Thanks. I really don't understand the purpose of these annoying poorly implemented document sharing sites when the original format is widely supported.
I believe the purpose is to "drive traffic", "build user base", "engage users", and later "monetize". Without supplying much value in the process, which is why we are annoyed.
There is a purpose. Several sites that depend on document submissions of different formats (like pdfs, ppts, word docs, etc.) might need an efficient way to render these document previews on a page. Those sites can use an api from scribd, documentcloud, etc. to display these files inline.
There is a certain very valid and extremely useful use case to sites like this, of course, linking random internet users to pdfs through them shouldn't be one of them ;)
I am in no way affiliated with any of these services, just came across this use case while building something for someone in the past.
I think that's not doing DocumentCloud justice. While I realize this is a precarious argument, I find it hard to believe that Jeremy Ashkenas, an active HN member, creator of Backbone and CoffeeScript, and someone I've come to respect, would work for a company that offers no value.
Maybe you're right, but in this case I do think it is somewhat transitive. Based on what I know about Jeremy, I'm inclined to think he is successful enough work somewhere that he considers 'worthy'. But I'm not certain enough to strongly argue this point :-).
DocumentCloud was created to help journalists, researchers and archivists, by allowing them to embedded, annotate, and search PDF documents in news stories. Take this CBC new story for example [0]. This allows media outlets to publish the documents "inline" with their own content, rather than asking the reading to download something. DocumentCloud works with many major news outlets (NY Times, PBS, Associated Press, etc), and they are a major playing in this space, if not the biggest [1]. Their code is open-source too, so if you think something could be improved, send a pull request [2].
Even if their code could be improved, it's still obnoxious. Downloading something sucks if it's a weird format that requires users to hunt for an application to view it with, but these are PDFs.
Chalk it up to personal preference I guess. DocumentCloud shows the document "inline", but you always have the option of downloading the original document too [1]. So, if anything, they are attempting to serve both categories.
Why should anyone create PDFs that are 100's of MBs in size?
At some point "convenience" becomes annoyance. Because instead of encouraging people to do the sensible thing like breaking documents into smaller, digestible pieces (e.g. small PDFs, page images, etc.), they are encouraged to be lazy (e.g. throw a 500 page document in a scanner that outputs PDF, and upload the oversized result to one of these annoying sites). Then the average user tries to access it and she has to wait patiently while the browser tries to load this ridiculously large file, or her browser just chokes. So, "time saved" on the front end - easy scanning of docs to PDF - can often lead to "time spent" dealing with the mess on the receiving end. The uploader gets convenience, the user gets annoyance.
Why the hell would a PDF for public use be more than a hundred megabytes? You'd think the solution to people being too retarded to properly use a PDF conversion tool is teaching them how to use it, not building a website that thrashes PDFs and hogs your computer to make sure they don't annoy anyone.
Thanks, I can see some value to it now, and it does have lower bandwidth requirements than the PDF. I think Scribd has completely switched me off to document hosting sites.
That being said (1) the link you posted is not posted within an embedded context, so there's no benefit as you described, as far as I can tell; and (2) I can't zoom in properly since it's using GIFs, which is really annoying because now I have to click a link, visit it and wait for it to load just so that I can click the .PDF link -- I'd rather click a PDF link to begin with.
