Hello,<p>I'm one of the founders of Scribd. You might be surprised to hear this, but I applaud the PDFy service and am glad someone has built it.<p>Scribd is not designed to be a simple, lightweight way to host a PDF file. Yes, this was the original idea of Scribd 8 years ago, but we've long since left that path. We see that market as having been made irrelevant by a combination of Google Docs, Dropbox/Box.net/etc., and better PDF readers now built into browsers like Chrome. There may be room for someone to build an imgur like service for PDFs too, but that's not what we're doing.<p>Scribd is really good for two things:<p>1) Scribd is a subscription reading service ("Netflix for books") where you can read over 400,000 professionally published books for $9 / month, including thousands of new releases and best-sellers. It doesn't include many programming books unfortunately (yet!), but if you like to read other things, it's a good deal.<p>2) Scribd is good for serious authors and publishers who want to publish a lot of content and organize it well. For example, the World Bank uploads thousands of research reports to Scribd and organizes them into collections. And many serious authors publish books and other writings with us.<p>We're sorry that we haven't done a good enough of explaining who we are as it's changed over the years. And we're sorry if you've been frustrated trying to use Scribd for something it's not particularly good at.<p>To joepie91_ - I think it's cool that you've started this. We have some experience building document hosting services, and I can see you are already encountering some issues we've worked on, like DMCA and copyright. If you'd like to talk, we'd be more than happy to help you out.
>"I got sick of documents getting locked up behind login walls of services like Scribd."<p>Now thats a fantastic example of building a product around a real problem. If I even see domains like Scribd anymore I won't even give it a click. No, I don't want to sign up. I'd rather just do site:domain"thedoc.pdf" or some other way.<p>I hope your product takes off and everyone uses it!
"...much like Imgur does for images. PDFy is free, ad-free, and non-commercial."<p>They must be using a different imgur than I use, because it's definitely commercial and has ads. I can't see pdfy surviving on donations indefinitely.
This looks great, but I hope you have a solid system in place to deal with the huge number of DMCA requests you'll get. Free PDF hosting services (free file hosting services) end up being a target of pirates, but not just that, of automated systems that index things specific to pirated text in order to get clicks.<p>If you don't get way ahead of these kinds of users, you'll end up with an untenable drain on your resources that will make it easier to shut down than to sustain.
Great idea. Just one little tip: I would not use the combination 'Instant and PDF' in your communication. Instant PDF is a well known product by Enfocus. It's basically a check-app for Print-optimized PDF files. As such it's a world-wide standard designers are forced to use. Create PDF, run it through Instant PDF, if approved it will attach a flightcheck report to said PDF and newspapers, magazines, printers can process the file. The flightcheck searches for common mistakes (non-embedded fonts, rgb colors, low res photo's, etc). Recently the Instant PDF name got absorbed by Connect but the brand Instant PDF is quite powerfull really).
I'm skeptical about the longevity of a site that operates entirely on donations, but seeing that you offer the source code for free (and it runs on PHP, which is arguably pretty well-supported), <i>and</i> your license is reasonable (if crass, but who cares?)...<p>This is really great. Thanks for posting this.
Wow, love this so much more than Scribd. Already clicked on the latest uploads and found something cool, and it just worked and didn't require login. Amazing.
This really needs NSFW tagging. Right now, the "latest public documents" is full of hentai. Doesn't mean that people will actually do that, but at least giving uploaders an option wouldn't hurt.
I love it. But instead of "document.pdf" as the file name on download, what if you changed it to "[pdf title].pdf"? Several downloads in a row gets confusing
@joepie91_: Just FYI, documents do not load until you accept the site's cookies. I don't know of a technical reason why this should be, off the top of my head, so if there isn't one, you may consider removing that restriction/requirement.
This is awesome! But I can't see it surviving on donations. Commercialize it please so that it survives. Tasteful ads aren't so bad like what Reddit does or Carbon[something]... I'm just concerned you won't survive on donations.
Very nice initiative! Good luck with it!<p>I know this implies complexity, but I think it'd be nice if there was a comment feature for the PDFs, perhaps even something à la Soundcloud, i.e. per section comments.<p>I'd love to find things such as my washing machine's manual improved by user experience through comments etc. :-D
This is really sweet, but if I may, what's wrong with using existing solutions like Dropbox or Google Docs? Neither shows a paywall or login screen when accessing the shared links.<p>Unless you don't use either service, which is totally valid.
I also made NextPrev.it a little while ago with a friend. It gives you option to host a PDF and control which page the viewer sees, perfect for presentations or looking through contracts etc.
I don't want to sound negative, but when I look at the "latest public documents", most of them seem to be copyright infridgement.<p>But good luck anyway.
This looks like duplicated effort to me. Upload the pdf to Google Drive, set the permissions to "people with link can view", and share the link it gives you. Alternatively, there's a publish to web option - they're identical in this use case. I already do something similar on my portfolio page - I have a link that downloads a pdf version of my resume on Google Drive.
Could we please stop hating on Scribd? In addition to being rude, it's also mistaken: I've found PDFs on Scribd that simply aren't available anywhere else, because the original links on other sites became broken. This is somewhat common for academic papers, for example. Yes, I had to upload a PDF in order to download the PDF from Scribd, but that's a fair trade; I chose to upload an academic paper that perhaps might be useful to someone else.