Lately, I have seen that scribd makes it very difficult for users (free users) to browse through a document hosted on their site. There is no ability to search within a document, let alone being able to download the same.
To my amazement, I saw that even copy/ pasting text copies gibberish to the clipboard!To check out what was wrong, I turned off javascript in the browser and then loaded the same document again. Voila, I did see the gibberish. And so, it looks like the javascript from scribd somehow decodes the gibberish text and then displays it in the browser.