Hmm, actually tried that later, and scribd still tried to make me pay to read this pdf. A pdf that according to the author he is selling and that scribd has no permission to be distributing and is not sharing their profits with him.

It turns out I was able to download it for free, and this was before I knew that scribd did not have permission to distribute it, and that was by taking advantage of their "offer" to upload a document to get the document I wanted.

All of that is crap.