Web Document Explosion
The Web Document is becoming mainstream. The number of unique scribd visitors tripled between January and December 2008 - culminating at 23 million unique visitors in November 2008. This makes scribd pop up at rank 16 in ComScore’s top 20 social media sites. Although 10 times less than blogger.com or Facebook, this is still quite an impressive achievement. Competing services such as Docstoc or Issuu attract significantly less visitors, but are still growing.
It is a snowball effect – as more users contribute content, the service becomes much more relevant to everyone and easier to find. I was pleasantly surprised, recently, to see quite scribd documents come up among the top results for my Google searches.
This confirms an emerging trend in the Future of Documents: the social, web document is becoming a significant alternative to paper. Many alternatives are required in Document 2.0 to move towards the Less Paper Office while covering all possible use case scenarios for the document. The web document is one of them, and is becoming a very credible alternative for sharing documents in a view-only, easy to share format, complementary to virtual desktops or online office document applications.
Another perspective is that with this enormous growth of web documents, many of them will want to be printed out.
The web for scanning, searching and linking. But hard copy for reading.
The reality is that most web users are much more like viewers than readers.
At http://www.Docufacts.nl, the leading dutch information source for the documentindustry, we use scribd to present inline preview of whitepapers, presentions ans customer cases. This seems to work-out very well compared to the ‘download PDF here’button.
With the bigger screens (22″and up) the need get less to print it for a quick view on it. For studying purposes paper may be favourite for reading.
See the article about Obama: http://www.docufacts.nl/2952/crossmedia-aanpak-cruciaal-voor-verkiezing-barack-obama/