iPaper: a Simple Way to View and Share Documents on the Web
Scribd has taken another step toward its goal of becoming the YouTube of online document sharing. The company’s new iPaper tool allows you to embed document files in webpages, enabling your site’s visitors to browse through them using a Flash-based interface.
IPaper eliminates the need for separate software downloads (like Adobe Acrobat Reader for instance) and weighs in at just 100k, which means it loads very quickly.
The interface is quite similar to Acrobat with options to search, copy text and quite a bit Acrobat doesn’t offer, like the ability to e-mail, embed or share the document with others. There are also a variety of views, from an outline overview to individual pages, which can be zoomed up to to 300 percent.
The copy and paste features are a little buggy — they seem to work on most documents, but then occasionally fail — but otherwise iPaper is a fantastic little app and offers a far better way to handle document files on the web than the traditional download link.
Perhaps even more interesting for some is the ability to embed Google text ads inside the iPaper documents, a feature that may well mean Google will scoop up Scribd at some point.
Scribd also has a new API for iPaper which allows you to integrate the functionality into your own website. For instance if you have a form accepting file uploads you can them pass the files on to Scribd which will convert them for viewing in iPaper. Scribd currently supports PDF files, images, most office document formats and more.
Here’s a sample embed using iPaper to display the full text of George Orwell’s 1984:
[via GigaOm]
