It’s a big day for online document sharing and social reading site Scribd. Today at Fortune’s Brianstorm conference, CEO Trip Adler will be revealing a major initiate that introduces a suite of new products and an entirely new brand: meet Float.

Float is Scribd’s first iPhone application. It’s also an entirely new web app, and there will be additional mobile applications coming later this year. It’s part Instapaper, part RSS reader — and it also ties in nicely with your social graph to make it easy to consume all the links your friends are sharing. And Scribd has lined up 150 publisher partners to help get the app off to a running start.

Adler says the idea behind Float is to give readers a single app to consume all of the reading material they might be interested in, be it PDFs, news articles from traditional publishers, or blog posts. So content can be accessed from a few sources. First, as you’d expect, the app is tightly integrated with your Scribd account, so you’ll automatically have access to your Scribd docs. There’s also a ‘social’ tab, which lets you quickly read excerpts of any articles and docs your friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Scribd. And there’s a ‘Reading List’ that’s a lot like Instapaper — you can add a bookmarklet to your browser that lets you ‘Float’ whatever page you’re viewing. And then there’s the publisher tab.

Scribd has 150 partners, including The Atlantic, Time, Salon (and, disclosure, TechCrunch) who are offering full-text versions of their articles within the mobile app — you browse through a list of publishers, tap the ones you like, and you’ll see a list of the articles they’re offering. This content is all optimized for the mobile screen and does not currently include advertising, so it’s a pretty optimal reading experience. Note that while these publisher articles are full-text, the articles viewed via the social channel are excerpts (unless they’re from a publisher partner). Scribd had considered offering full-text versions of these shared links too, but decided against it.

The Float name stems in part from the way the app lets you scroll through text. Most document viewers display content that’s either paginated (you flip between pages by swiping horizontally) or scrolls upward (like in a browser) — Float will do either of them on the fly. Want to jump to a full screen of new content? Swipe left. Want to nudge the text just a little further up? You can do that too.

This floating text effect probably isn’t game changing, but it’s pretty nifty — and the app includes plenty of other nice touches, like a variety of themes (light mode, dark mode, etc), and font resizing that doesn’t muck up the text. In fact, the app generally looks quite polished. Another very handy feature: the app will locally store any content you’ve started reading, and it’ll also pre-fetch content when it can.

So, how exactly is Scribd going to make money off of this? Later this year, the company has plans to roll out two paths to monetization: it’ll run ads against some of the content that’s available. Publishing partners that are distributing full-text versions of their content will get a rev-share on these ads.

And then there’s the more ambitious plan: Scribd wants to use Float to become the ‘Netflix of reading’. Pay one flat fee, and you’ll be able to access content that’s typically behind a pay wall from a variety of publishers. This will, of course, take the cooperation of the publishers. But it’s something that could have broad appeal — it’s hard enough to get people to pull out their credit cards to jump over one paywall, and it’s certainly not something they’re going to want to do for every newspaper or online magazine they want to access.

Today, Scribd is taking the next step on its HTML5 rollout: it’s swapping all of its embedded document widgets that are using Flash over to a new embeddable version of the HTML5 viewer (and new document embeds will be in HTML5). This is important, because Scribd already has 20 million embeds scattered across the web that will be automatically converted to the new viewer (CTO Jared Friedman says this shouldn’t break anything).

The reader will allow document embeds to be read on mobile devices that can’t use Flash, like the iPad and iPhone, and it should generally offer a more native feel in the browser than Flash does.

The feature has been long-expected — in some ways Scribd was actually beaten to the punch by fellow Y Combinator alum Crocodoc, which launched its own embeddable HTML5 document viewer last month. Of course, Scribd is still a much bigger site, and the services have different use-cases (Crocodoc is focused on making it easy to share, edit, and annotate documents from within the browser, whereas Scribd is a huge repository of documents with more sharing features).

