ow To Download Scribd Documents

For Free
Posted by Jamie on March 27, 2019

Originally marketed as the “YouTube” for documents, Scribd began its operation
as a way for anyone to publish and host their documents and writing online. Born
out of the need for one of the site’s creators to host his father’s medical research
without having to pay for publication and wait over a year for the documents to
be published, the site gained notoriety in 2009 after signing a deal with several
publications, including The New York Times, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and
several other blogs and publications to host their documents, as well as for their
Scribd Store, which allowed users to sell digital copies of their work online.

Since then, Scribd has morphed into an online subscription service, built to read
millions of eBooks, comics, and more online with a Netflix-like subscription
service. Despite this refocus on more mainstream titles and novels, Scribd is still
used by millions of people daily to host and share online documents using the
platform built by the site itself. In the site’s documents section, you’ll find
historical papers, political documents, poll results, and plenty of other
information for use in your college assignments, term papers, or just as a general
document of interest. And while viewing these articles is free by itself, albeit
with some limitations on certain documents, downloading this information to
your computer is limited for often than not.

While you should avoid downloading and using others’ documents without
paying for a monthly Scribd decision, at the end of the day, certain users—
students specifically—may find it difficult to pay for the research and other
documents provided on the website. Luckily, there are some ways around these
restrictions. Though the three methods outlined below are both occasionally hit
or miss, they often can be used to bypass the Scribd security and subscription
measures, making it easy to view the documents necessary for your next project
or paper. Here’s what to do.

METHOD ONE: UPLOADING DOCUMENTS

First, it’s important to note that this is method one for a reason. Although we
have three methods on this list, this is the one that we’ve had the most luck with,
and as of March 2019, it’s still the one that works reliably. However, it’s not
perfect, so if this method ever goes down, let us know in the comments and try
our other two methods below.

Our first method for downloading Scribd documents on the web today relies on
uploading a document of your own to a Scribd account, in order to gain access to
the document you want to download. We’ll be performing our test in Google
Chrome, though you should be able to accomplish this in any modern browser,
including Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Start by heading over
to Scribd.com and signing up for a new account. Alternatively, if you already
have an account with Scribd, you can use your existing account by logging in.
Scribd supports accounts with both Facebook and Google sign-ins, so starting a
new account is as easy as clicking a button and linking your account. Once
you’ve signed in, find the document you want to download and copy the URL
down to an outside source, like a Google Keep note or Word document.
From here, you’ll want to click the “Download” option on the right side of your
display. This will automatically redirect you to a page designed to help you set
up your Scribd subscription, complete with a 30-day trial. Above this page,
however, you’ll see an option to upload files from your computer, with a button
that reads “Select Files to Upload.” Click this button and, on your computer,
prepare any kind of document. If you have a word processor installed on your
computer, like Word or Apple Pages, you can use that to create a short,
meaningless document. Alternately, you can use Google Docs to create a free
document on your computer, and download it to your device. The document can
contain anything, including straight gibberish; we recommend using a Lorem
Ipsum generator if you’re having trouble figuring out what to write. When your
document is uploaded, provide a title for the new file and hit “Save.”

Now, grab that URL we saved earlier in this process and paste it into the address
bar at the top of your web browser. A download button should load on your
device, and you’ll be able to save the Scribd document to your computer.
However, we should mention that, thanks to recent updates from Scribd, we ‘ve
had some difficulties performing this without first editing the HTML code using
the inspect button on your browser. It’s not a perfect solution, but once you edit
the HTML for the View button to lead to your device, you can download an
HTML version of the page, allowing you to take the document offline. If you
have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro (check with your school or teacher), you can
convert the HTML document to a PDF.

METHOD TWO: USING THE PAGE SOURCE

CODE
The second of two methods used for viewing Scribd documents, this involves
using Mozilla Firefox to view the page’s source code to gain access to the page’s
info. As mentioned above, we’ve experienced some hit or miss results with this
method, but since it only takes a couple minutes of your time to try, it’s worth
trying anyway. You’ll know this method has failed if you receive a message that
announces an invalid key error. Otherwise, let’s get going with your Scribd
document. This was originally our top-recommended way to download Scribd
documents without paying for a membership, but we’ve heard from enough users
having difficulty with this process to demote it to a backup method.

Start by navigating Firefox (we can’t suggest using Chrome, as Chrome

generates a .swf file that never manages to download) to the Scribd document
you’re looking to save to your computer. Though Scribd also carries full-length
novels and other works of fiction, we recommend only using this for nonfiction
documents and other sources for your projects, papers, and research. Inside your
document’s preview, right-click the document and select “View Page Source”
from the menu. This will open a new tab in your browser, displaying the source
information for your Scribd target.

In this new page, hit Ctrl+F to open the Find in Page UI in Firefox. In this field,
enter the phrase “access_key,” and upon finding the result in the Scribd source
code, highlight and copy the code to your computer. It should be an
alphanumerical code, and appear as ‘key-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.” Now head back
to the original document page in your browser and look at the URL in the top of
the browser. This time, we’re looking for the document ID number in the URL of
your specific page. Unlike the access key, the document ID is listed in the URL,
and consists of several numbers. The URL should appear as
“‘https://www.scribd.com/read/NUMBER/DOCUMENT TITLE.” We’ll be
using the number portion of that link in a moment.

Now, open up a new tab in Firefox. We’re going to create a new URL using the
information provided us by both the access key, the document ID number, and
the following partial URL:
“http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=NUMBER&access_
key=key-ACCESS_KEY”. When you’ve pasted this URL into your new tab,
replace the number section with the document ID and the access key area with
the access key you grabbed earlier. Following this, you’ll have to wait a few
minutes for the page to load as your documents begins to download from the
Scribd servers. Once your document has finished loading, use the print option to
print to PDF, and your document will be saved to your computer.

If this method doesn’t work for you, and you receive some form of error message
from Scribd, retry using the first method listed above. Users have reported to us
that their preferred method uses the document upload method listed above.

METHOD THREE: GREASEMONKEY SCRIPTS