Today the World Economic Forum will announce Scribd as a Technology Pioneer for 2011. Scribd is a social publishing and reading site that gives anyone with a document the tools to publish it. That means that everything from term papers to sheet music to whole books can be quickly converted from humdrum Word documents to fully searchable, shareable HTML5.
CEO and co-founder Trip Adler believes that the iPad will profoundly change how people read. 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 devotees might quibble with that, but Scribd has given rise to at least one totally new 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.
“You have something that’s already written, in a Word file or PDF,” explains Adler. “We will instantly display it in a web browser in HTML5, and then we will make that content indexed by search engines, shareable on social sites, and available on any mobile device. This has huge, world-changing implications: now publishing is going to be completely democratized. A major publisher has the exact same publishing opportunity as a high school student.” And the same opportunity to charge for their content, too.
More info:
Scribd web site: http://www.scribd.com/
Scribd blog: http://blog.scribd.com/
Scribd profile on Crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/scribd
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