I realize that someone, somewhere, is running webtv and would love a service like Scribd. That person is not able to use it because it's a flash and javascript nightmare.

The rest of us, who have regular PCs with the modern software that scribd requires, have document readers for all of the various file formats. The very worst of these readers is faster and more pleasant to use than the best scribd rendering.

Lastly, as usual, TechCrunch measures success in terms of users and investor capital. Ask yourself: Does it really make sense to measure the success of a free hosting service in terms of unique users?

This is sad news. Just when you thought flash was dead for all but video, it's now being used to show text.

I will be charitable here (you can tell I am not a huge fan either!). I have seen a couple of people use the site, and they use it to publish short stories and such. They could always post it to a blog, but I think Scribd gives them nice search engine optimization. Even for this legitimate use case, the flash player is a bit of a turn-off for me.

But the reason I am not a huge fan is the sheer extent of copyright abuse going on there. Turning a blind eye to it - hiding behind DMCA really - is not kosher, and I frankly wouldn't want to do business that way, no matter what the profit.

i wonder how many of those visits resulted in a comment on the referring page complaining about scribd and asking for the actual pdf...

Man, you guys are harsh. Even if it isn't a service you yourself would use, why bash a service useful for others? The first goal of many Y Combinator startups is to make something people want, and Scribd clearly fits the bill if millions of people are using it.

Flash provides a PDF viewer component. I'd like to use it because I intend to adorn documents on my pages with additional controls and interactions. I can't inject my own UI and logic into your desktop PDF viewer.

Unfortunately, this Flash component only handles PDFs, not the wide spectrum of document formats. If I could reliably convert Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. server side to PDF, then I would be a very happy boy.

Does anyone know of any such software that can do this? I doubt Scribd would be the one to provide it, but I would really love a simple `anything2pdf` that "just works": `cat foo.doc | anything2pdf > foo.pdf`

Screw scribd. Give me something that converts pdfs into straight (x)html, and I will be happy.

Fuck the haters. Scribd is awesome because it's a great utility for easily sharing your shitty Word docs and PDFs, and there is obviously demand for it as Scribd and all the Scribd-like knockoff sites each have more users than your worthless websites. Complaining about Scribd putting text in Flash is like complaining about how ugly Myspace pages are: while you were out bitching, a few talented people were out giving the masses what they wanted, no matter how many standards got violated, and will subsequently get paid for it.