Miscellaneous

Cool Online Tool: Scribd

By Bill Gratsch

Ran accross a really cool online tool this week, iPaper from Scribd:

Scribd is a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds. E-books, presentations, essays, academic papers, newsletters, photo albums, school work, and sheet music are just a few of the different kinds of documents you can publish and share on Scribd.
Scribd provides:

• A simple yet powerful method of publishing and distributing your own electronic books and documents in a variety of formats - for free.
• A vibrant global community of eager publishers, readers and collaborators that offer great content and constructive feedback.
• A massive, perpetually growing library of open, community-generated content.
• A secure, flexible private document managment system.

I don't know how long it has been available, but here is an example of iPaper at work: Warren Buffett's Annual Letter to Shareholders, which is normally posted as a pdf.   Seemed faster and more efficient than viewing via Adobe Reader (even after it finally loads).  It also apparently allows you to post other formats for easy online viewing without having to first convert to pdf.   Finally, you can embed the a document into your own website similar to the Buffett letter example above.   

Give the tool a test drive.  Good stuff.  

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on March 04, 2008 (boomark / email).