Looking for a place to share your documents online? Previously, I’ve written about services like Show Document, a free online document collaboration tool. However, I’ve not yet gone into detail about document sharing websites.
Firstly, there are a bunch of them! If you simply want to upload a file and share it with your friends, family, book club, college organization, company team, etc, it’s a piece of cake nowadays.
However, online document sharing sites are also really useful for those who want to read original works created by millions of people. Thinking Wikipedia? Basically, these sites are mini versions of Wikipedia, but are sometimes better because they contain book excerpts, slideshows, recipes, puzzles, magazines, sheet music and a lot more.
Here is my list of the top 3 sites for sharing and finding documents online:
![scribd[5]](http://www.online-tech-tips.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/scribd5.png "scribd[5]")
Scribd is the titan in the document sharing business. They have over 60 million readers a month and almost 50,000 documents uploaded every day! That’s a huge user base. Not only that, they have documents in over 90 languages.
Their iPaper document readers supports a huge array of document file types, including pdf, doc, ppt, tiff, png, jpg, OpenDocument, and StarOffice documents.
Other nice feature of Scribd include the ability to upload multiple files at once, upload from a URL, categories, groups, tags, and folders.
Finally, it also includes traffic analytics for free, so you can keep track of how many views, downloads, etc occurred with your document.
Docstoc is another decent online document storage site, but not as good as Scribd. However, it has several million documents, so there’s still a lot of stuff you can read online for free.
Docstoc does not support as many file types as Scribd, but it has more sharing/embedding options, such as posting to social network and social bookmarking sites.
It also has better document viewing features, such as fullscreen, fit width, fit page, rotate, related docs, and other docs by user.
SlideShare is one of the largest sites for sharing presentations only. The presentations are nicely organized into categories and uploading is quick and easy. You can also import your Google Docs presentations into SlideShare.
SlideShare also has some nice social networking features like the ability to Follow others (like twitter), start discussions, and create groups, etc.
You can embed the slideshows onto your own blog or website or share the slideshows with others privately. You can also sync audio to your slides and market your own events on SlideShare.
I’m sure others will feel that these are not the best document sharing sites, so feel free to post what you think is best. Other good sites include DocShare, Yudu Freedom, and Calameo. Enjoy!
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