Turn Paper into iPaper
You may recall Scribd, the startup that lets you share documents in a very spiffy online viewer (here’s the review at our parent site GigaOm). Now there’s a new way to get documents into their system, getting the benefits of unlimited storage, easy publishing, and community features: you can send them paper.
After making arrangements through their Convert Your Paper to iPaper program, Scribd will scan and OCR your documents, then send the originals back. Papers or bound volumes are acceptable, but not photographs. You can only submit things you own the rights to (or that are in the public domain), and the scans will be publicly viewable (monetized by Google ads) when they’re done. So think about paper marketing materials, old manuals, and anything else your business has spun off into paper that you’d like to have online for free, without the hassle of scanning them yourself.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Pretty sure this was an April Fool’s one.
Gordon, I thought so too. But I checked with the Scribd folks and they swear it’s for real – and spent time writing emails with additional details. If it is a joke, they’ve carried it past the first and above the call of duty.
I really hate April Fool. We have to remove it from the history. It is one of the worst holiday ever.