Pain-free PDFs
Darlene Fichter points us to a tool called Scribd, which may make PDFs a lot less painless for all of us. As she points out in her post, many usability studies show that people really dislike PDFs and avoid them. Scribd, however, lets you upload documents and share them in a document viewer embedded in the web browser or send to people via e-mail or with a link on a webpage (lots o’ options). You can also make it a private document, only visible to those you send it to.
Darlene has an example on her site which you can try out. See below for my own example of an embedded Scribd document. See? So much easier than PDFs. Bye bye PDFs!
Another neat add-on is that you can then download the document as a PDF, Word document, plain text document, or an MP3 text-to-speech file. Nice! I do think this is one of my favorite new tools!
One other tiny plus for the Scribd site: as you start to type in your desired username to create an account with, with each letter you type, it lets you know if that username is taken yet or not–right there on the account creation page. Now there is a technology that more sites should employ!
May 8th, 2007 at 1:54 am
Check out http://www.box.net/ too. Brilliant Widget!
Example on http://zbdigitaal.blogspot.com/2007/04/bestanden-opslaan-en-delen-in-een.html
I love it.
Edwin
May 8th, 2007 at 11:07 am
I have been using FlashPaper to provides documents to our online students. This tool allows for faster downloads since it is based in Flash. A good alternative to traditional PDF’s, especially when the document is meant to be viewed over the Web.
May 8th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Well Edwin, it’s not exactly the same–as with Scribd you can actually see the content of the document within the webpage. The tool you link to merely shows an icon for a document (unless I’m missing something).
May 8th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
I’m pretty impressed with the MP3. Not perfect by any means, but definitely ok to listen to and easy to understand.