Scribd.com - review by In-Between Names!

Scribd.com is a website that allows exchange of information between Internet users worldwide. The site does this by allowing users to publish their own literary works for others to read by uploading their files to the site. It was launched on March 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstam. Based on the information gathered from the site itself, Scribed.com attracts more than 50 million readers every month, with more than 50,000 documents uploaded every day in 90 different languages.


It targets people that use it to obtain information of all types and forms. Groups of people that would benefit range from college students to working professionals, from kids to adults, from classical music enthusiasts to literary buffs. Notable users of Scribd.com include President Barack Obama, The New York Times, FOXBusiness.com, among others.

Scribd functions much like a document version of Youtube, and the concept that allows this comparison is the iPaper document reader. iPaper converts regular computer files to a proprietary form for easy convenient viewing. Compatible documents for conversion are the following:

• Adobe PDF (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Microsoft Word (.doc/ .docx)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt/.pps/.pptx)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls/.xlsx)
• OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
• OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
• OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
• All OpenDocument formats
• Plain text (.txt)
• Rich text format (.rtf)

Business value

Scribd.com allows businesses to reduce their research costs for strategic decisions, new trends and methods of production, retail, and other business processes. Instead of spending subscription fees to industry journals, specialty websites, and the like, the research division of a company can acquire relevant information through free and simple registration to this site, which then allows them unlimited access to all documents uploaded at the site.

Independent consultants can use Scribd.com as a platform to popularize their services. Published technical reports bring credibility to the firm or person who made it. Industry journals serve this purpose, but these publications are not accessible to the common man. Scribd.com, as a purveyor of intellectual democracy, is able to provide the information to anyone who seeks it. Writers struggling to be noticed by the reading public and by publishing firms can use Scribd.com the same way as the previous example.

Companies can show innovation in information dissemination of its products and services to the general public via Scribd.com, surely a very unorthodox method. The usual manner of dissemination among is with traditional advertising (Print, Radio, Television). With the advent of the Internet, email became a method for direct marketing, but as email made it easier for entities to communicate, junk emails are as easy to dispose. The recipients of the information via email are limited by the company’s contact list, since these contacts have already previously contacted them. Unlike the traditional method of advertising, prospective buyers, while looking for information about specific goods and services, can use Scribd.com to get the needed knowledge, and hopefully entice them to purchase from the information provider. The buyer only needs to search at Scribd.com for related literature.

A company that uses Scribd.com obtains a degree of competitiveness with respect to other companies by reducing its cost of advertising the products and services it offers to the public. The aforementioned traditional venues for advertising are not cheap. With Scribd.com, information is spread for free. Another benefit it provides is a focused, sharp-shooter method of promotions because it specifically targets those who desire knowing about the particular products and services the company can provide.

Critique:

Scribd.com, though extensive, does not contain all information. Some may possess important information but may not be a registered user of the website. However, this constraint is relaxed over time as the data gathered form Alexa.com suggests that more and more users begin to frequent this site. It is currently ranked Top 200 by Alexa.com. We believe that there is a strong positive correlation between the number of registered members and the amount of information contributed to the site at a regular basis.


Reliability of information gathered from Scribd.com is also a concern for the would-be researcher. One cannot ascertain the credibility of documents available at the site because of what has just been stated – that information is limited by the number of registered users.