The other day I decided to give Scribd.com a try for some of my free e-books and e-patterns.
I am very fortunate in that I have all of my free e-patterns and e-books on my own Linda Walsh Originals E-Pattern website. However, some of my small business artist and crafter friends don't have websites that are capable of housing their free e-patterns, e-tutorials, e-projects, etc. They want to share them on their blogs so, what do they do? Well, they use one of the many document sharing websites available and either provide a link on their blog or embed the code into their sidebar or post.
One of these document sharing websites is Scribd. I've been thinking about Scribd for a little while now and haven't had the chance to test it out until today. If you don't know what Scribd is it is the fastest growing social reading and publishing company on the web today.
Here's what they say about themselves on their "About" page:
Scribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing company. We've made it easy to share and discover entertaining, informative and original written content across the web and mobile devices. Our vision is to liberate the written word, to connect people with the information and ideas that matter most to them.
And, here's what they offer for quick facts:
Scribd. \skribbed\ the world’s largest social reading and publishing company
Stats
>75 million readers every month
>20 million embeds
>1 billion pages converted to HTML5
Tens of millions of documents published
Millions of Readcasts every month
So, why was I interested in Scribd? Well, I thought it might be a good place to test some of my free e-books and e-patterns, and could potentially be a website I might be interested in selling of some of my e-products on in the future.
The former I could do right away. The latter requires more research on my part as to what the best website is for that and researching each websites terms & conditions are. I want to make sure I pick the right website for supplementing the selling my e-products. For now, the "freebies" are fine for Scribd.
So, I set-up a Linda Walsh (Linda Walsh Originals) account and profile page. If you'd like to see my profile page just click on the icon at the beginning of this post or CLICK HERE.
Scribd allows you to post documents in the following formats: You can upload documents in the following formats: Adobe PDF (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc/ .docx), Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt/.pps/.pptx), Microsoft Excel (.xls/.xlsx), OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw), OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi), OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc), All OpenDocument formats, Plain text (.txt), and Rich text format (.rtf).
Upload is very easy. You just select the file you want and then follow the prompts. You can make you documents public or private. In the case of the latter, they can only be viewed if you've given someone the URL.
Documents can be viewed on Scribd in Float mode, or they can be downloaded and printed, can be downloaded to a mobile device, or added to a collection. Documents can also be shared (i.e. readcast) on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, or embedded within a website or blog.
The Float mode viewer displays a pop-up control bar on the bottom of your window that allows you to scroll through the document page by page, zoom in or out, convert to full screen mode, search the document, add a comment, embed/share, add to a collection and download. You can also "readcast" your document which is basically sharing it with your friends across multiple social networks.
You can embed your document in a website or blog utilizing the HTML coding they provide and it would look like the following:
How to Make a Little Sachet Basket
According to Wikipedia the technology used for this is: Scribd uses iPaper which is a rich document format similar to PDF built for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page.[27] iPaper was built with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPhone).[28] All major document types can be formatted into iPaper including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents, OpenOffice.org XML documents, and PostScript files.
All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be private or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed documents in their original layout regardless of file format.
Scribd iPaper requires that Flash cookies are enabled, which is the default setting in Flash.[29] If the requirements are not met, there is no message; the white or gray display area is simply blank.
If you don't want to embed your document you can just provide a link that would display the document in full screen mode for easy reading. Here's the link for the document above: http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/70100063?access_key=key-1fjo1x20uz80b7ctbszx
You could add the above link to the sidebar of your blog to provide your blog readers with a way of seeing and downloading your free e-product. Or, you could embed the code directly into a post or, in the case of Blogger.com, onto one of the ten tab pages they offer per blog.
In Scribd you basically have bookshelves where you can store your uploaded documents, store other Scribd docs you like in collections, or store the readcasts you are sharing with your friends.
You can also set-up a profile page with information on yourself, links to your website, etc.
Plus, Scribd maintains pretty detailed statistics for you on your documents, such as: recent activity by document, by region, by jeywork, by referrer, embeds, readcast, etc.
Pretty cool, huh?
There are lots of document sharing websites out there like:
I was impressed with how quick and easy Scribd was to learn and navigate. Depending on what you have to share, if you are a small business artist and crafter on the web and you want to share some of your free documents you might want to consider using Scribd or any of the websites shown above.
I'm going to check my stats on Scribd in a few days to see how many views and downloads there have been. Hopefully there will be lots and lots.
I only uploaded two of my free e-books. If they seem to be getting a lot of viewing maybe I'll upload some more. We'll see.
If you'd like to see my profile on Scribd and the documents I've uploaded there please CLICK HERE. If you like what you see please FOLLOW ME. Just click the green button next to my name at the top of the page.
Posted by Linda Walsh Originals- "Doll Patterns for Grown-up Girls!"
Linda Walsh Originals E-Patterns - "Instant Download E-Patterns for Grown-up Girls!"
Linda Walsh Originals Dolls - "Handmade Dolls & Crafts for Grown-up Girls!"
0 comments:
Post a Comment