I agree that it should be HTML, most of the time. But in reality, there are often many decent reasons why it’s not.

I don’t think there’s much point in saying what the web was created for, because that was 17 years ago, and the web has long since been twisted for purposes other than those it was designed for. And in my experience, most academic papers are distributed in PDF, not HTML. The reality is that many people have documents that they want to share that are in PDF, .doc, .ppt, etc. They’re not in HTML because they were not originally written for the web. For example, from my about page I link to a few of my project reports. I don’t want to bother converting them to HTML, but it would be nice for people to be able to easily view them.

You’re right that they are just reinventing PDF. That’s the point though. But it also does more — PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides, etc. are all viewable through the same interface. From that perspective, I think it’s a win.

I do agree that what they have right now seems pretty half baked. I tried to follow their QuickSwitch instructions to turn one of my PDFs into iPaper, and the sample code that they gave me was missing a really important piece, which I only discovered by looking through the full reference. Once I finally got it working, the page was displaying a blank document. Only by clicking though to the Scribd version could I actually read the document, and even then, the font was so crappy that it was basically unreadable.

So, for the concept, I give them a B+, for the implementation, a C.

If they’re just trying to do an online rendition of the printed copy, then they’re just reinventing PDF. Their tool doesn’t appear to provide any extra features, such as annotation, a mechanism for sharing comments, or sharing a single “documents” across multiple sites. When I viewed their demo document that’s supposed to contain advertising, it didn’t. It sounds like they can’t even get their own crippled featureset right.

Craptastic!

As to your concerns about centralization on the web, I worry less about utility computing providers (S3, paypal, etc), and more about the centralization of services: google search, gmail, google documents, google calendar, etc. It’s only a matter of time until Google (or Microsoft, or Yahoo!, or Amazon) start violating user’s privacy. The impact in China is chilling: Yahoo! has cooperated with a repressive regime and people are in jail (or dead) because of it. If utility computing services go down, then there’s a denial of service for their customers, but when privacy is at stake, their can be much more serious consequences.