One other thing to note: Scribd actually has a patent pending called “INTEGRATED DOCUMENT VIEWER WITH AUTOMATIC SHARING OF READING-RELATED
ACTIVITIES ACROSS EXTERNAL SOCIAL NETWORKS” that includes claims to inventing the presentation of documents using HTML5 (it discusses the generation of font files from documents and the use of the CSS 3 @font-face tag to present them). At this point the patent hasn’t been granted yet but if it is, companies may have to work out deals with Scribd to offer similar functionality down the line.

I’d embed a sample here, but WordPress still has to update their Scribd shortcode. In the mean time, all documents on Scribd now offer the HTML5 embed by default.

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv.

Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . .

Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we planned all along to start a live platform, and that the Justin.tv show itself was a way of promoting that platform. While this ended up happening, none of it had crossed our minds at the time.

Emmett Shear and I had been working on Kiko, the first Javascript web calendaring application in the Microsoft Outlook style. We prototyped the application in our final year at Yale, went on to raise money from Y Combinator, then continued working on it for over a year.

Then Google Calendar was released—boom—absorbing most of our nascent user base and capturing most of the early adopter mindshare. But to be perfectly honest, Kiko would have failed regardless. We were too easily distracted and hadn’t really thought through the strategic implications of owning a standalone calendaring property (hint: no one wants a calendar without email). A short time later we were burned out and spending most of our time playing Xbox with the Reddit guys in Davis Square—hardly a startup success story.

Emmett and I started thinking about possible ways to get out of the calendar business. At the same time, I was startup fatigued. We had spent over a year paying ourselves nothing. The seed and angel investment market conditions were the polar opposite of what they are today. It had been a struggle to even raise a paltry $70,000, and we had failed to build a product with real traction. I was starting to think about moving back to Seattle to try something new, maybe in a different industry.

Still, we learned a ton and it was fun to be part of the early Y Combinator startup community (then largely in Boston). We became friends with Matt Brezina and Adam Smith (of Xobni), Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam and Jared Friedman (of Scribd), and many others. It’s amazing to see how many of those friendships persist today, and even more amazing how well many of those companies are doing.

Coming back from one particular YC dinner, Emmett and I were discussing strategic ideas for Kiko, and I remember telling Emmett an idea that popped into my head: what if you could hear an audio feed on the web of our discussion? Wouldn’t that be interesting to other like-minded entrepreneurial types? We kept going, and eventually the idea morphed into a video feed. Then it became a live video feed. Then it became a continuous live video feed that followed someone around 24/7. Then it had chat, and a community built around watching this live show, which was now a new form of entertainment. I was hooked.

I couldn’t stop talking about the idea. I mentioned it at YC dinners and to other friends. I even came up with a perfect name for it: Justin.tv. On one trip to DC, I told my Dad and my college friend Michael Seibel what I was thinking. Eventually, in-between drinking sessions, we thought of a brilliant idea for divesting ourselves of Kiko, which is a story for another day. After that, Emmett and I were coming up with other startup ideas (I guess we got excited about staying in the industry after all). One particular favorite was the idea of a web app that would ingest your blog’s RSS feed and then allow you to layout and print physical magazines from it. Excitedly, we drove one afternoon to Paul Graham’s house to pitch it.

We explained the idea to Paul and Robert Morris, who just happened to be at the house visiting. I vaguely recall there also being a “this will kill academic publishing” angle, although I can’t figure out how that sensibly fits in now. Paul didn’t particularly like the idea: he didn’t think people would use it. “Well,” he said, “what else do you have?”

I said the only thing I could think of: “Justin.tv.”

Because it was something I was clearly passionate about, and because creating a new form of entertainment was clearly a big market (if you could invent one!), Paul was actually into it. Robert’s addition to the conversation was “I’ll fund that just to see you make a fool of yourself.” Emmett and I walked out of there with a check for $50,000.

Six months later, we’d recruited two other cofounders (Kyle Vogt, our hardware hacker, who we convinced to drop out of MIT on a temporary leave of absence, and Michael Seibel, my college friend from DC, who became our “producer”). We built a site with a video player and chat and two prototype cameras that captured, encoded and streamed live video over cell data networks, negotiated with a CDN to carry our live video traffic, and raised an additional couple hundred thousand dollars. Our plan? Launch the show and see what happens.

