The Net of Inter - Best Free Stuff The Internet Has to Offer

I’m not a big reader but when I do read, it’s online. I recently found a site called Scribd which is a community driven, free online document sharing site. People store anything from books, articles, and images to sheet music, government documents, ancient texts, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Scribd boasts the most users on any document sharing site so finding reading material that you enjoy won’t be a problem. If you’re a bookworm, you’ll get addicted quick. There are groups to join, messaging and comments, voting, and other social networking types of options. Scribd.com uses a program called iPaper which can in turn be embedded into other websites using an embed code link. They have constant backups as well so you know that your files will be safe. While Scribd isn’t exactly an online document editing solution, it facilitates many ways to upload documents that already exist that you may store and share online (or keep private). Best of all it’s free, and if you don’t need to upload and just want to read, you don’t even need to sign up.

Supported File Types:

• Microsoft Word Files (doc, docx)
• Microsoft Powerpoint Files (ppt, pptx, pps)
• Microsoft Excel Files (xls, xlsx)
• Adobe Acrobat Files (pdf, ps)
• Open Office Documents (odt, odp, sxw, sxi, etc.)
• Text Documents (txt, rtf)

Different Ways to Upload:

• Scribd’s onsite file uploader
• By pasting the URL of a supported document file
• Copy and Paste into a text box (in that sense it’s technically a document editor but it lacks WYSIWYG features like bold, italics, bullets, font style and size, etc.)
• Using the Scribd Desktop Uploader which is a free program that uploads documents from your PC to your account on Scribd.com (Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X)
• Using Scan to Scribd which is a 3rd Party Program that uses the .NET framework to scan and upload your computer’s documents with an option to use optical character recognition (OCR). I tried it out thinking it would actually scan my hard drives for all supported documents but instead you have to open each odocument file seperately.
• Sending an email to iPaper@Scribd.com (read below)

iPaper@Scribd.com:

This is one of my favorite features besides the obvious sleek setup and quick response of the flash iPaper document reader. If you’d like to send a document to a friend or colleague, have it backed up, make it readable without any document reading software by just going to a web page, and uploaded to your account then you should try this. If you email someone an attachment and CC: ipaper@scribd.com, Scribd will send an email with a link to the document hosted on Scribd. The recipient will obviously receive two emails (one from you with the attachment and one from ipaper@scribd.com with the link to the private document), but it’s still a stylish way to send someone a document.

Have you used Scribd? Let me know what you think.

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