
Ask HN: Review my startup - Scribd (YC S06) - snowmaker
In the past when Scribd has come up on Hacker News, a handful of HN readers made no secret of the fact that they saw the Scribd product as flawed.  While the harsh feedback was painful at times, it was important for us to hear.<p>We are sincerely grateful for the advice and criticism that we got from the very smart people on HN.  The conversations we have had with people here were instrumental in our understanding what was bothering people about Scribd, and how to fix it.<p>Today we're launching the largest product change ever on Scribd, and one that goes directly to the heart of those concerns.  We are leaving Flash and moving to all HTML5.<p>The #1 problem people had with Scribd was the Flash reading experience.  Scrolling was problematic, you said.  It didn't respect your browser's search, text selection, or keyboard shortcuts.  It didn't feel like your PDF reader, either, and it was missing functionality you expected in a document reader.  Sometimes it slowed down or crashed your browser.<p>At a higher level, people challenged why we were using Flash to display documents in the first place.  A lot of you suggested we build a Google books style viewer, using AJAX and images.<p>We ended up taking that suggestion, but we took it a step further. Rather than building yet another reading application based on images, we used the magic new stuff in HTML5 to convert documents into fully native webpages.  It took us a while because we built this from scratch, and it was hard to do.<p>The result is that the reading experience on Scribd is now incredibly light and fast.  It's no different, really, from reading a blog, since it's all in plain HTML yet it still preserves the exact complex and rich formatting of the original document.  While it's an early beta product, I think it is already way better.  But don't take my word for it - try it yourself:<p>http://www.scribd.com/html5<p>What is Scribd, anyway?
There’s been a lot of confusion among HN readers over what Scribd is supposed to do, and I want to clear it up.  The point of Scribd is, most emphatically, <i>not</i> to replace your PDF viewer, and that’s why we encourage users to download documents in whatever format they want.  If you try to think of Scribd as an Acrobat/Preview/Foxit competitor you’ll never understand it.  The purpose of Scribd is two-fold:
1) For authors/publishers: to provide a place where they can publish their book, essay, presentation, magazine, legal document, poem, catalog, scientific paper, etc. to a wide audience
2) For readers: To provide a place where you will occasionally find interesting content generally not available elsewhere and make it easy to share that content with your social graph.<p>Scribd’s real value is in the unique content – not available elsewhere – that we have added to the web. It is that store of content and the community around it that has made Scribd popular among authors, students, business professionals, musicians, cooks, companies, publishers, and other wide-ranging types of people.<p>What HN made clear was that while building out that community, we could not ignore the reading experience itself.  When you find an interesting document on Scribd, you expect to be able to read it in an easy, natural way.   That’s what we’ve tried to build.<p>Feedback
When we've gotten feedback from HN, it has ended up dramatically improving the product.  I have every reason to expect the same will happen this time.  And I think we've shown that we do pay attention to what gets written here.  So, please, tell us what you think in the comments (or email me directly).  Kindly keep the discussion to the reading experience itself for now – that’s what we’re really trying to improve.<p>What else can we do to make Scribd the best reading experience on the web?  The whole team at Scribd is anxiously waiting to hear your answer.
======
axod
For comparison, here's the same pdf as viewed in Googles pdf viewer:
<http://tinyurl.com/33339j8>

My own feedback so far: Clicking download, should allow me to download the
document. It should not require me to create a dummy account, jump through
'invite friends' 'look at these other documents' hoops.

Also I really like the way Google has a scrollable list of thumbnailed pages.
Makes navigation very easy. Also search, and ability to change size of pages
with a simple click to allow different reading modes. Plus with Google, when
you click [download], it downloads. It doesn't try and get you to sign up.

Scribd looks like a big improvement on flash definitely though. The fact it's
using fonts rather than fonts rendered on an image is lost on me though.
Copy+Paste of text works fine in both viewers, and that's all that really
matters to me.

~~~
qhoxie
We have discussed some really cool things to do with page thumbnails. It is
one of the features I am particularly excited about, because I feel that
navigation of online viewers has a long way to go. How do you like the
slider/scrubber in terms of the nav experience?