Now, let me just tell you why this was a bad idea:

• We didn’t have a plan. We loosely figured if the show became popular we could sell sponsorships or advertising, but we didn’t have a plan to scale the number of shows, nor did we understand what our marginal costs on streaming, customer acquisition, or actually selling ads were.
• We didn’t understand the industry. We didn’t know what kinds of content advertisers would pay for. We didn’t have good insight into what kind of content people wanted to watch, either.
• We relied on proprietary hardware that we were going to mass-produce ourselves. Smart angels told us to drop the hardware and figure out how to do it with commodity equipment, but we wouldn’t listen because we thought hardware would be easy (or at least, doable). Ironically, months after we were told this we switched to using a laptop.
• We were trying to build a “hits” based business without any experience making hits. We knew a lot about websites, but little about content creation. Smart VCs (who took our calls because Paul referred us) told us as much: nobody really likes investing in hits based businesses, because it requires the continual generation of new hits to be successful (instead of, say, building a platform like eBay or Google whose success is built on masses of regular users).

How did we get as far as we did?

• We were passionate. We honestly believed we could create a new form of reality entertainment. Put to the side that we had no experience with creating video (or any kind of content), by God, we were going to make this work.
• Early stage investing is often about the people, not the idea. Paul has said as much about what he looks for. As two-time YC founders he knew that we worked well together and even if we were working on something totally inane we were going to stick it out with the company and iterate until we found a business model.
• We sold the shit out of it. Everyone we knew was excited for Justin.tv. Why? Because our excitement was infectious. That’s how we got Kyle to drop out of school. That’s how we got Michael to quit his job and move across the country.

Ultimately, the show failed. But all told, I’m thankful every day that things went the way they did. Why?

• We built a strong team. The four of us started, and the four of us all still have leadership roles in the company. Along the way we recruited the smartest engineers and best product designers we could find.
• We were willing to learn, and to pivot. After quickly realizing the initial show wasn’t a sustainable model, we decided to go the platform route, and built the world’s largest live video platform (both on the web and in our mobile apps, which have millions of downloads).
• It got us started. Some people wait until the stars are aligned before they jump in. Maybe that’s the right move, but plenty of businesses get started with something that seems implausible, stupid, or not-a-real-business but turn into something of value (think Groupon). If we hadn’t started then, would we have later?

Today, I’m more excited about Justin.tv than I’ve been at any time since we launched the initial platform. Why? We’re taking everything we’ve gathered and learned over the past four and half years building the largest live video platform on the Web (17 million monthly unique visitors in Dec according to comScore’s MediaMetrix), and applying it to tackle a new generation of problems in mobile video. Our world class web and mobile engineering team, all of our product development knowledge, our substantial, scaled video infrastructure, and everything we’ve learned about building engineering teams has all been put to work on a new app that we think is going to change everything.

Our new app is called Socialcam, but that’s another story.

Photo by Terry Chay

It’s funny. When I tell my ‘normal’ friends that I’ve just come from Facebook’s office or need to head down to Google’s campus in Mountain View, they often give me a strange look, as if I’ve just told them I’m about to make a house call to the Easter Bunny. These companies aren’t places inhabited by actual people — they’re nebulous things coursing through the Internet’s series of tubes.

But I can’t blame them. Most of the startup profiles we see in magazines feature a portrait of the founders solemnly gazing into the distance as they plot to change the world with their revolutionary new sharing widget. Sometimes there’s a snapshot of a few desks, each of which is far too neat for anyone to actually have done any work on. There’s got to be a better way.

Which brings us to today’s episode of TC Cribs, featuring Scribd, the popular document sharing platform. This is something of an experiment for now, but there may well be more episodes coming in the future (leave a comment below if you think your office is a good fit!).

And a big credit goes to TC’s John Murillo for editing the video.

