Scribd is 'Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company on HTML 5'

Starting tomorrow Scribd will start scrapping Flash across its tens of millions of documents in favor of HTML 5, according to a TechCrunch report.

Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman told the site: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”

Documents will simply become very long Web pages. A new bookmark feature will help you keep your place in especially long documents. Scribd’s documents will be especially iPad friendly. Instead of downloading a book from Apple’s iBooks store or Amazon’s Kindle app, you can see if an electronic version is on Scribd and read it in your browser. Pinch and zoom to make the text bigger. No download necessary. The books and other documents are stored on the Web. They can be shared via Facebook and Twitter, or sent to a mobile phone.


“Right now the document is in a box,” says Friedman, “a Youtube-type of experience. There is a bunch of content and a bunch of stuff around it. In the new experience we are taking the content out of the box.”

This is another major hit for Flash. Hopefully, Adobe is able to get their "best tools in the world for HTML 5" out soon.

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