Scribd, the site for sharing documents on the Internet with over 10 billion words of text uploaded, has released iPaper, a new document format built for the web. iPaper is the first full-featured Web-based document viewer and is more like a YouTube video than it is like a PDF. Through a Flash widget that streams documents from Scribd’s servers, documents can be viewed directly in a browser without software downloads.
The primary design goals of iPaper were that it be fast, light and easy to use. At 100 KB the iPaper application is about 1/1000th the size of Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software, making it an incredibly fast way to view documents. Despite the tiny size, iPaper integrates Scribd’s social features, like emailing and embedding, and an elegant security system that allows content owners to protect their work without clumsy DRM solutions. iPaper also builds on the rich features of PDF, including full text search, copy/paste functionality and various view modes and zooms.
Originally posted on February 19, 2008 @ 11:53 am