~~~
axod
For me, the slider thing duplicates the functionality of the scrollbar(browser
generated), without adding anything else useful.

Also I'd much rather see the viewer separated from all the other clutter.
Didn't it used to be?

~~~
thacker
Try the fullscreen button -- is that what you're looking for?

~~~
axod
Thanks yes.

Also the "readcast" popup is pretty annoying IMHO, popping up each time,
obscuring the document.

~~~
thacker
If you have a Scribd account, visit
<http://www.scribd.com/account/edit#sharing> and turn off all the Readcast
options. The popup will be suppressed.

~~~
axod
I don't have an account. I don't understand why I want an account yet :) The
value proposition of what Scribd solves, is still puzzling to me... But thanks
for the info.

------
oops
I used to skip scribd search results and I won't anymore.

This is a million times better. Not just the reader (which is awesome) but the
site design itself. Obviously a lot of thought has gone into it. I really like
the way the footer/toolbar behaves when you reach the end of the page.

Well done!

~~~
amalcon
This. Very much this. I used to avoid scribd because I didn't want to deal
with the flash; now I'll probably favor it because I know I'll get a good
layout.

~~~
grinich
This is a fine comment and I agree with you, but you might want to avoid the
Reddit-speak around here. My guess is that's where the down-votes are from.
Here's another case: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321795>

~~~
amalcon
Eh, I don't really care about downvotes. I don't usually bother to post if all
I have to add is an agreement, but this was basically a request for opinions.

------
frossie
It does look really great, but more than that I wanted to thank you for a
really classy post. I certainly thought I was in a timewarp when I saw the
submission title.

------
jayliew
Hey guys, I'm trying to understand Scribd's purpose as it's written.

Re: purpose 1) For publishing a body of text, or a hosting literal file type,
there's already Posterous and, any free file hosting site.

Re: purpose 2) Discovering interesting content .. appears to be served pretty
well by the likes of Digg, Reddit, Twitter-link-mining apps, etc. Sharing,
there's many bookmarklets and "share this" buttons.

If the value is in unique content, but the content is provided by the crowd,
then for an individual content creator, what's in it for them? E.g. if I have
some really interesting content, I could post it on some public hosting site,
or own my own web site, and if it genuinely is interesting, it'll hit the main
page of a site like Digg/Reddit, and therefore sell itself.

I think the move away from plugin prison to HTML5 is great (am myself a
developer), but we know that the mass majority don't buy based on techie cool-
ness (if they did, then Apple's developer un-friendly-ness would drive them
all to Android!)

Sounds to me like you guys want to be the YouTube for documents? (which IIRC
wasn't that the goal in the beginning?) I guess like Smugmug's founder's
interview, there'll always be a high-end niche of any market (are you trying
conquer the "high-end" and "niche" documents? If so, then perhaps it might be
a branding problem?) As in, if people perceive you as an expensive brand, then
naturally people will _want_ to publish via Scribd. If I was writing an
article about animals, I might be better off publishing the article on
National Geographic's blog vs. my own no-name blog.

Other than that, awesome product! I guess I am still just trying to figure out
why I should put my documents on Scribd.

Always a fan of YC-startups. Good work, guys.

~~~
snowmaker
These are all great questions - thanks for giving me an opportunity to
clarify. Let me try to explain.

Regarding 1) We've done site surveys in the past to try to understand why
people upload to Scribd. Every time we do it, we find that the #1 reason is:
"Scribd gets me readers". Not "it hosts my docs for free", or "I like the
display format", or whatever. Readers is what they want, and so we have worked
very hard to maximize the number of readers we can get them.

I think file hosting sites are great, and Scribd is not attempting to replace
them, they just serve a different purpose. If you want to share a file with a
few friends, a file hosting site makes a lot of sense. But if you want to
build an audience of strangers, posting on Scribd gives you a surprisingly
good change of doing that.

