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Comment by jacoblyles | Hacker News Reader

Early Scribd broke the web by taking open format documents, putting them in a proprietary wrapper, and calling it a "service".

Middle Scribd fixed their own brokenness by moving to HTML 5 (which is sometimes more convenient than a PDF, and is certainly "open" and accessible).

Late Scribd is again breaking the web by moving documents behind a paywall. Some qualities are just baked into a company's DNA.

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Thank you. I've never understood why Scribd exists at all. The web has done fine at moving documents around before Scribd, and it'll keep doing it fine long after they disappear.

emailing pdf's is not my definition of "doing fine", I am not following the current drama much, but I do thank scribd for letting me look at content I would have otherwise ignored on seeing ".pdf"

I always thought that Scribd was just a reaction to how awful Adobe's free PDF reader has become.

What is the problem with pdf ? Editing a document in html is too painful.

What does that quality of Adobe's pdf reader have to do with the ease of editing documents in html or pdf?

I would prefer a service that just focuses on the .pdf discovery rather than a viewer, so like Google Scholar with some social services around it.

You can still get the viewing stats, your just not at the services whim, simply move your file and the service will just remove the listing. Makes sense to me, probably some stuff like this out there seems fairly obvious.

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