by Brian Solis
It’s not my headline, I just grabbed it from DIGG, although I do like the ring of it. Adobe’s PDF has reigned as a standard universal document format for a long, long time without any serious competition.
Is Scribd’s new iPaper a giant-killer?
According to the company, iPaper is a document format built for the Web. Similar to a YouTube video, iPaper documents are Flash widgets which can be embedded into existing web pages. It supports PDF, Word, PowerPoint, among other document formats.
It’s interesting positioning because you can already convert documents freely using several other online services such as Docstoc and ThinkFreeDocs and in turn you’re given an embedd code or a link for viewing the finished product. Either way, I do enjoy not having to pay a premium for the ability to create a universally readable doc.
However, iPaper is different. It’s sort of the next phase of all of this stuff. It looks and acts just like the multimedia players you’re used to seeing on the Web. And, in my opinion, it delivers a much richer experience.
The company has also introduced an API that will make it easy for others publishers to plug Scribd into their systems.
More at GigaOM.
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Discussion
I just ran into ipaper for the first time and I hate it because I can’t get the information into a format I can use – PDF, Jpeg, gif.
I will break ipaper to get what I want!!!!!!