If you don't believe me, try posting some doc you've written on Scribd. You
will probably be surprised by the number of random people bumping into your
document brought by related doc traffic, Scribd community traffic, search
engines, Facebook, Twitter, our mobile apps, and all the other ways we make
Scribd content discoverable.

re 2) Absolutely. Scribd isn't trying to be a content discovery site - other
sites do a great job of that. Rather, if we've done our job right, then when
you bump into interesting links on Digg and Reddit, some fraction of them will
happen to be hosted on Scribd. Now that we've launched the HTML5 reader, you
will hopefully enjoy clicking over to Scribd to read the document that Reddit
surfaced for you.

Re making Scribd a "high-end" brand - I think that is a terrific idea.
Creating that kind of brand is not easy, but it can be extremely valuable.

~~~
jayliew
Interesting, so you really are becoming more YouTube-for-documents like.

I prefer to upload a video clip to YouTube and then embed it on my site vs.
hosting it straight on my site, because if I upload it on YouTube, I get more
visitors who may learn about my video (that didn't visit my site), and those
may eventually be curious enough to visit my site.

So "discovery" is the big deal here, the "Scribd gets me [document] readers",
like "YouTube get me [video] watchers".

Good to know :) And def +1 for doing your market research / cust. dev!

------
benologist
All up I like what you're doing but it's broken in Opera. After playing in
Firefox:

\- Text selection is really awkward, drag too far and you select unrelated
stuff from nearby elements instead or as well

\- The navigation stuff feels really weird down the bottom, probably because
most software puts that stuff up the top

\- The blue/gray page strip is weird, it feels more like a zoom tool rather
than page navigation

\- In book/slideshow mode the length of the page and the toolbar being all the
way at the bottom makes me think I should still be scrolling

\- Zooming in book mode has some of the site components overlaying it, in
slideshow mode it adjusts properly

~~~
jjs
_\- Text selection is really awkward, drag too far and you select unrelated
stuff from nearby elements instead or as well_

Same in Chrome. Perhaps making images into CSS background images of the slides
would fix this.

------
tel
I've never had such a sudden swing in opinion about a product. Previously, I
can remember real panic in seeing your logo pop up: _this was about to be a
waste of 20 seconds of browsing._

Now I'm reading PDFs on my iPad in an experience that very nearly beats some
of the native apps.

You guys listened, pulled a herculean engineering job, and absolutely hit
aces. 1 day into it I can't say how I'll use your site, but I'm now excited to
find out. Fantastic job!

------
grinich
This is great. Kudos for having the guts to radically innovate while everybody
else just complains.

A few notes:

The interface seems very cluttered. I know you have lots of exciting features,
but if you want to make it about the content, then you need to find a way to
hide this complexity. On my mind: <http://uxhero.com/ux-theory/ipad-pages-vs-
microsoft-office/>

The right bar is really distracting and throws off the weight of the page. I
really don't care what other random folks have read the document. Not really
relevant until I'm tied in via FB.

I don't really understand why there are the different modes. Slideshows should
be in slideshow mode; text should scroll. I still have to scroll with book
mode, so what benefit does it offer?

~~~
qhoxie
That is great feedback. With an undertaking such as this, UX is definitely
going to be a big issue. While we were careful and thoughtful in creating the
current interface, we surely have plenty of work to do in terms of the overall
experience. That's one of the aspects I am most excited about, though. We have
so much more to work with - we will be able to make great strides in usability
over the coming weeks and months.

------
carterschonwald
I want to see how it works on mathy latexed pdf documents. I've yet to
experience an online reader that handles that robustly.

~~~
pytxab
Check it out on this baby:

<http://www.scribd.com/documents/5/Paper-5>

That's a LaTeX paper by one of the guys who built the reader.

~~~
gtt
in my browser (ff 3.5.9) fonts are very small $(

~~~
mikexstudios
Try clicking the 'zoom in' button in the bottom bar.

~~~
shawndrost
It should probably be zoomed in more by default. (2 clicks more seemed right
to me -- safari on a 13' macbook)

------
motvbi
I personally would like the pages of the document scroll horizontal rather
than vertical. What would be really cool is identifying the columns in a pdf
document and formatting them such that it shows two or three narrow columns
that I can scroll through. Basically something similar to this
(<http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/>) on the web. This would make reading on the web
a lot more easier than it is today.

