Scribd: an online document repository and reading interface
Mar 21st, 2009 by Bryan
I have been on an “open-access scholarship” roll the past few days, and I finally created a suitable category and will place all of the relevant posts in that area. Don’t worry if you’re not interested in this. I will be hitting some biblical topics this week.
Scribd wants to be the YouTube of documents on the internet by allowing individuals to upload material, encouraging users to embed documents in their own web pages, and providing a social-networking space to help people interested in similar documents connect with each other. TechCrunch reported that Scribd recently started signing agreements with publishers to provide full text and (mostly) preview snippets of books intended to drive e-book sales back on the publisher’s own sites.
Scribd would be an intriguing choice for a journal that wanted to provide online text. Rather than simply posting a link to a PDF, the Scribd interface allows one to read the text right on the screen along with all sorts of tagging and embedding features. You can even click a link to have the text read to you by a computer voice.
The only thing that might be better is to provide articles as actual HTML pages. However, Scribd still has an advantage over HTML in that it preserves the “page” metaphor for sections of text. It would be difficult to tell someone how to find a particular quote in a long html document, other than suggesting they use the “search” function, which might be a little snarky. At least for the time being, bibliographic conventions suggest that we continue to use “pages” even for online text, but that’s another topic.
I am embedding a delightful piece of biblical “scholarship” that I found, a debunking of 101 supposed contradictions in the Bible. Here is the first one:
1. Does God incite David to conduct the census of his people (2 Samuel 4:1), or does Satan (1 Chronicles 21:1)?
Obviously, both God and Satan incited David to conduct the census of his people.
Um, ok, that solves everything. How could I have been so naive? I copy/pasted that text straight from the Scribd text, by the way. It uses Flash, but basic functions are still there. Here is the text embedded. (Be sure to look for the “full screen” button on the upper right. It helps my weary eyes tremendously.)
So, what do you think of Scribd? Would you read JBL if it were to publish there?
