Scribd Steps Up Its Game With iPaper

Document sharing on the Web via embeddable Flash players keeps getting better all the time. Earlier this month I wrote about Issuu, a Denmark-based startup that does a really good job with image-heavy documents like magazines and photography books. Today, Scribd released a vastly improved upgrade to its document viewer, which it is now calling iPaper. Scribd streams the converted PDF documents to the Flash player, and offers three different ways to view each document: in one long, scrollable window; as a book with page-turning effects, or as a slide show. Check out the book mode in the this document.

Pretty cool, but what’s the business? Scribd allows you to put contextual Google AdSense ads inside each document. Scribd will do a three-way rev share, giving most of its portion of the AdSense dollars to the document uploader. Now all those documents not already on the Web can generate some income.