~~~
qhoxie
That's a really interesting idea. Given our other view modes, I don't see why
we could not do a horizontal scroll as well. I'll keep this in mind.

------
rit
I just saw the new HTML docs for the first time using Chrome on Linux and it
blew my mind. It needs a bit of polish still it seems on some of the font
anti-aliasing but overall it's amazing. Lightweight, easy to scroll, fast and
oh - look... my CPU usage isn't spiking to 70% because no flash is running :)

Great work guys - you really have upped the ante and I hope given Flash the
deathstroke by proving it's doable.

I'd recommend if possible that you provide some of your tools and code to the
web as open source - if you can make it easier for other people to dump Flash
you could truly start a revolution worth joining.

~~~
matthiaskramm
We're looking into releasing as much of our HTML5 conversion as possible as
open source. For starters, basic technical details on how our conversion works
will appear on our tech blog <http://coding.scribd.com> in the next few days.

~~~
jasim
Awesome! I don't think even Google did that.

------
phreanix
I'm not sure if this is happening to anyone else, but I'm thinking the
viewmode default should be on 'slideshow'?

Otherwise looks great! I can't wait to see it formally launch. Is there a way
to upload documents in different formats now to test it out?

~~~
phreanix
LOL, your usernames are different from the original poster, but I'm guessing a
few fellows from scribd HQ are monitoring this thread. =)

Thanks for the responses! I'm assuming then that the default viewmode will
change depending on the document (ex. an e-book will default to 'book', and a
pptx doc will default to slideshow)?

I will also 2nd the request for keyboard shortcuts as suggested below. Maybe
activate page-up & page-down in full screen mode.

As also mentioned already, page thumbnails would be great.

~~~
qhoxie
Yes we will do some detection based on document type for the default view
mode.

------
blasdel
About 9 months ago one of the Scribd cofounders emailed me to follow up on
comments I made on HN tearing his product to shreds, and while he was
surprised that I had detailed answers to his questions, I think I was even
more surprised that he was up for a long involved conversation about the
problems, given the sorry state of his product. I got the impression at the
time that they were focusing on the site and community to the detriment of
making the content actually readable.

Now the product is finally living up to the founders :)

~~~
snowmaker
That conversation was one of the pieces that led to this change. Thanks for
taking the time to talk to me about the product.

------
nopal
I'm very glad to see you guys moving in this direction. I, frankly, hated
Scribd before, even though you guys had a relatively nice PDF reader.

The only suggestion I have right now is to have the full screen button take
into account the longest side of the page and the browser window size will
scaling. I think it would be more useful to have the shortest side of the
window be the limiting factor with the scaling, rather than scaling to the
longest side of the window. That way, content isn't hidden.

------
techiferous
Clickable: <http://www.scribd.com/html5>

------
CrazedGeek
Selecting text is a bit odd for me- on slide 4's bottom text, for example,
selecting a large part of it selects the whole slide. (Chrome w/ beta channel)

~~~
qhoxie
There are some oddities with selections because of layering, but this is
something I often notice in native PDF viewers. Have you seen any particular
patterns which cause this?

~~~
CrazedGeek
The only pattern that I can recognize is that it's impossible to select an
entire line character-by-character with the mouse- I can do it by triple-
clicking the line, though.

~~~
qhoxie
That's helpful, thanks!

------
ganjianwei
I'd like to see larger up/down scrolling buttons. Fitt's Law is working
against me when I try to click on those. I think they should be larger because
it's the controls that users are most likely to use. Maybe Marco Arment's
Instapaper pagination will give you some ideas:
<http://blog.instapaper.com/post/414438490>

Overall, a huge improvement. Good work!

