Scribd

Scribd

Publishing and advanced document sharing – that’s Scribd.

And it’s not just publishing documents already in PDF format. Publish PowerPoint presentations, Excel Spreadsheets, Plain Text documents, and of course WORD documents amongst others.

It’s YouTube™ for text.

When would I ever use this?

Site owners will occasionally have written works that need an initial publishing home (as opposed to a corporate publishing house). Scribd could be that published, social reading space. There are a surprising number of readers.

In the companies own words:

Scribd is the world’s largest online library. We’ve made it easy to share and discover entertaining, informative and original written content across the web and mobile devices.

Small businesses and individuals can sometimes use all the exposure they can get. Quality material often gets shared.

This social and “share-able” element, as well as a cool Revisions feature and nice embeddable viewer, is why I use and recommend Scribd for such occasions. I think I like the overall feel and flexibility of Scribd for PPT presentations as compared to SlideShare.net, another  service worth checking out.

What about Google Drive “Viewer”?

The Google Drive “Viewer” (previously Google Docs) is certainly another option for sharing, especially if you have Adobe Illustrator, Apple Pages, Photoshop, and even Autodesk files – it’s pretty powerful stuff. Check out both Scribd and Google Drive as you decide which to use or offer to a client.

The reason I emphasize Scribd is because it’s where a lot of people go to read. It is a landing place for published documents. Google Drive is more of a one-to-one way tool for privately sharing or a embeddable viewer for publicly publishing.

Conclusion

If you upload/publish your document only to your website, the only readers you have are those who come to your website. If you publish your document on Scribd, it could easily be read by others who have no idea who you are but love your material.

Ah, the power of search results.

It’s a pretty cool feeling.

Scribd could be very useful for you or your clients. It’s a great home for businesses, organizations, and individuals of all kinds. With an iOS and Android companion, there’s plenty of reading material wherever we are.

If Scribd is “YouTube™ for Documents” I wonder who will be the first to have something go viral! It’ll happen some day.