scribdfield_api_upload() not returning array

Hello

A site I am hosting on our cpanel runs drupal 6.28 with scribdfield 6.x-1.1-beta1. I have been troubleshooting an issue where the scribdfield module is reports the error "filepath could not be uploaded to Scribd.com"

I tracked it down to the piece of scribdfield code on line 186 of scribdfield.module

$response = scribdfield_api_upload($filepath, $public);

The $response variable is being returned empty, even though the file is successfully posted to scribd. I can confirm because I use the scribd api (http://api.scribd.com/api?method=docs.getList&api_key=##############) directly to pull the list of documents with my API key and I can see the same document has been posted 25 times during my testing. I also confirmed by outputting the values of $response instead of the original error and the contents get output as null.

So, because the $response is empty, none of the code to save the doc_id or access_key is run even though the document was successfully posted. I have worked around the problem by retrieving the doc_id and access_key manually through the scribd API, then placing the doc_id and access_key in the "else" section manually, then saving the page again thus committing statically the doc_id and access_key, but this is a horrible work around I've done just to get the page to display right.

Can anyone help me understand why $response could be empty?