In my last digital design column in the latest issue of the magazine I take a look at the long history of “iPaper”. It’s essentially the story of the holy grail for designers: a format that manages to combine the design strengths and reading experience of paper with the unbeatable advantages offered by the internet – universal, instant and effectively free publishing and delivery.

Back in my first column, 150 issues previously, I had thought it was obvious what format would come to fill this role: the web-optimised PDF. And, as the most common document format on the web after HTML and with semi-integrated playback in most browsers, to an extent it does. Generally though, despite all its other strengths, PDF has failed miserably in its web ambitions. 

So is there an alternative?

One of the most interesting new takes on the longstanding iPaper dream comes from Scribd.com and is called… “iPaper”. Scribd is generating quite a bit of interest at the moment as a site where users can upload and share their written work. Just two years on from launch and with over 15 billion words in its public library, over 50,000 new uploads every day and over 50 million visitors a month, Scribd is well on track to establish itself as the “YouTube for writers”.

This file sharing is interesting enough especially as – again like YouTube – you can embed the iPaper content and reader into your own pages with a short snippet of code – something I’ve taken advantage of recently to enable quick posting of brochures to a web 2.0 user-generated site (there’s even a nice Drupal iPaper module to make this even easier).

What’s particularly interesting though is how Scribd has chosen to implement the site. You can upload files in a number of formats – DOC, OpenOffice, PPT etc – and these are then automatically and rapidly converted into both PDF and into Flash SWF. It’s the latter which is the main format used for display.

The beauty of this dual approach is that you don’t need the baggage of Adobe Reader to just quickly view and navigate the design rich SWF file (including search and print) which is all that most user want to do 99% of the time. For those rare occasions when you do want more, it’s simple to download the PDF version for offline reading, commenting, archiving etc. 

With the iPaper player “about a 1/1000th of the size of Reader” and the SWF content files smaller than their PDF equivalents, Scribd cruelly exposes the inherent bloat and semi-detached nature of the supposedly “web-optimised” PDF. 

Adobe is clearly well aware of both the problem and the solution. Indeed it has largely copied the Scribd model for its own Flash-based handling of hosted PDFs at Acrobat.com.

I wonder though whether this could be the herald of deeper integration. Now that Adobe owns both PDF and SWF formats and their respective players wouldn’t it make sense to spread iPaper-style benefits beyond these cloud-based server solutions? 

What I’m imagining is a truly web-optimised flavour of PDF with its own associated Flash wrapper. This Flash version of the document would enable fast and truly integrated online display within the browser either full-screen or embedded via a dedicated lightweight document reader incorporated directly into the ubiquitous Flash player. If you like the look of it, simply right-click and download the underlying PDF into Adobe Reader for offline viewing, printing, archiving and so on.

It certainly wouldn’t be the holy grail – as I discuss in my article – but it would be a major step towards it.