Monday, May 18, 2009

Scribd Launches New Venture

Two months ago, I did my first post on Scribd here, which I described as:
a document-sharing website with more than 50 million monthly users. Anyone can post a document to the site and, according to Wikipedia, Scribd is "the world's largest library of user-generated documents."
In that post I explained that several major publishers had agreed to offer both teaser excerpts and some full-length novels on Scribd free of charge.

A few weeks later, I did another post here when Scribd came under attack. J.K. Rowling and other published authors had accused Scribd of posting their copyrighted material without permission. Scribd said it immediately took down such material when posted without permission upon receipt of a notice. While this approach keeps it in compliance with the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I said the onus should be on Scribd to prove they are good citizens of the publishing world by taking an active role in avoiding copyright infringement rather than standing by passively and allowing well-known books to be posted to their site.

Sunday's Publishers Weekly had an article describing the launch of the new Scribd Store in which publishers or individual authors could post their works for sale.
The Scribd Store offers a generous revenue sharing agreement with sellers getting 80% of revenue. Publishers and authors also have complete control over price and packaging—they set the price, or set no price at all, and can dictate what to sell, whether entire documents, chapters, even pages. They can also dictate reading options—for example, allowing for works to be viewed on Scribd only, or enabling PDF downloads, PDF downloads with DRM, or ePub downloads. Sellers can also offer downloads to mobile phones and devices.
Go here to check out the new Scribd Store.

1 comment:

Derek Dean said...

Hello, I'm new to scribd, and you seem a bit more knowledgable than myself, having posted material on the website. (sorry, I did a google search or "is scribd bad?" and your post came up)

I am probably in a spot you are or were in. Having finished a book, and having no one to read it. I've been doing the SASE method, sending to agents they often times return it a day later not even glancing over it. Anywho, how would you say scribd is? I don't mind not making a dollar, thats fine. It's just that as is I've technically written a diary of someone else's life. And until others read it won't be a story. Thanks for any insights of how's it's been for you.