Monday, April 16, 2007
Scribd, YouTube for Books, Contains Library of Copyrighted eBooks
Scribd is an online library that everyone can contribute to. It's been called the "YouTube for Books", and it's an apt comparison. The ease and social sharing nature of the site as well as a familiar user interface all point towards a self-conscious mimicry of the video sharing site.
You can quickly upload documents onto the site to share with the entire world without even needing to sign up. Other people can read your documents inside their browsers, or download them as PDF, Word documents, or even as audiobooks. Another neat trick borrowed from YouTube is embedding: you can embed a ScribdPaper viewer to display a document inside a blog post or other webpage. An embeddable MP3 player that turns text into speech is also available.
Like YouTube, there's also a whole lot of copyrighted content on the site from O'Reilly computer manuals to the latest Harry Potter book. How long it takes for copyright owners to discover the YouTube for books is an open question.
Tags:
You can quickly upload documents onto the site to share with the entire world without even needing to sign up. Other people can read your documents inside their browsers, or download them as PDF, Word documents, or even as audiobooks. Another neat trick borrowed from YouTube is embedding: you can embed a ScribdPaper viewer to display a document inside a blog post or other webpage. An embeddable MP3 player that turns text into speech is also available.
Like YouTube, there's also a whole lot of copyrighted content on the site from O'Reilly computer manuals to the latest Harry Potter book. How long it takes for copyright owners to discover the YouTube for books is an open question.
Tags: Labels: Technology
