well, I was able to read the latest Macworld online because a user uploaded it to Scribd.