Category Archives: Product

Features and functionality announcements, guides, tips.

Introducing Scribd 3.0 for iPad & iPhone

Posted on July 17, 2013 by scribd | 3 Comments

We’re incredibly excited to announce the release of Scribd 3.0 – currently available on iPad and iPhone.

Scribd has always helped connect authors, publishers and readers to a massive library of engaging content. While our website has remained a hub for these books, documents and publications, today’s update features a redesign that places the emphasis on better mobile browsing, content discovery and reading.

Same Scribd. Improved Design. Far Sleeker.

Here is a rundown of some of the best features for both the new versions:

Faster, Friendlier - This design strives to connect the Scribd homepage experience more closely with the mobile experience. Feel free to browse, explore and read our vast library of content. With improved navigation for the iPad app, it’s never been easier to explore Scribd and your personal library.

The new Scribd app mirrors the look and feel of our homepage.

Browse Tons of Content - Have you seen us lately? More than just documents, much of our content in the mobile apps is centered around categories ranging from Creative Writing to Science Fiction. Come back often, we are always adding new publications and categories every single day!

Science Fiction is just one of the many categories of publications you can select from.

Improved Reading - We are most excited about how this update addresses a drastically improved reading experience. Now, the contents of your favorite book have been optimized for both the iPhone and iPad. Additionally, you can adjust your preferred reading experience by changing the text font, size and color. Reading with Scribd has never been better. With offline file management, it is much easier to save books to your library to read later.

The newly improved reading experience now offers a variety of potential adjustments to text font and size.

Additionally, we have also tackled other improvements including:

* Improved offline file management

* User profiles

* Manage your Scribd Social Feed

* Enhanced PDF reader

* Bug fixes

So, give the Scribd app a spin! We’re looking forward to the many ways our users will benefit from the vast improvements for Scribd’s mobile apps. As always, please share your feedback in the comments or via scribd@support.com.

To download the app, simply point your browser to the App Store.

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Posted in In the News, Product, What's New

Tagged App Store, iPad, iPhone, iTunes Store, mobile, scribd

Introducing Reading Progress

Posted on February 6, 2013 by scribd | 14 Comments

Scribd has built the world’s largest digital library, right at your fingertips. Whether on the desktop, phone or tablet, Scribd offers millions of books, magazines, research papers, scientific reports, legal documents, among others, to read and enjoy.

Today, we’re excited to announce the ability to sync your reading progress on any publication across all of our platforms. Start reading on the web and continue on the same page through the mobile web or the Scribd app. A panel on the Homepage will always display your most recently read publication. Reading from the world’s largest digital library has never been easier.

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Posted in Product, What's New

Tagged Feature, Reading Progress, Recently Read, Update, What's New

Introducing: My Content

Posted on December 19, 2012 by scribd | 5 Comments

Yesterday evening we told you about the introduction of our new Profile pages. Today, we want to walk you through ‘My Content” which provides publishers and users a place to manage all of their published documents, collections, readcasts, and saved documents. Previously, this page was known as ‘My Shelf’ which we have deprecated to simplify how users access their content and remove redundant navigation.

To access your ‘My Content’ and start interacting with your publications, simply click on the following link after you are authenticated on Scribd.

My Content is the nucleus of all the collections and documents a user has published, purchased, saved, and readcast across our community. Within each type of content listing, users can further edit, delete, feature, and save publications.

The ‘My Content’ layout includes easily navigable menus that contain your documents and publications.

There are built-in controls to create, edit and manage your documents. Content can be sorted by a variety of variables such as date published, title or number of reads.

Controls allow you to edit, save, add to collection, make private, feature and delete your content.

We have also surfaced some actions previously visible under ‘Edit Document’ and ‘Collection,’ such as privacy settings that allow you to make any of your content public or private, which can be locked from My Content.

As a note, premium publishers profiles currently support ‘My Content.’

Start exploring, featuring and displaying your content! As always, let us know what you think of these updates and stay tuned to our blog and social media channels for further updates.

