Online Publishing.

Share this post :

del.icio.us Tags: documents,online publishing,publishing,e-doc,e-books,googe books,tutorials,user generated content

Recently I was searching online for tutorials on drawing and information about the human body proportions, especially of different races and ethnicity. I was in particular interested in casual drawing, which I can import into Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. I stumbled on a wonderful site called Scribd. Its a wonderful site where users can create documents and upload, typically tutorials technical documents, which they think help people world wide.

The system supports various document types, some of them are:

• Adobe Postscript
• Adobe PDF
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft PPT
• Microsoft Excel
• Open Office (All document types)
• Text (Plain ASCII)
• and images (of various types)

I was able to download some tutorials about drawing and manga style drawing in no time. There is of course, a limit to the number of documents you can download per day, to prevent overloading the Scribd server by greedy pigs like me :) I am sure this great site will, come up with a premium account soon, if they don't have yet. There is not limit at least for online viewing though.

The registration is a breeze, and the site is pretty well organized. Still, I would have preferred more categories than already present. I am sure, they will come in due course of time.

The beauty of this site is, it has user generated content/documents for sharing. It scores over Google Books, as it allows the users to download the content to their desktops, unlike Google.

If you are looking for documents of any type, which can be downloaded for your leisurely reading, Scribd is your best bet.

You can view the documents in a very intuitive User Interface and I like very much the Book View the tool provides. Makes you feel, you are thumbing through a book. You can go full screen as well. The documents are converted to Flash and rendered on the browser. You do not require any particular document tools like word, acrobat or open office to be installed on your system. Just Flash Plug-in for your browser.