The Scribd Blog

Tomorrow is the annual Red Cross “Red Crescent Day,” and  this year’s theme is urban violence. With the number of people living in cities set to skyrocket during the coming decades, the Red Cross is focusing on the humanitarian challenges posed by urbanization, particularly the violence that makes daily life in some cities almost like living in a war zone.

For more insight into this problem, read “Urban Violence: War by Any Other Name” or visit www.scribd.com/icrcdocs.

-The Scribd Team

Today, Scribd is changing the way you read documents online. Over the next few weeks and months, Scribd will convert our entire content corpus — tens of millions of documents, books and presentations — into native HTML5 web pages so that we can offer the best online reading experience. Scribd documents in HTML5 load instantly, support native browser functions (zoom, search, scroll, select text), and deliver an impressive reading experience across all browsers and web-enabled devices, without requiring add-ons or plug-ins.

What does this mean? It means that any document in any format (MS Office Docs, Google Docs, PDF, ePub) will now be readable on any device with a browser. This move — nearly six months in the making — represents billions of pages of content that will become part of the fabric of the web. To find out more, view this presentation (in HTML5):  http://www.scribd.com/html5

The Scribd Open Reading Platform: The future of reading is open. Join us.
-Jared Friedman, Scribd Co-founder and CTO

This week, Silicon Valley gathers at the 5th annual O’Reilly Media and UMB TechWeb Web 2.0 Expo, the world’s premier summit where industry leaders gather to showcase the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for the builders of the next-generation Web.

If you can’t make it to San Francisco for the expo, don’t worry! Scribd has you covered with the official Web 2.0 Scribd profile, where you can browse the latest presentations from the summit and hear about newly launched products.

Here’s a direct link to the Web 2.0 Presentations Collection.

This Saturday marks National Comic Book Day, an annual “holiday” when participating comic book shops in the U.S. and around the world give away free comic books.

In celebration of this holiday, Scribd will be showcasing some of our best comic books on our homepage and scribbling/tweeting random comic book factoids throughout the weekend.

Check out our updated comic book collection here!

Have a MARVEL-ous Saturday!
-The Scribd Team

P.S. For more information, visit www.freecomicbookday.com.

Scribd has always been about making connections around shared reading interests. Today we’re launching a new product called Readcast that helps you automatically transmit your Scribd reading activity to your friends across the social web.  You can now instantly “Readcast” to share your thoughts about a presentation and find out what books other people are reading too. So how does it work?

Readcast is a customizable feature that lets you instantly share your Scribd reading events — including scribbles, comments, downloads, and eventually mobile, printing, and purchases — with your friends across Facebook and Twitter. You choose whether to automatically Readcast all your Scribd activities or do so on an activity-by-activity basis. Here’s the Readcast box that appears ten seconds after you’ve started interacting with a document:

Beyond Readcasting your own reading activities, we also want you to see which Scribd books, research, presentations, illustrations, and other written works your Facebook friends (and similar Facebook users) “like,” comment on, and share — all without ever leaving Scribd.com. That’s why the Facebook “like” button and Facebook reading activity feed are also now part of the Scribd social reading experience too. Try them out by logging in and visiting any document reading page.

Visit www.scribd.com/readcast for more information.

Reading is better when it’s social!
-Matt Riley, senior software engineer, and James Yu, senior product engineer

Don’t forget to submit your 2009 tax returns today. Even President Obama finished his! :)

Today, Scribd is launching a suite of premium print options, enabling readers to print business materials, books, magazines and millions of other written works and illustrations using on-demand services from HP’s MagCloud, Blurb and Mimeo. Whether you want a high resolution or standard print, or a glossy-and-bound edition, Scribd’s “Print” button lets you decide.

Coming on the heels of last month’s “Send-to-device” launch, which made it easy to send Scribd content to any e-reader or mobile device, today’s announcement brings Scribd one step closer to our “any document, anytime, any format, anywhere” goal … and you one step closer to having infinite choice about how you read on-the-go!

To see which premium print options are available for a particular document, click the ”Print” button above it.

-The Scribd Team

If you’ve noticed Scribd being used by a lot more websites recently, you noticed right. Today, web giant SAP announced it is integrating Scribd’s technology into its new social collaboration software SAP StreamWork. SAP joins more than 18,000 companies and developers already using Scribd’s open API to create “virtual document rooms” where their customers can access, share, and store documents on the web.

Other Scribd API partners include career sites like Monster.com which uses Scribd’s technology to showcase resumes, large legal information companies like FindLaw, Internet companies such as Posterous, and academic organizations like Educause. For more information about using Scribd’s API for your business, please go here.

We created a new way to easily share collections with the launch of our new widget. It allows you to share your favorite collections — much like a playlist on iTunes — but for written documents, books and other great stuff you’ve collected on Scribd. To embed a collection on your site simply hit the “share this collection” tab to get the code.

There are over 20 thousand Collections already created on Scribd. Here are a few of our favorites;  DealBook’s Lehman Examiner Report Collection, USAF History Collections and AP Study Guide Collections.

Music playlists, video libraries … and now Scribd Collections! With more than 10 million documents and books on Scribd, readers want to bookmark, organize, and share docs instantly. That’s why we created Scribd Collections, a new way to group your favorite reads into themed lists and share them with friends on and off Scribd.

With “Collections,” you can create reading lists from anywhere on Scribd, using the “Add to Collections” box at the bottom of documents or going into your “My Collections” master page. Set a Collection private for yourself or public to share. You can even allow other readers to contribute documents to a collection by choosing the “public-moderated” setting.

Try it out! Click the “My Collections” link at the top of your logged in homepage to get started. Here are some fun examples to inspire you:

St. Patrick’s Day Collection, Scribd Best of 2009-2010, Health & Lifestyle books, Page-a-Day Calendars, Relationships Advice

Stay tuned for additional Collection sharing options coming soon!

-David Dai, Software engineer (currently updating my “Ruby” computer programming Collection)