iPaper Takes on Adobe for Online Documents

By Greg McNevin

February 21, 2008: A new online document viewer is taking a stab at the Adobe-dominated market, enabling users to view any type of document directly in a web browser.

While it may not sound too groundbreaking or exciting right off the bat, Scribd’s new iPaper platform is quite intriguing. The software functions as an online alternative to Adobe’s PDF, using Flash to enable any website to embed documents, and even add advertising to them.

Scribd describes iPaper as being closer to a YouTube video than a PDF. Through a lightweight (100KB) Flash widget that streams documents from Scribd's servers, documents can be viewed directly in a browser without software downloads, and for free.

Despite being 1/1000th the size of Adobe's Acrobat Reader software, iPaper integrates Scribd social features such as emailing and embedding, plus what the company describes as an “elegant security system” that allows content owners to protect their work without resorting to clunky DRM solutions. iPaper also includes typical PDF features such as full text search, copy/paste and various view modes and zooms.

“Documents formats like PDF and DOC were designed before the Web was as pervasive as it is today, and were originally meant to be shared using floppy disks”, says Trip Adler, Scribd's co-founder and CEO.

“In 2008 everything is online and most documents are created to be shared in some way over the Internet. We designed iPaper as an online standard that brings the best of existing formats straight into the browser.”

The service is certainly nimble, documents load rapidly and can be searched and otherwise interacted with ease. However, Scribd has an ace up its sleeve in the software’s ability to integrate Google Adsense advertising.

The technology enables users to not only publish documents on the web that would have traditionally proved tedious and time consuming, but also monetise them with contextually relevant ads.

Since launching the service has already been used to publish upwards of 10 billion words according to Scribd – more than double Wikipedia’s four billion, while its site is attracting over 12 million unique visitors per month.

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