------
angrycoder
There is something very, very wrong with your search. Doing a search for
'Lisp' yields 22 pages all containing the same book 'On Lisp'. I tried doing
an advanced search on titles only and got the same result.

On a somewhat related note. I find it odd that you don't have a specific topic
or category for Comp Sci/Programming. Just a topic for 'Science and
Technology'. What is the difference between a category and a topic?

------
jasonkester
Nice. Any word on when we'll be able to use this in conjunction with the API?

I just pushed a new build of Twiddla that allows viewing of the new Scribd
HTML5 docs. Anybody feel like doing a bit of testing for us?

    
    
      - go to http://www.twiddla.com/1
      - browse one of these urls:
        http://www.scribd.com/documents/5/Paper-5
        http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5

------
grayrest
How are you handling the legal issues around the fonts? My understanding of
most foundries' rules is that pdf/flash embedding is ok but eot/otf embedding
is not. I can see by playing with font families in firebug that you're
subsetting heavily on your html5 example. is that all that's necessary?

------
jacoblyles
Old Scribd used to wrap open-format documents in a proprietary, platform-
limited viewer. Old Scribd was evil. New Scribd takes documents and makes them
even more accessible and open. New Scribd is good.

It will take awhile to get the bad taste out of my mouth, but this is a huge
step in the right direction.

------
btilly
I would suggest typing the up and down arrows at the bottom to two keys, j and
k would be appropriate. Then have the mouse-overs for those buttons include
the keyboard shortcuts. Yes, you can accomplish the same thing with spacebar
and arrow keys, but it is annoying to jump to a spot halfway through a slide
then have to scroll.

The functionality is already there. But I personally don't like to have to aim
my mouse to navigate when I'm reading a long document.

Another idea to consider is creating an iframe version of the page, which
would allow you something closer to the old experience. The nice thing about
that is to allow third party websites to transparently embed scribd documents
in their pages.

Other than that it looks good and is more pleasant for me than your flash
interface.

~~~
matthiaskramm
We totally love your j/k keybinding idea. Consider it implemented. Maybe we'll
additionally do s/w, a binding that comes more naturally to people unfamiliar
with VI, but familiar with computer games :)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
+1 for J/K. J and K for navigation is becoming quite prevalent, as seen in
websites as varied as Google Reader and The Big Picture.

------
fragmede
Good job! Bits of feedback:

'Back' doesn't work. When I got to the bottom of the intro link, and clicked
the upload button (just because I could), and then hit 'back', it brought me
back to the top of the document instead of where I left off, which breaks
normal browser behavior. I'm not sure what's causing this, because when I hit
back, I do see the page counter at the bottom show 20/22 briefly before
getting reset to 1.

Others have already mentioned not putting the navigation at the bottom so it
doesn't look like spam.

Is an Arc90 readability-like feature in the works for those of us who want to
_read_ and not fight the designer who thinks grey-on-slightly-darker-grey with
a hard-to-read font is edgy? (Site is currently broken when trying to use
readability.)

~~~
qhoxie
Hmm, that first problem should not be the case. I'm unable to reproduce it in
my browser, but we will look into it.

What exactly do you mean by the nav at the bottom looking like spam? I assume
you are referring to the sticky toolbar?

Also, if you would like, we are doing our best to keep track of issues people
are seeing. You are welcome to add your issues to this Google form:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dF9URVpxVEZ...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dF9URVpxVEZfaElQcGtBTmxOVXpFYVE6MQ)

~~~
fragmede
Filed! ('back' works elsewhere, was broken on Chrome 4, winxp) You might want
to use something that will capture the user agent from the browser itself as
well as asking the user about what browser they are using. AFAIK, Google docs
does not let you do this.

The sticky toolbar looks like spam seen on other sites, esp because of the
Readcast FB/Twitter share bubble that pops-up. (Not quite as obnoxious as the
double-green line underline, but still.) In addition, the header that you _do_
see when you first load the page draws attention away from the bottom
navigation.

~~~
qhoxie
Great, thanks for filing that. We will look into better presentations of the
bottom toolbar.

------
ihodes
Beautiful! Great app, guys.

