3 best online document sharing sites

Posted on July 1, 2009 at 5:06 am

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

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

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

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!

» Filed Under Cool Websites

Comments

5 Responses to “3 best online document sharing sites”

Alek Davis said on : July 1st, 2009 at 10:55 am

I prefer Docstoc because the last time I checked it was the only site allowing embedded hyperlinks in presentations (Scribd used to allow hyperlinking, but then they disabled it).

webparkour said on : July 6th, 2009 at 5:19 am

http://share.zoho.com, is a simple & Nice online document sharing site. You can easily edit, upload and share your documents online. Also have chat feature with this for your team collaborations. Please try this…

Steve Johnson said on : November 18th, 2009 at 10:42 am

I found this link and tried Zoho – but then I learnt that Glasscubes had implemented Zoho within their document sharing – and I just find it much simpler to use.

So that would be my recommendation (after all you need your colleagues, customers and whoever you’re sharing your documents with to be able to use it).

So that’s my recommendation: http://www.glasscubes.com

Marcus said on : November 30th, 2009 at 1:47 am

Yes it is true that these three sites are the best online document sharing sites out there, but there are also many more that get the job done well too!