Can you explain the magic? I just don't get it. (Maybe I am stupid; I'll admit that much.)

From what I've seen, it looks like a Flash plugin to view PDFs. It breaks my scroll-wheel and keyboard shortcuts, uses funny-looking controls, and it takes as long to load the Flash plugin as it would have to just load the whole PDF. I always edit the URL so I can view the PDF normally. I don't know why I'd want to do this to my users.

I'll be the first to admit my perspective is limited, but for me, the "magic" is the ability to seamlessly and easily embed documents in a web page. Before iPaper, getting casual users to view a PDF or doc was brutal because it added another layer of complexity.

The user had to be able to understand and navigate an outside application, and what's worse, had to have the desire and memory to return to your website afterwards. iPaper simplifies the whole process and is worlds better than Acrobat Reader in terms of speed and simplicity.

doesn't in-browser pdf viewing suck apart from safari?

Probably -- I wouldn't know -- but I much prefer it even when Firefox opens a PDF in Preview or Evince than trying to use iPaper. The two most common things I do with a PDF, scrolling and searching, work exactly the same there as in the browser.

Breaking a man's keyboard shortcuts and scroll-wheel is the webpage equivalent of kicking him in the nuts. It just ain't right.

I don't understand scribd's popularity. What's wrong with pdfs?

Scribd largest corpus of user submitted documents:

http://www.scribd.com/groups/adult/7

;)

i never liked acrobat reader on windows much. maybe that's it? or people just don't know where to host their pdfs. or don't know how to make pdfs.

Definitely... the .pdf readers in OSX and Linux work much better.

The .pdf reader in Windows that feels the most like a *nix .pdf reader is Foxit PDF. The Foxit PDF editor is also pretty nice, it lets you edit .pdfs at a relatively low level of markup and spacing.

So maybe the popularity comes out of ignorance?

yes. but that's not necessarily a bad thing to say about scribd. if scribd makes it easier for people to not know anything about how to use computers, then that's valuable to lots of people.

Scribd should win some award for being the most counterintuitive successful startup. It's hard to imagine that computer science majors came up with this idea!

youtube doesn't do much besides make a few things easy: make a file web accessible and convert to another format and provide comments and some text people can paste to embed it, and i guess favorites and a bit more -- all the kinds of things scribd has i think. plus give away free storage space and bandwidth, which scribd does too.