In an insightful article, Bobbie Johnson, a tech writer for The guardian, narrates how Scribd has scripted its amazing success story. Scribd.com – now publishing from bestselling novels to music – is much more than merely a ‘YouTube for ubiquitous documents’.
In fact, it is increasingly becoming the avenue online to visit for documents of every nature. It comprises everything from recipes and electronic books to PowerPoint presentations and academic papers. They are all shareable and searchable for the website’s estimated user base of not less than 50 million.
As the writer notes: “What YouTube happens to be for video, or Flickr’s for photography, Scribd is rapidly becoming same for the written word; not bad for something, which started out as an incidental offshoot of a completely different project.”
The website was formed after Adler and Jared Friedman, his close college friend and currently Scribd’s chief technologist, applied for the 2006 Y Combinator programme that offers monetary support and mentoring to budding entrepreneurs.
After working on some unsuccessful ideas, the duo joined hands with Tikhon Bernstam, and thought of a novel concept – a website to let users share their files easily – not just academic papers, but also short stories, books, PowerPoint presentations, sheet music, recipes and anything users wish to publish online.
The results are there for all to see! The website currently ranks among the world’s top 100. It has over 35 billion words in its vast system. The site users can simply scan in their documents of any sort, before being converted into what they call an iPaper (a Flash-based reading format) or widely made available to share online.
i use scribd to research a lot of my projects and they have quite a collection of material related to my topics, its a very useful site and i had no idea it had such a humble beginning.