The Trouble With Scribd

Online Publishing: The Trouble with Scribd

Scribd is great for generating unexpected traffic for your documents. Things you may have had written up and tucked away on your computer for years can suddenly come to life by folks actually reading and downloading and commenting on your files.

That's nice.

Unfortunately, once things get that nice, they will hardly ever stay that nice.

Imagine you were in charge of a website that generates traffic (in the tens of millions by their claims) for documents of tons of people. You would maybe not feel like the god of the Internet (we've established who that is), but probably at least like his vice president.

Such a burden to carry on his shoulders, or rather, on his neck is the fate of Jason Bentley, the executioner of Scribd on behalf of all those squealers over violated copyrights on the Internet.

If you have any documents on Scribd that enjoy readership, you're bound to receive a notification from Jason at some point in time which kindly informs you that your document has been removed from Scribd due to copyright violations.

Not that there is necessarily anything to that claim.

You might receive that note even if the document in question consisted exclusively of words you just made up with your 3-year old daughter and reinvented the alphabet to write them.

Jason couldn't care less.

The good thing is, he can press the "undo" button once you explain to him that the document was actually yours. ALL yours.
But after the umpteenth time, the fun of this sort of conversation loses its spark.

So, if your time is precious to you, you might want to consider alternatives.
Especially, since Scribd is MESSY, and they want to make if ever harder for users to locate their own documents in order to make things more "social."

I mean, you're ANTI-social if all you want to do is just post a document, right?

Right, Jason. Or Trip. Your majesties... Whoever.



Alternatives are scarce and have their flaws, too.

Issuu doesn't seem to be nearly as fussy as Scribd, but they also don't generate traffic.
You can embed a music file into your document (interesting for musician-writers... hehe), but the view of the document is even more messy than it is on Scribd. Advantage: you can download your doc in the original format (Scribd doesn't feature RTF in their download menu).

One of the best features of Scribd (which Issuu doesn't yet) is that you can upload revised versions of your documents replacing the older version without losing stats or any other settings and attributions. The big bummer about this, though, is that Scribd's paranoid copyright offenders detector may just decide that your new version is infringing copyrights, and that may be the last you saw of your doc.


Another document hosting service where one does not have to fear the wrath of Jason Almighty is Thinkfree, not your "tens of million readers" "Youtube for documents" just yet, but at least you can rest assured that the copyright headhunters who would, if they could charge us for breathing air just because they farted into it, or for using the alphabet won't track down your memoirs too easily here, so it's definitely a haven for all those documents that don't survive on Scribd...


One neat thing about Scribd, though, which can make your trip there worthwhile:

If you have a document with hyperlinks in it, you can download the document in PDF format with all the links working (Issuu doesn't generate the links), which is a feature that you would normally need Adobe Acrobat Pro for, an apparatus so large and costly that it would be more convenient to house a camel in your kitchen...

All in all: Scribd has its pros. But be prepared to lose some time and nerves over it.
Most "services" on the Internet, once they (or their head) get that big, never give you anything without asking for their pound of flesh in return...

P.S.: Currently trying out hubpages, another new appraised alternative to Scribd, but trying to publish anything there seems to be an even bigger pain in the butt than having to deal with Jason Almighty...


Update (Jan. 4, 2010): After half a year of innovations (or lack thereof), some things have changed, yielding the momentary consensus that hubpages is not an equivalent to Scribd, but merely a different type of blogging (= "hubbing") for those interested in generating revenue from their writing. Hubpages insist that your content be absolutely exclusive to their site only...

Over at Scribd, good ol' Jason has finally thrown in the inquisitorial towel and has been leaving Scribd users in peace, leaving the only disadvantages of Scribd being extremely slow opening of pages and documents during busy times, the constant innovations true to what seems to be Scribd policy: "Why make it easy, if you can make it complicated?" and the fact that Scribd documents require logging in in order to download them.