Scribd E-Book Store Lets You Be Your Own Publisher
According to Scribd, authors can opt to publish material as unprotected PDFs, which makes them readable on leading e-book devices like Amazon's Kindle and Sony's eReader. The New York Times reported that Scribd also has a Scribd app in the works for Apple's iPhone.
Scribd content has until this week been free, and users made it popular by sharing documents, such as sample book chapters and research items, over e-mail and embedded links in social networking platforms. Now with the monetized platform, however, it has attracted the attention (at least the positive attention) of publishers and media companies, including technology book publisher O'Reilly Media, which is one of the first to come on board with Scribd's new platform.
"Many publishers (including O'Reilly) have kept Scribd at arm's length because the service was often used by people posting copyrighted material without permisson," wrote O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas in a Sunday blog post. "Though Scribd was reasonably responsive to takedown requests, that puts the onus for monitoring on the publisher, a whack-a-mole scenario that will consume as any resources as you throw at it. ... Like any technology, it's far from perfect ... but it's good enough for us to be comfortable participating, and is as good an example of any turning lemons into lemonade."
Along with O'Reilly, travel guide publisher Lonely Planet and science book publisher Berrett-Koehler will be using Scribd for content and uploading their entire catalogs. According to The New York Times, none of the top-tier book publishing houses have yet signed on, although Random House is said to have experimented with the service.
"One reason publishers are excited to work with us is that they worry that publishing channels are contracting as Amazon and Google are gaining control over the e-book space," said Jared Friedman, chief technology officer and a founder of Scribd, to The New York Times.
Scribd's model may prove attractive to authors and publishers who see a better deal there than anywhere else with e-reading. Amazon dominates e-reading devices with its Kindle and recently released Kindle DX, but it's been criticized for keeping too much revenue for itself and not giving enough to digital book publishers.
Amazon last week started offering Kindle Publishing for Blogs, a program that allows bloggers to sell subscriptions through the Amazon Kindle store but gives them only 30 percent of monthly subscription fees paid while keeping 70 percent for itself.