The things that stands out to me right now, both good and bad, are

1) how much faster it loads compared to Google's reader

2) how much laggier it is when scrolling compared to Google's reader

3) When I land on the page, I look to the right and see half the page taken up
with meta-content (ratings etc) – it's pretty dominant. Perhaps there's a way
to tone it down a bit?

4) The selection issues other have brought up

5) It's beautiful!

6) I'll be using you guys a lot more (reading, and eventual publishing) now
that you've done this :)

(Used the link axod provided: <http://tinyurl.com/33339j8>)

~~~
newtonapple
As for #3. Try our fullscreen mode. It's awesome.

------
thunk
Wow. That is _gorgeous_. You've just made me really excited for the future of
the web.

------
zhyder
This is seriously impressive stuff. It's wonderful to be able to right-click
and run 'Inspect Element' on everything. Of course that's not the motivation
for doing it (you laid out the real reasons well), but it helps in winning
over geeks like me.

Also kudos on executing things in the right order: start with commodity tech
but build out innovative and useful features. Then rewrite the underlying tech
to make leaps in the level of refinement.

------
qeorge
I like your concept, but I'm sour on your company because of the blatant
piracy that's allowed. I know filtering content is hard, but I think you could
do a better job.

For example:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=paul+graham+hackers+and+paint...](http://www.google.com/search?q=paul+graham+hackers+and+painters+site%3Ascribd.com)

You can replace Hackers and Painters with most any book, and it will come up
on Scribd.

Just my $.02.

------
mzl
As several other commenters, this change actually makes scribd usable to me
(flash is not stable enough to run the scribd viewer on my linux box).

My remaining problem with scribd is that there are documents that I would like
to buy (recipes), but since I live outside of USA, that doesn't work. Would
Paypal really be so hard to use for international payments? Or is it a problem
with regulations?

~~~
snowmaker
Thanks! Yes, Scribd never worked well under linux before.

Unfortunately, the international payment restriction is totally a legal issue,
not a technical one. What country do you live in? We are finding ways around
the legal issues country by country.

~~~
mzl
I live in Sweden. Unless there is some simplifying EU framework, I guess that
Sweden is not that high on the list (which is understandable).

------
ErrantX
On a separate note: the new reader looks great. One comment; it;s a bit wide
for netbook screens. I appreciate it is not possible to support all screen
sizes but us netbook users are a reasonable share now :) The page content fits
but the tools/info is off to the right.

In fact everything on this screen appears "larger than life" (Chrome Dev
channel on Windows XP, Samsung NC10)

~~~
pytxab
Excellent point about the netbook screens. Thanks!

------
yellowbkpk
I've spoken with a few lawyers who would love for Scribd to allow deep links
into PDFs/content that would bring a user to a specified page and highlight a
certain range in a document. Think "document permalink" so that they can send
the URL to their colleagues.

Also, commenting and annotating on the doc. i.e. highlight a paragraph and add
a line of text in a bubble.

~~~
tlrobinson
That would be neat, kind of like GitHub's links to a specific line or ranges
of lines.

------
varjag
Some text in the presentation is not browser-searchable (e.g. looking for
"navigate" in Chrome does not work for me)

------
Judson
I can't tell you how great the experience was! The one minor UX issue (and its
more of a feeling than anything else) is the controls at the bottom. It just
kinda feels like I can't see something. maybe the actual controls are too
close to the bottom of the page (maybe its my monitor), who knows.

But the experience was excellent!

~~~
qhoxie
Really glad you are enjoying it. Are you talking about the toolbar auto-
hiding? That was a decision we went back and forth on, so I would imagine it
is not set in stone. Would you prefer it expanded at all times?

~~~
pclark
i really disliked the way it auto-hid. I'd rather it remain visible.

~~~
profgubler
Agreed. Maybe instead of auto hide, always leave it on with an option to hide
it.