CEO Trip Adler says that the money will primarily be used to expand the team, which is current at around 45 employees. New hires will mostly come on the engineering side, with personnel also being added to Scribd’s business development and sales teams. Adler also says that Scribd has an agressive product roadmap for the next six to twelve months — a key piece of which will be mobile.

Adler says that Scribd’s goal is to make any piece of written content readable and sharable on any device, and the surge in mobile will obviously play a big part of that. He wouldn’t get into specifics as far as what we should expect for Scribd’s mobile products, but says that it’s more complex than a HTML5-based reader (Scribd launched an impressive HTML5-based text rendering engine in May). Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Adler says that the company definitely isn’t planning on producing a physical reading device of its own.

In terms of growth, Scribd currently draws sixty million monthly uniques, and has around 15% growth month over month.

Scribd has been the leading service for social, online reading for quite a while now, but there’s an increasing amount of action in this space from Amazon (via its Kindle platform) and Google (via Google Books). Neither of these are particularly social yet, but Kindle recently started allowing users to ‘lend’ their books to friends for two weeks (which the Nook can do as well), and other social features are likely to follow eventually — a more robust Kindle community would make sense. Of course, Scribd’s corpus of content includes millions of user-uploaded documents, while Kindle and Google Books are mostly focused on published works.

CEO Trip Adler says that until now, publishers haven’t really taken advantage of the features that the web affords — they might know how many hits a given document has received, but there’s much more data waiting to be unlocked. That’s where Scribd Stats comes in. After logging in, you’ll see an overview charting your overall document popularity (your aggregate read count, the number of times embedded versions of your docs have been read, etc.). You can also see this broken down on a per-document basis. Graphs look similar to Google Analytics, allowing you to quickly adjust the date range.

You can also select individual documents to do a deeper dive, with features that include: a heatmap for each document you’ve uploaded, allowing you to see which portion of a document people find most interesting; data on which search queries led people to find your document, and what they’re searching for within your doc; and graphs that led you track a document’s popularity over time. The feature will also allow publishers to analyze the performance of Scribd’s ReadCast feature, which lets users share the content they’ve recently read to Facebook and Twitter.

During the event, Adler took the opportunity to list of some of Scribd’s growth stats: it’s now home to one billion HTML5-based pages and is growing 15% month over month, which he says makes it the largest and fastest growing corpus of text online. The site saw 60 million uniques in the last month, and ranks a among Alexa’s top 100 sites worldwide.

Adler says that this is part of Scribd’s transition to a site where people read and share what they’re reading with their friends (before this year the site’s big pitch was to publishers looking to get their content online, now Scribd wants to be able to tempt more publishers by offering a sizable audience as well).

Scribd Stats probably isn’t going to increase readership directly, but it will allow publishers to hone in on what their readers like, which will (hopefully) help them produce more engaging content.  It could attract new publishers to the platform — perhaps authors will start releasing excerpts of their books on Scribd before publication, using Scribd Stats to figure out which pages are duds.

Scribd says that the product will be rolling out slowly to users over the next few weeks.

We wrote about Apture Highlights, a new plug-in that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, a few months ago. Today, Apture has scored a pretty significant deal with document-sharing site Scribd to allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents on the content platform.

As we wrote in August, ‘Apture Highlights’ plugs the “search leak” that is taking place with content on the web. The feature allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content.

Now, when users are reading documents, books, or other works on Scribd, they will be able to highlight any word, and Apture will open a small browser within the page to search for the additional information on Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Scribd representative Michelle Laird says that this integration is made possible party because of the company’s move to convert the platform to HTML5, which provides a more engaging experience for users (as of July, user engagement had tripled on Scribd.)

According to Laird, 50 percent of documents will be integrated with Apture today, with the remaining integrations rolled out over the next few days. For Apture, which has raised $4.1 million in funding, the deal with Scribd is a big win. This will be largest implementation of Apture to date, says the startup’s CEO Tristan Harris. Other Apture partners include The Financial Times and Reuters.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/15725310?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

Apture Highlights on Scribd from Tristan Harris on Vimeo.

