Scribd began as a site to host and share documents.

[12] While at Harvard, Trip

Adler was inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process
required to publish academic papers.[14] His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told
it would take 18 months to have his medical research published.[14] Adler wanted to
create a simple way to publish and share written content online.[15] He co-founded
Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the inaugural class of Y Combinator in the
summer of 2006.[16] There, Scribd received its initial $120,000 in seed funding and
then launched in a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.[6]

Scribd was called "the YouTube for documents", allowing anyone to self-publish on
the site using its document reader.[14] The document reader turns PDFs, Word
documents, and PowerPoints into Web documents that can be shared on any website
that allows embeds.[17] In its first year, Scribd grew rapidly to 23.5 million
visitors as of November 2008.[18] It also ranked as one of the top 20 social media
sites according to Comscore.[18]

In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload
and sell digital copies of their work online.[19] That same month, the site
partnered with Simon & Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd.[20] The deal made
digital editions of 5,000 titles available for purchase on Scribd, including books
from bestselling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Mary Higgins Clark.[21]

In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies including
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post,
TechCrunch, and MediaBistro.[17] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses
on Scribd in December 2009.[22] In August 2010, many notable documents hosted on
Scribd began to go viral, including the California Proposition 8 ruling, which
received over 100,000 views in about 24 minutes, and HP's lawsuit against Mark
Hurd's move to Oracle.[23][24]