Box.net + iPaper: Free Document Viewing and Storage

Earlier this week, the small startup Sribd launched its new iPaper viewer, which Om Malik did a review of with screenshots. Om sees iPaper as doing “pretty much everything you expect from Adobe Acrobat Reader, despite its tiny footprint.” That includes embedding documents, sharing them, doing full text searches, and viewing within many modes. Now, in a development that could be attractive to many kinds of web workers, Box.net is integrating Scribd’s iPaper with its free online storage offerings and the several free applications it delivers with online storage.

I did a post about Box.net embracing many free online applications with its OpenBox service back in November. It’s a key part of how the company is trying to differentiate itself from other providers of free online storage. The addition of iPaper to the mix looks like it could have several useful applications.


In addition to free online storage, OpenBox lets you do several types of tasks with your files through integration with free online services, including collaborating with others on files. You can do online editing with Zoho, document signing with EchoSign, CAD previewing with Autodesk Freewheel, working within the ThinkFree productivity suite, cropping photos with Picnik, sending content to Twitter, and more.

As noted on a blog post at Box.net’s site, “Scribd’s iPaper format will enable all your Powerpoints, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and PDFs to be viewed directly in a flash interface without saving them to your computer.” The idea is to let people view, search and share files without making edits—collaborative document viewing, where you can look at several pages of a document at once.

As I’ve noted before, at only 1GB of free storage, Box.net does not offer as much free online storage as other services do, and you can load the GSpace extension into Firefox and use 4GB of free GMail storage space. Especially since Box.net is seeking to get folks to work on files and collaborate, it would be good to see more free space offered. However, the company does offer a plan for $7.95 a month where you get 5GB of storage, and the list of free applications that Box.net reaches out to continues to expand.

Do you store and collaborate with files online? If so, what’s your solution?

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