A New View for Documents

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Pages and pages: The iPaper viewer supports several ways of navigating a document, including scrolling, a tile-based view (above), and book mode, which shows pages two at a time. Credit: Scribd/Books iRead

Adler says that Scribd is still experimenting with business models, although the company has seen its technology adopted fairly widely. Storage companies such as Drop.io and Box use iPaper to allow their customers to view the items they have in storage without having to download them. Adler says that the Scribd site currently gets 21 million visitors a month. He notes that the company may make money through ads embedded in documents (a feature that's already available) or through buying and selling documents.

But Scribd may have more to worry about from Adobe than it thinks it does. Al Hilwa, program director for IDC's application development software research, says that Adobe has been working to fuse documents with Web presentation. He adds that the company has begun incorporating Flash into PDFs and making its various document technologies available through Acrobat.com.

Indeed, Adobe says that FlashPaper is not abandoned technology. Erik Larson, director of product management and marketing for Acrobat.com and the former product manager for FlashPaper at Macromedia, says, "FlashPaper as a product is no longer being developed, but FlashPaper as a concept is alive and well." He adds, "FlashPaper has become a set of Web services on a set of servers in the cloud."