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Posted in How-To, Product, What's New

Tagged Feature, My Content, scribd, Update

Scribd’s New Profile Pages

Posted on December 18, 2012 by scribd | 9 Comments

Today we released a new version of Profile pages on Scribd. The new design is a result of strategic thinking about how to best allow publishers and readers alike to highlight specific content.

Spotlight on Content

We have introduced multiple content modules where members can surface documents and collections they would like people to see first. Before, when people clicked on a profile, they saw the profile owner’s timeline-driven activity feed. For example, if you published or read a document — that story would appear there when the action occurred. Our publishers and readers never really had any ability to tinker or adjust this page. Until now.

Scribd’s new Profiles have a variety of modules that place content control squarely with the user. Users can highlight a variety of collections and documents at a number of levels:

- Featured content module appears at the top. Here, publishers and readers can really emphasize particularly noteworthy documents. Note, documents do not necessarily have to be published by the profile owner (attribution is given to the actual publisher).

Feature / Unfeature

- For Publishers, their published public documents will appear next. We have made it a point to highlight content with the most reading and sharing activity. At the same time, we give publishers the controls to modify what gets displayed through a “feature” / “unfeature” action.

- User’s Collections are also highlighted on the new Profile pages. As with individual documents, some collections will be shown by default, but the profile owner has ultimate control over this.

- Most popular Readcasts are also featured in the main section of the page. Events are determined by a combination of reading and sharing activity of the particular document.

- The Timeline displaying the profile owner’s activity still occupies an important place on the page, on the right panel, below the profile owner’s information.

As a result, more content will be surfaced to the top of a user’s Profile and Content pages.

Content Pages

From the Profile page, profile owners as well as other people viewing their profile will be able to navigate to content sub-pages displaying all the profile owner’s Published documents and Collections.

With the new design of these pages (as well as of the Profile) more content is displayed, providing a much better content discovery experience.

From these pages anyone can select publications to feature (or un-feature) on their own profile too.

Published Documents

Collections Page

An Individual Collection

As a note for our Publisher Partners, profile support for these accounts will be forthcoming. Please continue to follow our blog and twitter for future updates. Tomorrow we will explore the ‘My Content’ page.

Start exploring, featuring and displaying your content! As always, let us know what you think of these updates.

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Posted in How-To, Product, What's New

Tagged Collections, Content, Profile, Profile Page, scribd

Bringing You Effortless Sharing With Auto-Readcast

Posted on November 14, 2012 by scribd | Leave a comment

We’re happy to announce Scribd’s integration with Facebook Open Graph, which allows you to automatically share or ‘Auto-Readcast’ to Facebook documents you read on Scribd.

What To Expect:

Before, frictionless sharing to Facebook wasn’t ideal because events would be published to all your friends’ news feeds. The result was, put bluntly, spam. Facebook now publishes these events in the Ticker on the top right of your profile without overwhelming Timeline or being intrusive to your friends’ news feed. Some events may be published to the feed or friends’ feeds.

Facebook Timeline makes special provisions for events that are shared via Open Graph. Instead of showing each shared item individually, Facebook groups all similar shared items and lists them as a single event.

Because frictionless sharing is not for everyone (or for everyone all the time), we have designed this feature to give you maximum control of what you share:

1. On your next visit to Scribd the first thing you’ll see is a large prompt that explains to you what Auto-Readcasting is all about and gives you the option to start using the feature. Click “Ok, Share!” to try this feature. Not doing anything will keep your settings as they are today.

2. If you do decide to try “Auto-Readcasting,” Scribd gives you controls so that you don’t find yourself automatically sharing something you didn’t really want to share. Each time you view a document, you’ll see a prompt on the top-right corner below the ‘Readcast’ button that shows you the Auto-Readcasting state for that document. You can keep from sharing any document by simply clicking ‘Cancel, I do not want to Readcast this‘ inside the prompt.

3. So you tried out “Auto-Readcasting” and decided it’s not for you? No problem. Simply visit your Sharing Settings under ‘Account’ and un-select Auto-Readcasting under Scribd, Facebook, or both.

We hope this helps and you give it a whirl.

You see, for far too long, reading has been mainly a solitary activity. Scribd is attempting to change that by helping readers discover and share quality, engaging content as effortlessly as possible. We believe Facebook continues to work on features to make this goal truly valuable and enticing to Scribd readers. They too provide tools to manage what is visible or isn’t visible to your friends on Facebook, and to adjust your global privacy settings (read this Mashable article or personally adjust the settings within Facebook). Learn more about how Open Graph by reading this Facebook summary on Scribd:

View this document on Scribd

If you have more questions, contact support@scribd.com.

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Posted in In the News, Product

Tagged Auto-Readcast, Facebook, Feature, Open Graph, Product, readcasting, Sharing, Ticker, Update

Attention: Beta Testers Wanted

Posted on October 29, 2012 by scribd | 2 Comments

We are working on a new publishing tool and looking to enroll a limited group of Scribd users for beta testing to gather feedback on usability, and gain insight from our valued users.

If you’re interested in enrolling to help test drive this tool, please fill out this form and we will send you instructions and a link to the new upload tool page.

While the beta version of the tool is already available to a very small group of users, you may not be able to see it. If you currently see the new publish tool by default, then go ahead and try it out! Be sure to leave us your feedback.

The new publish tool landing page looks like this:

You can always choose to revert to the previous upload format via the link at the top, ‘No Thanks. Take me to the old uploader.’

More helpful tips for the new publishing tool

You can quickly publish single or multiple documents accommodating multiple formats and cloud-based files from Google docs, Facebook and Gmail.

Once you have started to upload, the file will begin converting. If you would like to make the document private, click the checkbox to the right.

If you upload multiple files, you can save time by clicking ‘Apply To All’ next to the first document you provide information for. This will automatically apply the category, topics, type and tags to all your documents.

Include as much information about your document as possible. Title and description fields are required. This is your opportunity to create an engaging title and a short, concise description. As you edit these fields, you can preview them on the left. The more information you provide, the higher the document’s “discoverability” score rises which helps users discover your documents.

In addition to the title information, you can choose a category, topic, and type. ‘Categories’ cover a really broad range of content while ‘Topic’ helps narrow down the specific subject matter of your content from Government & Politics to Technology. ‘Type’ helps to distinguish whether your document is a research paper, essay, form, etc.

We all want to share our favorite documents with the world! After you ‘Save & Continue,’ be sure to click and link your social networks and let your friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ that you just published.

New to the publish flow is the ability for you to flag a document you want to have featured on our homepage, where your content will get thousands of reads. We are constantly featuring new documents every day, and if you think your document belongs there – convince us by checking the box and provide a solid pitch. Maybe your publication will be prominently displayed on our homepage!

At this point, you can view your work on Scribd. Congratulations! You’ve published your document. Now, go out there, get to work and start publishing.

# # #

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Posted in In the News, Product, What's New

Tagged beta test, new feature, publish, publish page, scribd

Save The Best For Later

Posted on October 17, 2012 by scribd | 1 Comment

We’re releasing a new feature that allows our readers to save content to read at a later time, across different platforms.

When you encounter an interesting document on Scribd, or your mobile device that you wish to read or reference later, you can do so by simply clicking “Save for later.”

You can “Save for later” from any document page on Scribd, as well as Scribd for iPhone. Documents you save on Scribd for iPhone can be read on Scribd.com, and vice versa. To find content you have saved, simply visit the “Saved” menu (don’t forget to log in).

To enjoy this feature on your iPhone, update the Scribd application through the App Store. The new update also includes iPhone 5 support.

Here is a breakdown of where you can find this feature and how to use it.

Scribd For iPhone:

To save any document, tap the ‘Save’ icon. You can bookmark documents from the following locations within the Scribd app.

Featured

Reading Feed

To access your bookmarked documents, access the menu and then tap on ‘Saved.’

Bookmarking From Scribd.com:

There are numerous places on our website where an authenticated user can bookmark documents including ‘Documents’ and ‘Collections.’ You can also save documents from the Activity Feed and the document read page.