“[Scribd's] value proposition always has been open access to the documents–freely shared with everyone and indexed in the search engines. The paywall destroys that value proposition. They’ve taken the documents that I wanted to freely share with the public (many of them public documents like court rulings and filings) and made them inaccessible.”

Goldman got a lot of feedback from the blogosphere, which unsurprisingly was anti-Scribd paywall. While the Scribd communications team expressed their concern to Goldman and invited him to the office when he sent them a pre-publication draft of the post, there was no apology, until today.

According to Goldman, he received the following email earlier from the Scribd communications team, which includes a link to an apology blog post from CEO Trip Adler which commits to making changes to the archive program. Despite the outreach to Goldman in order promote the public response, within an hour the post was down, replaced by a 404 page.

I have emailed Scribd to find out what’s up and will update when they respond.

In the meantime, here is the text of the apology post Goldman originally received, paywall free.

———- Forwarded message ———-

From: Michelle Laird > xxxx@scribd.com

Date: Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 3:34 PM

Subject: Scribd Archive Changes

To: Eric Goldman

Hi Eric,

Just wanted to update you. Here is an apology from Trip Adler, CEO and immediate changes [sic] are making.

The blog post copy is below.

Regards,

Michelle

• Home
• About Scribd

The Scribd Archive, an Apology and Immediate Changes

September 21, 2010

A few weeks ago, we launched a program called the Scribd Archive, which we hoped would encourage readers to contribute to the Scribd community. They could do this by uploading their own documents in order to download older documents in the Archive or pay a small fee. This in no way restricted the ability to read and share content on Scribd.

I believe the intention was good, but we made some mistakes that we need to acknowledge and fix. We didn’t communicate the program clearly to you, our content publishers, and we didn’t give you enough control over when/if you wanted your content in The Archive. So first, I’d like to sincerely apologize to the community of users who publish content on Scribd. You are the ones who power the site, which would not exist without your contributions.

We’re certainly not perfect, but in our effort to be better, we will be making several important changes:

• Clear opt-out — anyone uploading to the site will be informed about The Archive and can easily opt-out of the program here; we will also post clear information about The Archive on your “My Docs” profile page.

• Proactive messaging — you’ll be notified when your documents are ready for the Archive and again given the opportunity to opt-out of the program; we will also prominently let readers know that if they want to download for free, they can simply join the community and upload a document.

• Community advisory board — we’ve established a Scribd User Advisory Board (SUAB) to help ensure that we incorporate community feedback on upcoming Scribd products.

Our goal is to bring readers and creators of content together using the inherent efficiencies of the Internet and other technologies. We’re constantly learning new ways to do this better. If you have questions/concerns about The Scribd Archive or other Scribd products, please email me directly at xxxx@scribd.com.

–Trip, CEO and C0-founder

–

Update: After this post went up, Scribd decided to repost their apology, from Scribd CEO Trip Adler, “We took it down because we were making some final considerations.  It’s now back up in it’s original form.”

You can check it out here.

Photo: Dave Keeshan

Reading isn’t a particularly social activity, but talking about reading and sharing books, articles, and other documents is highly social. Book clubs are so popular because people identify with other people who share the same reading interests. Document-sharing site Scribd wants to become the place on the Web where a million reading clubs flourish . With a redesign rolling later today, it will now start calling itself a “Social Network For Reading.”

Scribd is already is seeing traffic to its site double every six weeks from social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and email. Documents are shared, liked, or commented on 10 million times a month now, and CEO Trip Adler expects that to multiply with the redesign. It has already embraced HTML5 and is continuing on a new design path it embarked upon six months ago.

The two main changes to the site are a cleaner home page with a reading feed and a personal book shelf with all your documents (screenshots below). Scribd had versions of these before, but the home page is now two columns instead of three. The reading feed takes up the main column, as before, but the document icons are larger and it is now easier to share directly from the feed. The algorithms behind the feed are also more targeted to make it a better reading recommendation engine, showing the documents your friends and people you “subscribe” to are reading, publishing, and commenting on.

