Scribd: Making Books Viral on the Web

When I was at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco a couple months ago the debate between HTML5 and Java was a bid debate. In non geek people were debating what kind of code should be used for the web in the future. These two codes allow text and other content come alive on the web and most notably HTML5 is the code enabling the iPad to do all the cool things it does on the web.

Just recently Scribd a social publishing and reading site launched, allowing anyone with a document the tools to publish it. Simply put no anything from term papers, to sheet music, to whole books can now be quickly converted from Word documents to fully searchable, shareable HTML5.

In the following video CEO and co-founder Trip Adler talks about how Scribd merges content for the real-word and the digital world. “As more reading is done on devices, multimedia can become part of the experience—and so do other people. For the first time ever, reading is a social experience,” says Adler.

Book club members might squabble at that last quote from Adler however Scibd has given rise to at least on completely new internet Phenomenon: the viral book.Independent publisher Chelsea Green posted the entirety of a book called Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? on Scribd. The book got over 100,000 reads in the first 24 hours.

So let’s say you have something already written, in Word rile or a PDF, Scibd will instantly display it in a web browser in HTML5 and allowing search engines to crawl the content. In addition the document becomes shareable on social sites, and available on any mobile device. This could be a dramatic change in the publishing industry because now a high school student has the same publishing opportunity as a major publisher. In a sense this is a new social bookmarking space for content that could lead to valuable traffic to your site.

Try it out and let me know what you think of the service.

Elliott -