The concept's pretty simple: Site participants upload their own documents in one of several common formats (Microsoft Office apps, PDF, text files, as well as PostScript and Microsoft ".lit" format) and Scribd publishes it to the world. Like YouTube, Scribd offers embeddable viewers for users (7,000 registered in the site's first two weeks) to quickly spread the love on their MySpace pages, personal sites or message boards.

Scribd visitors can view the documents in their browsers via Flashpaper, or download as PDF, Microsoft Word or plain text files and view them in Word or Reader on their desktops. Because the site will soon migrate to the Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator server, a Scribd function—secondary to file-sharing—PDFzone regulars will appreciate free, 24-7, high-quality PDF conversion from the file formats mentioned above on the Web.

"Our idea was to make an easier way to share documents," says Adler, whose site launched March 12 and logged between 40,000 and 100,000 hits a day in its first two weeks, thanks to six quick front-page mentions on Digg.com.

Flashpaper, in this context, is a fascinating choice of technology. Now an Adobe property that many pundits thought had the potential to be a "PDF killer" back when Macromedia introduced it in the months preceding the Adobe merger, Scribd's the perfect application for it: Flashpaper offers a lightning-fast view of a document's pages to give browsers a taste of its content.

When they want more robust features afforded by Reader such as deeper search capabilities, customized viewing, bookmarks and thumbnails—things that get more important the longer a document gets—the Flashpaper's left behind and the user downloads the PDF to his or her desktop.

Adler didn't know about the politics of Flashpaper when he first saw it. He just knew that PDF in the Web Browser can be a difficult viewing experience, and that Flashpaper was more nimble.

"One of the problems with PDF is that they're not great for viewing in the browser . . . you always have to open them in a new window, download them and they always take a long time to load" says Adler, who with his colleagues makes an in-depth explanation for Scribd's use of Flashpaper in a blog entry. "Our idea in using Flashpaper was to make a nice preview of PDF, so you can quickly view it in your browser and we have buttons right there in the Flashpaper browser to download the PDF."

Scribd also makes documents downloadable as MP3s—one of the site's most popular features, Adler says—to be read aloud by your computer, which works well on some documents but not at all on others.

It's all fascinating stuff—until one starts looking at the content. Adler envisions it, down the road, as a library for academics to post their research work, essays and literature.

For now, as might be expected with any new site finding its audience, Scribd's document library is all over the map: Lots of dating advice/commentary on mostly heterosexual relationships, college papers, entertainment, reference, humor documents and educational materials such as presentations, courses and study guides.

"I have no idea where it's going to go, but we're hoping it's going to be a little more serious over time," Adler says.

Some of those educational materials and e-book scans of paper editions certainly must skate on thin copyright ice. Scribd bans copyright-infringing content, as well as hate speech and content illegal in the United States.

Adler says Scribd's addressing the copyright issue both through administrative actions and a flagging system.

"It's clearly an issue and we've received some take-down notices and we've taken things down immediately and we have software to make sure it isn't re-uploaded." Adler says. "We're working hard on being DMCA compliant."

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