The book shelf basically replaces what used to be called My Documents and My Collections. It organizes everything you’ve read or published in one place, and looks a bit like the bookshelf theme in Apple’s iBooks app on the iPad. Whereas the reading feed acts as a realtime social club and discovery engine, the book shelf is where you can delve deeper into a person’s online reading library.

Below is CEO Trip Adler’s letter explaining the changes:

The World Economic Forum has announced its list of 31 Technology Pioneers for 2011. The Technology Pioneers are its list of up-and-coming startups. Last year’s list included Twitter, Playfish, and Boston Power. The year before, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove were named.

Joining the pantheon this year are foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, greentech is equally strong on the list, particularly with smartgrid companies such as OPower and Tendril. Below is the full list of infotech companies that made it, with links to their Crunchbase profiles for more information:

Aster Data (big data)
Atlassian (product management)
Foursquare (Geo-location)
GetJar
Knewton (adaptive learning)
Layar (augmented reality)
NetQin Mobile (mobile security)
OpenDNS (domain names)
ReputationDefender (online reputation monitoring)
Scribd (online documents)
SecondMarket (private securities market)
Spotify (streaming music service)
Vortex Engineering (low-power ATMs)

The final ruling was uploaded to Scribd by Good As You and received over 50,000 hits “in a matter of minutes” according to Scribd Senior Director of Communications Michelle Laird — it’s up to over 125,000 reads as of this writing. CEO Trip Adler says, “a typical viral document gets 100,000 reads in 24 hours, this document has over 100,000 reads in about 24 minutes.”

Of course, the case is not yet settled: Prop 8 may be facing a long, time-consuming road to the Supreme Court over the next couple years. But for champions of equal rights, this is big news — expect to see that Scribd read count continue to trend skyward over the next few days.

Update: There are some issues with docs loading, which Scribd says are being caused by an outage at Amazon’s Web Services.

Image by laverrue

You could call it the perfect storm.

Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.

In early May, Scribd announced its plans to ditch Adobe’s Flash and began the arduous process of converting every document (of its “tens of millions”) to native, HTML5 pages. “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash, “co-founder and CTO, Jared Friedman, told Erick Schonfeld. Although many documents on the web are still boxed into Flash players, the HTML5 format turns them into rich, interactive web pages.

That gamble has paid off handsomely for Scribd. Although the number of unique visitors still stands at roughly 50 million per month, those users are spending significantly more time perusing documents and sharing with friends.That growth in user engagement has rapidly accelerated in the past month. On May 25, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Friedman said user engagement had doubled— implying strong acceleration in the last three weeks.

The HTML5 play has also made Scribd’s product very iPad friendly and iPad users are responding in kind. According to Adler, although iPhones clearly outnumber iPads in the wild by a large margin, the number of users accessing Scribd through the iPad is now roughly equivalent with the number of users who are using their iPhone.

Now that the company has its HTML5 and iPad strategy in place, Adler says they are focusing on making Scribd more social and less reliant on search engines. Today, the majority of their traffic comes from Google, but Scribd is putting a greater emphasis on the social by closely integrating with Facebook.

Earlier this year, Scribd revamped its Facebook Connect option (enhanced content sharing and added an activity feed plug-in) and introduced Readcasting, which automatically tells your social networks, like Twitter and Facebook what you’re reading. According to Adler, those initiatives are growing: the number of people who are auto-Readcasting is increasing by roughly 10% each day and daily subscriptions to other users is up 15x (in the last three months). Quick video with Adler above.

Friedman has told us that he believes HTML5 improves the reading experience, by allowing any document to become a Web page. “The possibilities are endless,” Friedman said in a statement. And the HTML5 format is able to bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages. A new bookmark feature will help you keep your place in especially long documents. Scribd’s documents will be especially iPad friendly. Instead of downloading a book from Apple’s iBooks store or Amazon’s Kindle app, you can see if an electronic version is on Scribd and read it in your browser.

As Scribd has converted its documents over to the new format, the startup has noticed that users are spending more time on the site than before. In fact, Friedman says that users are spending twice as much time on the site.

