Tips and Tricks for using Scribd

Scribd is a free social sharing and publishing service you can use to get your various documents out to the world. You can upload your documents that you think other users will find useful and search a seemingly limitless number of documents that other users have posted.

Also, you can preview and read experts from books before buying them.

You can upload and share any kind of document – resumes, schoolwork, essays, poems, presentations, recipes, tutorials – pretty much anything.

There is a huge number of reasons why Scribd can be useful to you. It is good for research, learning, brainstorming, sharing ideas, and for general social interaction as well.

You can follow users who upload documents on the topics you are interested in, comment on them and become part of a community. You can also share Scribd documents and embed them on your own website. Scribd is definitely a great service without a doubt.

Here are some tips and tricks for using Scribd to its potential and exploring the service completely.

1.      Explore for more documents

Given that Scribd has a huge number of documents, a simple search sometimes can’t help you to find interesting people or documents. This is especially true if uploaders dodn’t put search friendly titles and descriptions into their documents.

To perform a more thorough search, go to Explore to open up more options for searching.

Here you can sort documents by topic, popularity, most discussed, file types, and many other parameters.

 2.      Easier reading

If you find that a document is hard to read, check  out View Mode. If you choose SlideShow, you can navigate only with the Next and Previous page buttons, but if you choose Scroll mode you can just scroll through the pages.

Also, for easier reading, you might want to check out the FullScreen View. It helps you to read without distractions and to dedicate your full attention to the document.

3.      Embedding

If you like a specific document and want to share it on your website, you can find embed codes by clicking on Embed and Share – Embed. There is even a special code for sharing on WordPress, which doesn’t not allow users to change the HTML code.

4.       Quality of PDFs

If you have uploaded your PDF file on Scribd and you are not satisfied with how it looks, the problem might be the quality of your PDF file. In that case, you might want to change your PDF creation tool. You can use Cometdocs for PDF creation, Adobe’s PDF creation online service, or online file- to-PDF creators.

5.      Make your documents easy to discover

If you want to share your original work on Scribd, which is highly encouraged and will make it possible for you to download the documents of other publisher’s, you need to add appropriate titles, descriptions, categories  and tags. This will enable you to make your documents more search-friendly.

6.       Update documents

You can upload the latest or revised versions of your document without losing read counts, ratings, or comments.  Just go to Advanced Edit – Revisions.

or open your  document and click on Upload a revision

7.       Scribd desktop uploader

The Scribd desktop uploader makes it possible to upload documents from your desktop and upload them to multiple Scribd accounts at once.

8.       Protect your documents

If you want to protect your work from plagiarism, you can restrict users from downloading or copying it and set up a license for document use. Go to Advanced Edit and make all necessary changes.

9.       Analyze stats

Scribd offers multiple features for analyzing the locations of your readers, how your document is being shared, which keywords are bringing people to your documents, who the referrers are, and much, much more. Just click on the Check Stats button in your Dashboard to check these stats out.