------
drusenko
guys, this looks awesome. it's obvious that a ton of work went into it.
congrats!

i really like the change of direction, too -- it's becoming more and more
obvious that betting your company on flash is not a good long-term strategic
move.

but if nothing else, i'm happy that it makes my reading experience so much
better :)

------
ErrantX
One thing I've never got to the bottom of is: do the vacuum'd in documents
(link the links added to HN submissions) get stored/archived and made
accessible on Scribd?

That's never felt a very comfortable thing to me; though I admit my main
awkwardness is in how it is automatically appended here.

~~~
thacker
All documents uploaded to Scribd (either automatically or manually) are stored
in S3 and are available on Scribd until the document is deleted from Scribd.
If you find your content was uploaded to Scribd without your permission, you
should contact our support team; they'll take care of it for you.

~~~
ErrantX
Does it appear in document lists? Or is knowing the URL the only way in?

The "ethical" concern I have is that it encourages behaviour like that shown
on hn - with the scrape link added automatically. There is a distinct
difference there compared to people uploading documents themselves (IMO
anyway).

Of course if it's stored but not indexed that feels fine.

(thanks for clarifying)

~~~
thacker
HN is using the "slurp" API we make available at scribd.com/developers.
Documents uploaded via the slurping system are marked as private and uploaded
to a fixed "slurp" account for which no one (outside of Scribd) has the
password.

------
justin
Nice post. I've always thought that scribd provided a service for people who
wanted to share correctly formatted documents, even if it had the downside of
being locked into Flash it was better than nothing. The HTML5 reader is a lot
nicer.

I'm still planning on copying all your social features.

------
tedshroyer
I think if you could do a left-right layout or ajax one at a time for the
document pages, then it would feel more like reading a book and increase the
likelihood that users will notice the bottom tool bar and use it for
navigation instead of the side scroll.

------
RichardPrice
I found this a terrific reading experience. I love the fact that everything
just appears in one page.

It's a huge achievement to pull this off, preserving the fidelity with the
original text. Many congrats to Scribd for pushing the state of document-
sharing forward like this.

~~~
qhoxie
This is something we are quite proud of. You will get to read more about how
it all came together when some of our engineers like matthiaskramm publish
their blog posts.

------
ALee
Awesome upgrade. I've always wanted to read Scribd documents on my phone, but
had to do the bass-ackwards method of downloading to PDF then uploading to my
phone.

Are my existing docs in HTML5? What happens now to embeds?

~~~
thacker
We're in the process of back-converting existing documents to HTML5. Most of
your recent public documents should be converted now or soon, with private
docs to come later.

------
amock
I just tried the site and it's broken on WebOS. The thing I was looking
forward to the most was being able to use Scribd on my Pre, so that's what
would make Scribd the best reading experience for me.

~~~
pytxab
Totally hear you. For the first version we focused on making it work on
browsers that support @font-face. The next version will be all about making it
work pretty well (if not perfectly) on browsers that don't.

That's a great point, though, thanks for letting us know how important that is
to you.

------
pclark
insanely great.

------
jasonkester
In FireFox 3.0.19, it fails to render images or fonts, throws two javascript
exceptions, then pegs the CPU at 100% until you kill the process.

Nice in Chrome though.

~~~
pytxab
Whoa. That's .... not good. What OS? And you're viewing the
<http://www.scribd.com/html5> document?

------
tlrobinson
Suggestion: left/right arrow keys should map to the previous/next page
buttons.

edit: it does in slideshow mode but not the other modes.

------
fnid2
The font in _that_ document is really hard to read at times. Pixelated and
blurry. And the little tool bar at the bottom popping up all the the time is
annoying.

That said, I applaud the effort and see it as a HUGE step forward from the old
flash version.

~~~
apphacker
Use the zoom.

------
danieldon
First of all, the HTML5 documents look great.

However, how do you deal with font licensing? You are using @font-face, but
this is still not permitted for many commercial fonts, even if they allow
embedding in PDF.

~~~
blasdel
[http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-
foundri...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries)

------
marcinw
Wow, this is seriously awesome. I always avoided Scribd because I could never
just download the PDF, but with HTML5 view + fullscreen mode I am happy. Now
time to overtake Slideshare... ;P

------
rythie
Minor point, do the "copy" buttons really need to be flash still?

