Have you seen Scribd? Well, once it works, it has the potential to be great.
What can I say about Scribd? It's a really great idea, to start off, as it is a great place to publish ones materials -- poetry, manuals, books, articles, notes, and pretty much whatever you can think of. And it's FREE!
And FREE could get you a lot! The Scribd site contains a vast quantity of materials that you are welcome to read. My first attempt to search for a book title that happened to be on my mind at the time resulted in, what else, the book in its entirety. Now I can't speak to the legality of this specific book being there, but all in all the site appears to be on the up and up.
But that aside, one of its greatest promises is the ability to eMail one or more people, include attachments, & the Scribd service will resend the eMail to everyone replacing the format-dependent attachment with a link to what they call ipaper -- a reproduction of the attachment without its reader being tied to the application that created it. And finally, the attachment is converted and placed inside the Scribd user's documents folder. Sounds too good to be true; yes?
Perhaps, yes.
At least that's what is promised -- but its execution leaves little to be desired. So far, I've not been able to get that part to work -- any part after pressing SEND on the eMail. The eMail recipients get their normal eMail, with the normal attachment included -- no mention of or link to Scribd. And to top it off, the attachment never ends up in the Scribd user's account.
Well, I've sent a message to their Feedback group, and I'll wait to see how well the other significant part of any Web 2.0 offering: service.
