That’s what the Book Beta Demo is trying to present. It looks pretty much like a book on a website. Readers can flip through the pages of the book, go to a specific page and even tear pages from it. Advanced features that you wont find in any real book are demonstrated as well.

Those features include transparency effects as well as a component called live Bitmapping which makes it possible to change animations on a page.

I’m not saying that this is a perfect adaption but the demonstration does come closer to the real experience than those pdf documents. I had some troubles concentrating on the contents of the book because my eyes did seem to be attracted to the page flipping mechanism.

The reason could be because it is a new way of reading or because there was not much content to read anyway in this demonstration.

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.