
Scribd "YouTube for Text" Gets $300K - perler
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/06/scribd-youtube-for-text-gets-300k/
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ed
I think the concept sounds great and it is beautifully executed.

Books don't have the same broad appeal as videos but are definitely easier to
classify, search, and analyze. There's a whole lot of semantic data to work
with in a book so a site like Scribd should be much easier to monetize than
youtube with context-sensitive advertising. Couple this product with some sort
of publisher agreement a la youtube and you'll definitely have a winning
investment.

Congrats on the cash infusion! Spend wisely!!

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danielha
I love this idea. My co-founder and I were working on something similar a
while ago before deciding to pursue our next idea.

Scribd's implementation is absolutely top-notch. I'm very excited for them,
especially knowing that our ideas are shared by some other clever folks.

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nickb
This has nothing to do with YouTUBE. This is just a pirate's heaven that will
be taken down by some angry publisher.

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danielha
Your second sentence made it even more analogous to YouTube.

When YouTube was younger, its popular use was to facilitate the spread of
copyrighted content. Now there's a whole slew of user-generated videos out
there.

There will inevitably be pirated material on Scribd, sure. But surely you can
see further than that. Sharing group documents? Helping some self-"publish"?
Spread works in the public domain? Share academic and/or research papers?

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nickb
Ever heard of HTML/XML? How about CSS? How about Prince?
http://www.princexml.com/ Why would anyone wanna publish through Flashpaper?!
Oh, that;'s right... only if you have a scanned book. But even then, Google
Books' AJAX reader is so much nicer than Flashpaper.

YouTube solved the problem of not having a codec or a media player installed.
Scribd is solving a non-existing problem. No one wants to read a book in some
tiny window.

There's a huge difference from writing books and making videos in front of a
camera. I'll let you figure out the difference in magnitude of work required
to do each.

Also, most of the people don't read that much.

Sorry to rain on the parade but Scribd is NOTHING like YouTube! It's just a
"clever" marketing gimmick.

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danielha
There is more to reading than physical books.

There are MSWord documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, etc. These are
documents that someone might want to simply embed in a blog post. A user might
want to embed a PowerPoint presentation on their MySpace profile. Getting
videos online was not an impossible task before YouTube. YouTube made it
easier, as you mentioned, by enabling users to view without worry of player or
codec. With Scribd's flash viewer, people are able to view through their
browser regardless of document type.

I'm no fierce advocate of Scribd; in fact I'm not too familiar with them. I
just know it's something that would make things easier for me personally. This
is reason enough for me to be a believer.

