What is a good alternative to Scribd? One that allows viewers to download the source file without too much hassle and displays the text properly? Google Drive?
Dropbox is a bad option if you intend to share it with too many people; pdfs are often large enough you'll get the "This account is generating too much traffic! Try back later" pretty quickly. Dropbox is great for sharing with the family or a small email list, but not for linking to the general internet.
Dropbox doesn't expose your PDFs to search engines, so it doesn't work as a public reference dump. (Github does, I think, but it's not so easy to use - can you imagine ordinary people trying to use git to expose documents to the world?)
Now imagine I know very little about computers and just want to upload and share a PDF file, i.e. click "upload" and get a link--an imgur for PDFs. I don't know of a solution like that.
I prefer viewerjs.org - I don't believe it if people that say that every modern platform has a PDF viewer.
Having a document hosted on your own website together with a javascript viewer reduces the risk for users both in terms of privacy and security, as Acrobat Reader is a seriously problematic piece of code and all the remote code is a serious violation of trust between the user and the owner of the site.
Any modern browser has inline pdf viewing really. Scribd is from the time when the majority didn't yet. I do much prefer sites to open pdfs in a new tab, though, but not as download.
This seems like something that could easily be hacked together over a 3 day weekend (at least a basic version). It could be profitable pretty quickly too if you go for the current Imgur model of ads/pro accounts.
*adds to to-do list&
