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Scribd (pronounced /ˈskrɪbd/) is a document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. Scribd was founded by Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam, and Jared Friedman in 2006.^[2] Scribd's major competitors are Docstoc, edocr, WePapers, and Issuu.^[3]

History[link]

The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler was at Harvard and had a conversation with his father, John R. Adler, about the difficulties of publishing academic papers. He teamed up with cofounders Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam and they attended Y Combinator in Cambridge in the summer of 2006^{[citation needed]}. Scribd was launched from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.^[4] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store,^[5] and shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd.^[6] Over 150 publishers including Random House, Wiley, Workman, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, Harvard University Press and Stanford University Press are now associated with Scribd. ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009.

In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and MediaBistro. ^[7] Over 100 media companies now use Scribd’s branded reader to embed source material into their stories. In August 2010, news stories began to break and documents and books began to go viral on Scribd including the overturned Prop 8 and HP’s lawsuit against Mark Hurd’s move to Oracle Corporation.

Adler is currently the CEO of Scribd, where he is responsible for the product and strategic direction of the company. BusinessWeek named Adler one of the “Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010”.^[8]

Awards/recognition[link]

In September 2009, BusinessWeek named Scribd one the “World’s Most Intriguing Startups”.^[9] In December 2009, Forbes named Scribd one of its “10 Hot Startups”. ^[10] Fast Company named Scribd “One of its Top 10 Most Innovative Media Companies” in February 2010.^[11]

In May 2010, Scribd was recognized as one of the “2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies” by Lead411.^[12]

On September 1, 2010, the World Economic Forum announced the company as a Technology Pioneer for 2011.^[13][14] After the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Award, Time Magazine named Scribd one of the “10 Start-Ups that Will Change Your Life”.^[15]

Timeline[link]

In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones. ^[16] In April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast"^[17] which allows automatic sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.^[18] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the f8 Developer Conference.

^[19] Scribd rolled-out a re-design on September 13, 2010 to become according to TechCrunch, “the social network for reading.”^[20]

Financials[link]

The company was initially funded with US$12,000 from Y Combinator, and received over US$3.7 million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group.^[21][22] In December 2008, the company raised US$9 million in a second round of funding, led by Charles River Ventures with re-investment from Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group, and hired as president George Consagra, former Bebo COO and managing director of Organic Inc.^[23] Consagra left Scribd and became CEO of Good Guide in August 2010.

David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribd’s board of directors in January 2010. Scribd hired Robert Macdonald, former head of media and publisher partnerships at Google, in July 2010 as its SVP of business development and opened a New York office.^[24] Scribd also utilizes Google Advertisements for revenue generation.^[25] It also makes revenue from Scribd Store sales.^[26] In August 2010 it began beta testing premium services.

Prior to the $9 million round, Scribd was valued at $10 million. Their current valuation is likely much higher.^[3]

Technology[link]

Scribd used iPaper, which is a rich document format similar to PDF built for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page.^[27] iPaper was built with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPhone).^[28] All major document types can be formatted into iPaper including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents, OpenOffice.org XML documents, and PostScript files.

All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be private or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed documents in their original layout regardless of file format.

Scribd iPaper requires that Flash cookies are enabled, which is the default setting in Flash.^[29] If the requirements are not met, there is no message; the white or gray display area is simply blank.

Scribd launched its own API to power external/third-party applications, however, only a few applications use this API. ^[30] Its revenue model has gained coverage on numerous blogs such as TechCrunch.

On May 5, 2010, Scribd launched the largest implementation of HTML5 to date at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. ^[31] TechCrunch reported that Scribd is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”"^[32] In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a cover story on Scribd entitled “Betting the House on HTML5.”^[33]

Reception[link]

Scribd has been praised by several newspapers^[which?] and has been dubbed as the potential "YouTube for documents".^[34]

Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner.^[35] Former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, All Things D Reporter Kara Swisher, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Red Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, The World Bank, Ford Motor Company, HewlettPackard, Samsung and the Living Torah.

Scribd has currently more than 50 million users and it hosts more than tens of millions of documents. Scribd's documents are embedded more than 10 million times across the web and more than 1.8 million searches are conducted on Scribd's website everyday.^[36]

Criticism[link]

Scribd has often been accused of copyright infringement. In March 2009 Scribd launched a copyright management system and has made upgrades to the system including the addition of OCR. The New York Times reported in May 2009 that Scribd hosted pirated works by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin.^[37]

In September 2009 American author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors."^[38] Her attorneys Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara sought class action status in their efforts to win damages from Scribd for allegedly "egregious copyright infringement."^[39][40] On May 11, 2009, Motoko Rich, writing in the New York Times, reported on Scribd hosting pirated works. Sibley Camara filed a class action lawsuit against Scribd, accusing it of calculated copyright infringement for profit.^[41] The suit was dropped in July 2010.^[42]

In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd had been served with 25 DMCA take down notices.^[43] It is not known how many DMCA notices have been served up to now.

Controversy[link]

In March 2009 the passwords of several Comcast customers were leaked on Scribd. The passwords were later removed when the news was published by The New York Times.^[44][45][46]

In July 2010, GigaOM reported that the script of “The Social Network” movie was uploaded and leaked on Scribd and promptly taken down per Sony’s DMCA request.^{[citation needed]}

In August 2010, Scribd began beta testing premium services including the Scribd Archive. The test was met with minor community backlash leading Scribd to make changes to its policies^{[clarification needed]}. Now when trying to download almost any document from Scribd, users are asked to pay for it first via their premium content service.

Supported file formats[link]

Supported formats include:^[47]

• Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx, .ppsx)
• Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
• OpenDocument (.odt, .odp, .ods, .odf, .odg)
• OpenOffice.org XML (.sxw, .sxi, .sxc, .sxd)
• Plain text (.txt)
• Portable document format (.pdf)
• PostScript (.ps)
• Rich text format (.rtf)
• Tagged image file format (.tif, .tiff)

See also[link]

• Docstoc
• Google Docs
• Issuu
• Wayback Machine
• WePapers
• Webcite
• Yudu Media

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Scribd

• Official website
• Video: 'YouTube' for writers

John R. "Trip" Adler III, (born June 24, 1984) is an American entrepreneur who is best known for starting the social publishing company Scribd. Adler grew up in Palo Alto, California, and then attended Harvard University where he studied biophysics and graduated in June 2006. His father, John R. Adler, is a prominent neurosurgeon at Stanford University and also an entrepreneur.

Scribd[link]

The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Adler was at Harvard and had a conversation with his father about the difficulties of publishing academic papers. He teamed up with cofounders Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam and they attended Y Combinator in Cambridge in the summer of 2006^{[citation needed]}. Scribd was launched from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.^[1] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store,^[2] and shortly thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd.^[3] Adler is currently the CEO of Scribd, where he is responsible for the product and strategic direction of the company.

Personal life[link]

As a member of the Harvard Surfing team, Trip Participated in the first Ivy League Surf Championships in May 2003. Trip and his teammates were undaunted by Surfing Magazine writer Matt Walker's claim that there were "about 100 community colleges that could kick [their] ass." ^[4] Trip is a jazz saxophone player, and he has occasionally performed on the street for tips.^[5] He also likes to race go-karts around the Scribd offices.^[6]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Scribd
• Adler's profile page on Scribd
• Article on Scribd in Businessweek
• Video Interview
• How Scribd made pages pay
• Scribd CEO Trip Adler Speaks!