Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Scribd now offering free document scanning...

We know it's April 1st, but this is 100% real. I made James Yu, Senior Product Developer at Scribd swear on his unborn first child that this isn't an April fool's gag. Starting today the document hosting company will take any of your real documents and scan them for you to be hosted on Scribd. All you have to do is send your heaps of paper to this physical address:

Scribd
Attn: iPaper
211 Sutter St
2nd floor
San Francisco, CA 94108

The company isn't doing the scanning on-site, but is sending the documents off to a trusted third party. In order to gain access to the documents you need to attach your Scribd username on a cover sheet. Users without an account simply need to attach their e-mail address, and they'll get an e-mail with a link to the documents when it's done.

The most amazing part in all of this is that this service is completely free. Comparable commercial services range in price, but some I found were up to $.80 a sheet. There also appears to be no size limit, meaning you could literally send several boxes of old papers you have laying around. I can see this being huge with college kids who have those final papers that are marked up by their professors or T.A.'s with all the edits and notes that aren't on the final drafts on their computers.

I'm still checking in to see what happens to your real paper after you send it in and how long the process will take. I'm assuming it's shredded, not sold to the highest bidder. Stay tuned.

No comments: