This just in from the world I can’t quite seem to keep up with. A sort of YouTube for documents. Not sure what implications and applications there are here for museums, but I have the feeling something’s up. I remember lots of predictions about e-paper; this may be the latest iteration of the idea.

Inevitably, Google has a finger in the pie. From techchrunch.com:

“Document sharing on the Web via embeddable Flash players keeps
getting better all the time. Earlier this month I wrote about Issuu,
a Denmark-based startup that does a really good job with image-heavy
documents like magazines and photography books. Today, Scribd
released a vastly improved upgrade to its document viewer, which it
is now calling iPaper. Scribd streams the converted PDF documents to
the Flash player, and offers three different ways to view each
document: in one long, scrollable window; as a book with page-
turning effects, or as a slide show. Check out the book mode in the
this document.

“Pretty cool, but what’s the business? Scribd allows you to put
contextual Google AdSense ads inside each document. Scribd will do
a three-way rev share, giving most of its portion of the AdSense
dollars to the document uploader. Now all those documents not
already on the Web can generate some income. “

More information and a comparison with Adobe Reader,
at readwriteweb.com