Last summer I was looking for alternatives to custom Flash scripts to allow me to put a portion of my novel DisasterLand online. I had no interest in spending time to build something from scratch, and I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted on any of the script sites. I wanted to maintain the look and feel of the book as much as possible, and it didn’t want the excerpt to be easily copied.
Scribd was the only thing that came out of literally hours of searching and though it didn’t offer me what I wanted—a way to quickly add documents to my own site—it did offer something interesting: a way for users to share documents with the public. Basically, a YouTube for documents as others have put it.
After a bit of study, I realized that they had simply created a web-based interface with Adobe’s FlashPaper software. So then I turned to FlashPaper. Firstly, it wasn’t offered for the Mac but that wasn’t a tragedy… Yet why wasn’t it used more often? Why hadn’t I heard of it? Why wasn’t it being updated for Vista? Was it worth $79 for one brief excerpt?
In the end, I decided to spend a bit of time and create a simple Flash script. So I put chapter one online.
A few weeks ago, I realized this wasn’t working. The limited excerpt wasn’t of any use to a serious reader—anyone could write an opening chapter, and there was no indication that any of the rest of the book was of the same quality. I had to find a way to put up a more significant chunk of the book online, easily and functionally.
While working on another project I came across the Saddleback Educational Publishing website, and their very impressive web catalog (top left on the site, I can’t link directly). The VirtualPages catalog from Impelsys was exactly what I wanted: clean, visually attractive and functionally rich. Yet, it seemed, at a price. Their site doesn’t list pricing, which told me whatever it was, I couldn’t afford it. Self-publishing is a cottage industry, and I was looking for pricing in the high teens. Tops. The $79 for FlashPaper had been really pushing it.
Again, I wound up at Scribd: yet this time I was in for a treat. In February, they had released iPaper, their own custom alternative to Adobe’s now-abandoned FlashPaper. iPaper does the same thing—creates .swf files out of documents—but it is web-based and free. In case you’re wondering, iPaper automatically converts: .doc, .ppt, .pps, .xls, .pdf, .ps, .odt, .odp, .sxw, .sxi, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .txt, .rtf files and more.
iPaper offers exactly what I wanted—it was inexpensive, allowed private document access (only from my site, not to the public from Scribd—but if I change my mind I can easily make the document public) and the ability to easily and seemingly embed the doc in my current site with a tiny snipped of javascript. Perfect! The only downside I could see was the potential of losing control of my excerpt (at least theoretically). I decided to give it a try.
Perfect? Almost. The pages look great (the page turn animations are incredibly convincing), offer fullscreen viewing options and customization of how the documents are initially presented to the viewer. With a setting of private, documents can not be emailed or shared but can be printed. The actual implementation was straightforward and quick, though it took me a bit of time to figure out the iPaper/Scribd integration. Scribd bandwidth comes via Amazon’s S3
The downside is that iPaper feels very much like a Scribd afterthought to me, and I’m still not 100% convinced the documents are secure. Also, when a reader clicks to open the document full-screen (something they inevitably have to do to read conveniently), the window that opens up does not open in a new window, but in the same window, and the URL is inelegant. Annoying, but not a disaster.
To save you some time, I’ve written a little guide to adding iPaper to your site, which should save you a bit of time.
Using iPaper
The first thing is to sign up. Quick and easy. Next step is to determine the best way to integrate iPaper into your site. There are several options: QuickSwitch, which will convert all .pdfs on your site to iPaper docs while you click, the Scribd API (with Ruby and PHP client libraries among others) to give you more flexibility, and the Embed option, where you simply upload the files to Scribd and you are given a link to them. There is also a subset of QuickSwitch called slurp, where instead of pasting the javascript onto a page, you create a slurpified link directly to the document instead and iPaper does the rest.
I chose QuickSwitch, even though I had only one document to covert and the Embed option would probably have worked just fine. But with QuickSwitch, I could see the javascript I’d be adding and how to customize it so it made me feel a bit more comfortable.
I created my .pdf file and uploaded it to my site. I pasted the iPaper javascript into the page and added the link to my document. When I brought up the page and licked the link, in only a few seconds the new iPaper doc appeared. Success! After a little bit of tweaking in terms of the size (iPaper lets you specify custom height and widths), I had a great looking page. It really is that easy. I suggest that you go back and remove your .pdf at this point—Scribd doesn’t need it anymore, and anyone who looks at your page source code will be able to grab it.
Quickly, though, I realized I wanted the document to appear as a book, not as the default. I checked the API and didn’t see a way to add that functionality. I eventually thought to check Scribd directly, so I brought up my account and my document. From there I could set document preferences (’Edit’ along top menu bar, then ‘More Advanced Options’)—including default presentation. Perfect!
The further I got into the preferences, however, the more tenuous the security felt to me. The initial preferences were set to private, but didn’t include a copyright specification (I set this myself) and even though the document was set to private, the default is ‘allow users to download as a word document, .pdf and text file’. It didn’t seem to matter as the document was private, but I changed them anyway. Again, disconcerting.
I had done this as a trial, and for the next few days watched my Scribd account to see if anyone was able to view the document from Scribd (no) and to see if any search engines crawled the document (no). I also tried to access the document directly from Scribd using the doc number, but it told me the document had been deleted. This too was a little disconcerting, until I realized that it just meant it was private (why didn’t it just say that?). I also tried pasting the javascript from my page into a new page and setting the public variable to ‘true’ instead of ‘false’, to see if someone could change the privacy of the document and then download or share it (no). I took the URL from the fullscreen version (which is clearly visible to all) and tried to download that URL (as if it was the direct link to a document). Instead of the flash doc, it gave me a short HTML document and there was no flash doc URL there to see. Again, good news.
Recommendations: I tried everything I could think of to trick Scribd into giving me access to the document, but it wouldn’t. So I feel pretty secure. The integration needs to be much better, the options clearer and the settings coordinated between iPaper and Scribd, but everything works like it should. I do wish I could turn off printing if I wanted to—I don’t, but can see why someone would. Also, probably my biggest complaint is the fullscreen version opening in the same window—it should open in a new window/tab. It improves the user experience, but also as importantly to site owners, it keeps Google Analytics functioning since users haven’t been navigated away from the initial page. I also wish the URL was a bit less… brazen:
http://www.scribd.com/word/full/2554616?access_key=key-i0uap177kgmej7f68ll
But just as people can access photos from Flickr or videos from YouTube, I can see Scribd being hacked in the same manner and even private files able to be downloaded. But maybe not. Just to make sure I watermarked the interior pages of my document.
iPaper and AdSense
Another really promising feature is that iPaper’s coders have hacked AdSense to allow ads to appear within your document. I didn’t elect to do this, and can’t find a document that is currently hosting AdSense ads. As has been pointed out (see link), this is against AdSense’s TOS, but Google might go along with this one since it’s in everyone’s best interest. iPaper still prominently touts this feature, so I don’t think it’s been removed. Anyone have any feedback on this?
Good luck!
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Comments (2)
[...] Earlier I had written a post about my experience integrating iPaper within an exisiting website. [...]
Lulu partners with Scribd, offers iPaper content | TheSacredWeb (space) shared this on Jul 19 08 at 11:04 amScott Phelps shared this on Oct 15 08 at 3:41 pmI have used ipaper on several websites.
Since my company mostly creates sites with a custom CMS we have had problems with clients struggling to create certain layouts…especially when they have to be changed regularly.
A good example of this is a complicated table layout for a yoga studios schedule. They product it in Word but just cannot reproduce it.
Through ipaper they are now able to generate a pdf and quickly have the information displayed how they like are the website.
Its a good product.
