Scribd

Scribd (www.scribd.com) is an online document sharing service and a virtual document library where users can search, browse, rate, upload, and share all kind of documents (jokes, facts, stories, legal, presentations, etc.). It’s like Youtube for text files.

Scribd is not just a carbon copy of YouTube.

They borrowed a lot of the basic design principles, but also took advantage of the written format by including flexible file formats for download and upload along with some interesting analytics tracking.

Documents can be displayed and embedded as html or the under-utilized, and faster-than-a-pdf, Flash paper format. They can be downloaded as .pdf’s, .docs, .txt, and even .mp3 files. The mp3 version is created by Scribd’s text-to-speech package (powered by Nuance) that lets you listen to the text of your document in a quivering British accent.

Here’s an example of how we embed a scribd document: