Scribd has been providing a quick and easy way to share documents over the web for a while. Now the company is hoping to move into the eBook arena with the Scribd Store, which lets you purchase, read, download or print premium content.

This week publisher Simon & Schuster announced plans to bring 5,000 titles from its eBook library to the Scribd Store. User will also be able to browse through listings for 7,000 other books that aren't available for download.

Scribd lets publishers keep 80% of the revenue from eBook sales, which is significantly higher than the revenue share Amazon gives publishers who make their titles available in the Kindle store.

The Simon & Schuster deal isn't exclusive. The publisher's titles are available in a number of other digital bookstores as well. But the announcement should give the Scribd store a bit of a publicity bump, as well as a solid base of quality content from authors that people may have actually heard of.

Zoho officially has more online office applications than most people could ever possibly need. But the latest addition makes a lot of sense. Zoho Share lets users upload documents (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc) and share them with other users either via the Zoho web site or by embedding docs on another page. In other words, Zoho Share doesn't do much of anythin gthat Scribd and DocStoc don't already do. But Zoho will also let you import documents from Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer and other online office docs, which means you can easily create and share your files using the same service.

Zoho Share is available as a public preview, and is still pretty rough around the edges. For example, I was unable to upload any documents, and thanks to the lack of a FAQ, it took me a while to figure out how to import docuements from other Zoho services. Eventually I figured out that by marking a Zoho Writer/Sheet or other document as public, it would show up in a Zoho Share search.

If you're looking for PowerPoint style presentations with pictures of cute kitens, or sample resumes, you can find them at Zoho Share. But like any YouTube-for-documents style service, Zoho Share will only really be useful if the company can build a strong enough user base to ensure that you'll always find what you're looking for -- or if Zoho decides not to emphasize the search and find functionality of the site as much as the fact that you can use Zoho Share to embed documents you upload yourself on your own web site. You know, if the company ever fixes the upload feature.

[via CNET]

Document-sharing site Scribd and online self-publishing service Lulu have teamed up to offer Lulu's free ebooks in Scribd's iPaper format. iPaper is designed to be a versatile cross-platform means of displaying different document types online. Key draws include the ability to embed docs in any webpage, including your manuscript in Scribd's library, and adding ads to your document.

Lulu is a popular self-publishing site, handling print versions and ebook versions of manuscripts, so getting them to start rolling out iPaper is a big win for Scribd. It's not going to be available for all Lulu books at first, just the most popular free ones. If this catches on, though, the two companies will have all the publishing bases covered, from printed books to iPaper ebooks.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Document sharing service Scribd has launched a new platform called iPaper that makes it easy to upload and embed PDF and Office documents on any web site. The iPaper viewer is based on Adobe Flash, which means it loads quickly and can be embedded on any web page just as easily as a YouTube video.

You can share documents by uploading them to Scribd and grabbing the embed code. Scribd has also released an API that lets web publishers add iPaper tools to their own sites. The company is also letting publishers embed Google AdSense ads in documents, which lets you monetize your content.

The document viewer is pretty slick. You can view multi-page documents easily. And you can navigate large documents using your mouse or keyboard. Check out a sample after the jump.

[via GigaOm]

While there are plenty of services out there that let you embed a PDF file on a web page, Issuu has to be the prettiest we've seen. When you upload a PDF document, Issuu converts it into web-based document that looks more like a book than a text document. The PDF can then be embedded on pretty much any website, including Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or Blogger pages.

We submitted the Brooklyn Area Guide from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, because it just happened to be the first PDF we could find. We don't know what that says about us, but you can see the result above.

The text is a bit hard to read, but you can click on the file to open up a larger player in another window, complete with a full screen mode.

[via Digital Inspiration]

A few days back we gave away a handful of invitations to DocStoc, a new online document sharing community. It's sort of like Scribd, but with more an emphasis on professional documents like contracts, budgets, and leases.

The site is still in a closed beta, and our first five invitations disappeared pretty quickly. But DocStoc CEO Jason Nazar has agreed to give Download Squad readers a chance to check out the service. Just enter the invitation code "downloadsquad" on the registration page.

Coming out of a private beta, Scribd lets users share and store their stuff, because we all have a lot of stuff to share.

Scribd's users can upload Text files, PDF's, MP3's, MS Office files into a public database. Descriptions and tags can than be attached to the ever-growing database of stuff, making it easier for other users to find, categorize, and vote on. Once uploaded, any items can then be embedded as html, or flashpaper documents onto other social networks or websites..

The Scribd site is filled with a ton of, stuff. With everything from Witty mid term answers to beautiful photography. When viewing documents, depending on formats, you have the option of downloading them in PDF, Powerpoint, Word, and Txt formats. You can also choose to listen or download the mp3 files with a built in player through Scribd's text-to-speech.

So what's the purpose of Scribd? Some say it's a text version of YouTube, I'm not so sure yet. It's a giant social network library of miscellaneous things. I guess its now up to the users, and what they want to accomplish with the service. The team has just got a fresh stack of cash from Angel investors to throw towards development.