To commemorate the transition, Scribd has partnered with a number of publishers to make premium content available in the new format for free. Forbes Media will make available its “Vintage Warren: The Best of Forbes on Buffett” special issue free to Scribd readers first; Liquid Comics, with titles from Guy Ritchie and Deepak Chopra, among others, will offer hundreds of graphic novels and comics on Scribd; Workman Publishing will offer the complete job hunter’s bible “Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview” and other full-length titles; and Publishers Weekly will share entire issues and special reports, starting immediately with its BookExpo America (BEA) show daily.

And Scribd plans to launch an ad revenue-sharing program for select content partners this summer. Friedman showed how ads within content flow more seamlessly with the HTML5 format on the iPad. Friedman says the great thing about HTML5 is that every tablet, e-reader and device supports it.

Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages. Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser (see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages.

Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”

Documents will simply become very long Web pages. A new bookmark feature will help you keep your place in especially long documents. Scribd’s documents will be especially iPad friendly. Instead of downloading a book from Apple’s iBooks store or Amazon’s Kindle app, you can see if an electronic version is on Scribd and read it in your browser. Pinch and zoom to make the text bigger. No download necessary. The books and other documents are stored on the Web. They can be shared via Facebook and Twitter, or sent to a mobile phone.

Scribd is joining a chorus of companies from Apple to Microsoft in siding with HTML5 over Flash. Tomorrow only 200,000 of the most popular documents will be available in HTML5, but eventually all of them will be switched over. When it’s done, Scribd alone will convert billions of document pages into Web pages.

Scribd’s currently uses a Flash player much like YouTube’s to allow people to upload and view documents on the Web. But with HTML5 standards now making their way through not browsers, there is little reason to do that. “Right now the document is in a box,” says Friedman, “a Youtube-type of experience. There is a bunch of content and a bunch of stuff around it. In the new experience we are taking the content out of the box.”

Friedman has ben working secretly on this project for the last six months. You can tell he’s excited about it. He believes the Web is finally ready to ditch Flash for documents. Unlike video players, the parts of the HTML5 standard that impact documents have to do with support for fonts, vector graphics, and rotating text. Friedman estimates that 97 percent of browsers will be able to read Scribd’s HTML5 documents because those parts of the standard are older and more widely adopted. HTML5 documents will still be embeddable in other sites using an iFrame.

Poor Adobe. Even as it too embraces HTML5, the Web is moving away from Flash.

Document-sharing site Scribd launched three years ago with the idea of making PDFs and other text-documents more Web-friendly. Now three years later, the site stores more than 10 million documents, which in turn have been embedded more than 10 million times across the Web. Scribd says it reaches more than 50 million people a month worldwide (Quantcast).

To celebrate its birthday, Scribd just rolled out a redesign with a new Zune-brown logo, much faster document search (to support 1.4 million searches a day), and other small new features such as the addition of collections. It lets you explore by category or trending documents.

Scribd took a big hit to its traffic in the middle of last year when it reduced its aggressive SEO tactics and got serious about cracking down on pirated documents, from which it still hasn’t completely recovered. But its stronger copyright filtering makes partners like major publishing houses more comfortable using Scribd as a way to promote and distribute its books. Scribd’s biggest competitor DocStoc is also growing at a nice clip and adding new features at a steady clip.

Scribd is also making a big push into mobile reading by making it easy to send documents to avariety of mobile devices, including iPhones, Android phones, Blackberries, Kindles, and Nooks. The company has raised $13 million total from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, and David Sacks (who recently joined its board).

In addition, a portion of its backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be put up for sale on Scribd, although there was no indication of exactly how many books that represents.

In March 2009, Scribd had already scored partnerships with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications. And all that content is attracting a lot of users too, apparently.

In a statement, Author Solutions says the Scribd portal currently attracts over 50 million users per month, and that the startup’s platform will help authors make more money from book sales because it brings higher royalty percentages than are possible with traditional paper-and-ink books. In its promotion video, which I embedded below, Author Solutions says it has helped some 85,000 authors get their books published to date.

