Re:Die, Scribd. Die.
by evgen on Friday June 20, 2008 @05:07PM
(#223221)
No, you can't do that with acrobat reader, but you can do that with this fancy thing we call "the web". You can even create a site in which users can submit documents they would like to share with other people so that the group can discuss the contents of the documents; the documents themselves can stay in their native pdf format and remain hosted on the authors site. Alternatively, you can decide to annoy your users by filtering attempts to share such documents through another site you are trying to pimp...
[ Parent
| on HN ]
then you would be reinventing scribd, it saves a copy of the original pdf and you CAN download it.
Am I missing something obvious on scribd? I saw no way to download the original PDF on the scribd page. I was as annoyed as the original poster when this paper (HPL-2007-193) was on HN and I tried to save it so that I could read it later. I ended up doing Print->Save As PDF from scribd. When someone later posted a link to the original PDF, it was much nicer looking, smaller in size (4MB versus 164KB), and had the original metadata (e.g. authors, description).
The "site" I was describing was HN, so I guess my sarcasm was a bit too subtle. Additionally, you can only get a copy of the original PDF if you register. I can understand why they went with this sort of bait-and-switch tactic, but it is slimy.