Document Read Page:

Activity Feed:

Search Results

To access your saved documents, click on ‘My Documents‘ and ‘Saved Documents‘

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Posted in How-To, Product, What's New

Tagged Bookmark, Save for later, scribd

Scribd Content Categories

Posted on September 17, 2012 by scribd | 5 Comments

As our redesigned homepage continues to evolve, we have made it easier to discover the various types of documents, publishers and collections featured on our homepage.

Today, we launched category pages for our publications across a number of content verticals from food to science.

When publications are featured on the homepage, they are designated with a specific category. That clickable link takes you to a page that accumulates all relevant documents related to its category.

With millions of documents uploaded to Scribd each month, this feature allows readers an opportunity to read content-specific documents, and enable users an opportunity to discover the many types of publications our users upload.

In the coming weeks, a great example of this feature will be through our Election 2012 page, which accumulates all of the featured content that relates to the upcoming presidential election in November.

Once a user clicks on a content category, they will be able to see a curated list of all the category articles, as well as a list of Editor’s Picks including, publishers, readers and collections.

The full list of our live content pages includes:

Art & Design
Business
Government
Photography
Food
Travel
Vintage
The 2012 Election
Science
Health
Legal
Infographics
Sports
Technology
In The News
Creative Writing
Olympics
Architecture
Maps
Economics

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Posted in Product, What's New

Tagged Categories, Content, Election 2012, Infographics

Scribd For iPhone Now Available In App Store.

Posted on August 16, 2012 by scribd | 12 Comments

To get Scribd for iPhone visit the App Store.

With Scribd for iPhone, our valued users can access their content, collections, reading feed, and community while on the go. Everyone can also access a plethora of content on the app, including an array of editorial publications curated by Scribd editors everyday. With the app it’s easy to explore, read, and share millions of written works across the Scribd ecosystem.

All that Scribd has to offer, and more

The app allows users to access features that are popular with Scribd’s engaged user base, such as the Reading Feed, documents and collections while they’re away from their desktops.

Our editors constantly handpick the best documents for the stream of curated content that reflect the best creative writing, research, trending documents and source material that is generating headlines in the news.

Easily share your favorite documents with friends, family and the social world with the tap of a button. Within seconds, you can easily share documents by email or twitter.

Enjoy your favorite Scribd content fully optimized for the iPhone. The app’s PDF Reader makes for an ideal experience for reading documents.

The PDF reader can also come in very handy for reading documents outside of Scribd. When you browse the mobile web and stumble upon a PDF file, select to send to Scribd and you will automatically be placed in the Scribd iPhone app PDF Reader for an optimal reading experience.

Bookmarks is a new feature and currently unique to the iPhone app. Like to read on the go? Save a document to read later and offline with our bookmarking feature.

About Scribd

Scribd is the world’s largest online library.

Use Scribd to discover creative writers, test out new recipes, or tackle new hobbies with how-to guides. Pour through analyst reports, business presentations and spreadsheets. Get access to detailed information contributed by world leaders, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.

Stay current while reading the detailed documents that make the headlines of the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, Huffington Post, Forbes and other national and local journals. Get the latest literary offerings from publishers like Random House, Workman, Chronicle Books, Wiley, O’Reilly, and others.

Add new dimensions to your academic work with an array of research documents from abstracts to dissertations from Harvard Press, University of Chicago, and Duke Press, as well as students, teachers, and professors from all over the world.

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Posted in In the News, Product, What's New

Tagged apps, iPhone, mobile

Category Archives: Product

Introducing Scribd 3.0 for iPad & iPhone

Introducing Reading Progress

Introducing: My Content

Scribd’s New Profile Pages

Attention: Beta Testers Wanted

Save The Best For Later

Scribd Content Categories

Scribd For iPhone Now Available In App Store.

Scribd Blog Archives

Scribd on Twitter

Follow “The Scribd Blog”

Category Archives: Product

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Scribd Blog Archives

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