hg00 comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Question: where can I upload jailbroken PDFs that is public & Google-visible?
For a job, I compiled ~100MB of lipreading research, some of them extremely obscure & hard to find (I also have some Japanese literature PDFs in a similar situation); while I have no personal interest in the topic and do not want to host indefinitely the PDFs on gwern.net, I feel it would be a massive waste to simply delete them.
I cannot simply put them in a Dropbox public folder because they wouldn't show up in Google, and Scribd is an abomination I despise.
(crosspost from Google+)
Hm? As far as I can tell, the worst thing they do is sometimes charge users to access older uploaded documents. They have to make money somehow. Would you rather them insert full-page ads in documents the way YouTube now plays ads before video clips?
Anyway, one idea is to find people who run sites on topics related to the PDFs and suggest that they upload them to their sites. Should increase the google juice of both the documents and the sites of those who upload them, so win/win, right?
Money which they have zero right to collect and which breaks the implied contract they had with their previous users who uploaded those documents.
And their interface is butt-ugly with PDFs completely unreadable in their HTML version - but of course they don't let you download the PDFs because they're all behind the Scribd paywall.
Hosting documents. A pretty simple task, one would think, and yet Scribd manages to do it both scuzzily and poorly.
A fully-general excuse. But they are not owed a living.