Under terms of the agreement with Scribds, authors will receive 50 percent of the net sales of their titles through the startup’s social platform. A default price of $9.99 will be set for each title, but authors will have the opportunity to set their own prices.

Distribution to Scribd will be included as a free service for all new ASI titles.

Scribd had 8.1 million unique worldwide visitors in November 2009 (Comscore). They’ve raised $12.8 million in three funding rounds. Sacks is already an investor in the company.

What is the best reading experience on a touchscreen device? As magazines and tablet-makers grapple with this question for larger form factors, Issuu has an answer for touchscreen phones. The Web-based document-viewer just released Issue Mobile for Android phones, and is working on an iPhone app.

Issuu Mobile is a mobile document reader which gives you access all the magazines, books, and documents uploaded to Issuu. Millions of public documents have been uploaded, just like on Scribd or DocStoc, and you can view your own private documents in your own account as well. The Android app shows featured content and addresses the small screen size with a new EasyRead feature. You just scratch a portion of the text and it pops up in a magnified view. You can also subscribe to publishers and news feeds.

Everything on Issuu is free or promotional right now, but you can find previews and free editions of books from Penguin, Random House and indie magazines. Issuu really needs a store like Scribd’s. But it is creating new mobile reading experiences which everyone can learn from.

I just wonder of down the road you need a separate app, or whether you can get the same reading experience from the Web. For now, Issuu is offering both and, at least for smaller screens, optimizing the experience with an app.

Here is an AppsFire video of the upcoming iPhone version of Issuu Mobile reader:

Book publishers are increasingly embracing digital books, and not just on Amazon’s Kindle.  Today, John Wiley and Sons, Barnes and Noble imprint Sterling Publishing, Chronicle Books, and the University of Chicago Press announced they will join a total of 150 publishers to offer ebooks in the Scribd Store.  Wiley is the venerable publisher of the For Dummies series of books as well as Frommer’s travel guides and CliffsNotes.

Scribd lets people embed and share documents in a Flash viewer, but has been partnering with publishers since March to also sell downloadable digital versions of their books. Other publishers already on board include Simon & Schuster and O’Reilly Media.  The ebooks are downloadable as a PDF, and excerpts can be shared through the Scribd reader.  

Scribd’s strategy is a counterweight to the closed Kindle store, where ebooks bought on Amazon can only be read on the Kindle. Of course, you can also read PDFs you download from the Scribd store on a Kindle. But as more tablets and ebook readers emerge, you might just end up reading books on the Web in your Scribd Flash viewer. At least that is what Scribd and competitor DocStoc (which has its own document store) hope will happen.

I personally wouldn’t pay for a PDF copy of a book. It is just not an enjoyable reading experience. Let me flip through it, share it, read it on my iPhone or future tablets, Tweet out quotes, and maybe I’ll pay.

“Scribd doing 43M revenue this year??” was the subject line of an email sent to me last week, along with a link to this photo, taken in Scribd’s San Francisco offices, showing a list of “important stuff” on a whiteboard. Our tipster must not have read the whole list, though, because I was immediately suspicious.

The items on the list, as best I can read them:

Important Stuff

• 2009 revenue: $43 million
• From store: $39 million, revenue/doc: $11.77
• Docs uploaded per day: 1.95 million
• Killer feature of 2010: include video in documents
• Don’t forget to sign acquisition deal with ebay next week
• Call back Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Install waterslide in office

The chart also shows a graph showing profit hitting $1 billion.

The first thing I did, of course, was call the phone number (it’s busy/disconnected). Then I emailed Scribd CEO Trip Adler to ask if the photo was actually taken in their office, and what the story behind it was. His reply: “I just put that stuff up on the whiteboard as a joke. At the time we joked that TechCrunch or some other bloggers would somehow pick it up, and it’s pretty funny that that’s what actually happened. If you want to write a post on it, you can try to guess what information is actually real. Oh, and if you can’t read the last one, it is “install waterslide in office”. Haha.”

Mission accomplished. But remember, we have spies everywhere, Trip. Oh, and call Arnold back.