~~~
qhoxie
Actually, they do. It is unfortunate, but flash is the best way to access the
clipboard from the browser. There are some slick implementations that make the
use of flash less evident, but if you use something like flashblock, you will
surely know. See: <http://github.com/mojombo/clippy>

------
sandGorgon
Just a suggestion - say if I skip ahead to the 20'th page, then Scribd will
load all 19 pages and the 20'th page.

That might not really be necessary and it does make the loading slower.

~~~
mikelikespie
This behaviour shouldn't be happening. Which browser are you using? How are
you skipping pages?

~~~
sandGorgon
chromium on linux - I skip ahead by clicking the small dashed bar (which has
as many dashes as pages)

~~~
mikelikespie
Thanks. We'll definitely look into this.

------
dhouston
this is really impressive -- high fidelity, search, scrolling, no waiting for
flash to load. congrats guys! we'd love to get this kind of previewing on
dropbox

------
mhartl
For those curious about how to _pronounce_ Scribd (as I was for a long time),
it rhymes with "ribbed", as in, "Scribd for her pleasure."

------
gruseom
Amazing work.

------
aw3c2
Accessing the site with Javascript disabled, I click Download and nothing
happens.

------
barmstrong
Nice work guys!

------
Maro
Is there a vacuum URL for HTML5?

------
joubert
I can't view docs on iPad?

~~~
qhoxie
What problems are you having? We did tests on an iPad and created a rather
sleek, lightweight version of the viewer for it.

~~~
joubert
I can see a list of docs, but can't seem to open them (the ipad opens the pdf
just fine). I thought clicking on the thumbnail or doc name would open it.

~~~
qhoxie
Any luck with this link: [http://www.scribd.com/documents/15556326/Structure-
and-Inter...](http://www.scribd.com/documents/15556326/Structure-and-
Interpretation-of-Computer-Programs-SICP)

~~~
joubert
Nope. There's the download button. There's the thumb and title. There doesn't
seem to be a way for me to view the doc, short of clicking the download button
for the PDF (which works). Actually, why go through the trouble of htmlizing
the doc when i can just view the PDF (which renders beautifully on iPad)?

------
alexcharlie
SEO+++++++++

~~~
earl
Um, google was already indexing all documents on scribd. And while it's
possible this will result in better SEO, I think it's more likely that all the
html necessary to build documents with layout will confuse google's
crawler/parser rather than help it. So on balance, I'd bet this is at best
neutral for SEO and at worst pretty hard on it. I think Scribd really is doing
this for the reading experience.

------
mos1
The #1 problem I have with scribd is that you appear to be unapologetic
content thieves.

Take, as an example, the [scribd] links that HN generates automatically.
That's your earliest investor automatically stealing and rehosting content in
violation of both your TOS and the law, and you do nothing about it.

You must be aware of it, but you don't stop it. That certainly gives the
appearance that you don't care that you make a large portion of your money by
screwing over rightsholders.

Truly, I believe the world is a worse place because your business exists, and
that if you shuttered your business today the gains would vastly outweigh the
losses experienced by all. I understand that the DMCA allows you to operate
with impunity, but legal doesn't mean ethical. In this case, it's just abuse
of a loophole in a poorly written law.

This is my entirely honest opinion. I continue to hope you'll close down
scribd, or at a minimum engage in a MASSIVE rethinking of how you deal with
copyrighted content. I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I simply
can't understand how [scribd] links are anything other than a tacit admission
that your real business is the monetization of pirated documents.

------
earl
Looks gorgeous. I'd make the tool tray fall down a bit faster, but it's
awesome. And I love the subtle blue lights across the bottom.

------
puredemo
So you basically want to make scribd.com some sort of PDF aggregator?

~~~
blasdel
It was already a PDF/DOC/etc. aggregator -- that's always been their entire
business model.

What's new is that they're demonstrating that they care about people actually
being able to read the content.

