Online document sharing site Scribd has announced that it has partnered with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications, to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community free of charge. Publishers have begun to add an array of content to Scribd’s library, including full-length novels as well as briefer teaser excerpts.
Offering book excerpts to entice readers is nothing new – Amazon and Google have been doing this for years, and Amazon’s Kindle allows readers to download book samples to their devices for free. But these options aren’t conducive to sharing content that you’ve discovered on the web, as they don’t allow your to embed them in your blogs and websites. Scribd’s iPaper Flash document viewer is built to do exactly this, so inserting a book excerpt into a blog or even an author’s site is easy.
Authors also benefit from increased exposure on Scribd itself, which sees a monthly readership totaling as high as 50 million. Authors can also expose their work to a much broader demographic – for example, author Tess Gerritsen, whose largest audience has historically been women in their 40s and 50s, was able to attract a younger readership when she temporarily posted her novel “The Surgeon”.
Scribd has actually been posting both full text and excerpts of books from some of these publishers for a few months now as they conducted trial tests. The fact that they’re now publicly endorsing the platform seems to indicate that they’re pleased with the results, and I won’t be surprised if we start seeing more publishers sign on. Also worth noting is that this announcement stands in stark contrast to the accusations of Scribd’s willingness to host pirated content – I doubt many publishers would be willing to partner with the site if they thought it was wrought with piracy.
CPO RJ Garbowicz was asked what is YourNight.com, he responded, “Picture this; you get home from work in the evenings and you turn on your PC, what do you do . . . answer email . . . browse your social networking or dating site . . . play online games . . . search videos and music . . . shop online . . . peruse job listings . . . check out local events . . . search for a business . . . go to your online banking . . . well you get the point, YourNight.com affords you all of this, and much, much more – all within one colossal, user-friendly portal . . . that’s all I can say for now, since we are still in stealth mode . . . however, as soon as we complete our Series A capital raise of $10 million our purpose and presence will be known.”
For more information, please contact:
RJ Garbowicz President/CPO Extreme Enterprises, Inc.
Phone:727.289.5522
Email:RJ@eeihq.com
PO Box 49271
St Petersburg, FL 33743
shamelesss
Sounds great. Hold while I get in my Delorean and take a trip to the early 90s to return this idea to Compuserve and AOL where it belongs.
But I can do all of this already by simply putting a bunch of links onto my browser, “all within one colossal, user-friendly” IE that came preinstalled on my computer when I bought it.
Wow, a reply attacking a shameless plug – and including a shameless plug for that piece of crap, Microsoft IE.
Astroturf attacking astroturf. Whatever next.
Besides exposure do authors get some money from this deal? Does scribd share its adsense revenue with them?
Good question.
good site to save money on buying books if you dont know where to get free books
“if you dont know where to get free books”
Actually, Scribd is one of the places where you can find many “free” books.
I think ultimately the publishers will extract some concessions from scribd to take down much of the “free” material in return for conferring upon them greater legitimacy (and maybe some indemnity from mp3.com or Youtube like lawsuits).
My sense is that Scribd wil eventually morph into a distribution platform for (mostly) paid ebooks, as I must imagine that Google Adsense ads do not really pay the bills for the significiant hosting and Adobe costs they incur.
Anjali Sen
Especially for people in undeveloped countries that either cannot afford to pay or does not even have an avenue to pay online.
I like Scribd and have used it for document posts on my blog, can see where this will be good for books as it is a good format.
I’m still surprised Scribd has done so well. I have visited that site like maybe once or twice. I have seen you guys use it to embed docs which I can see being a benefitial use, but other than that the site just doesn’t excite me.
I would like to see collaboration on research papers, I’m not sure if they are already going on this direction.
$12million to share excerpts of books on their site. What a gigantic waste of money.
And their viewer… what a piece of crap. It’s so small, you can’t read anything without a magnifying glass. Whenever I see this crap embedded in blogs, I just close the tab.
Don’t you guys have a relationship with scribd or something? Not saying you guys can’t write about it, but it seems that you should at least disclose it.
nice site~!
people must always complain.in a world that need people to read more,scrib is doing great ! how else could i have discovered a great russian author called Anton Chekhov .
i think that scrib is providing a good service dispite what a few nay-sayers may voice. they provide a good service and i’m sure they get some from the book companies for helping them out. seems like a win for the book companies, a win for scrib, and a win for us.
@Yosef If you are looking for research papers, twidox.com might be the right place for you. Lots of educational and research papers.
(CEO of twidox)
it is a good news for the major company to start participate with scribd,for me scribd is “better alternative of Wikipedia,I use it as my reference to search and study new material for my project,yea,it is an advantage for a people who live in a third country but I think it wont be no more about that ,if this is about knowledge,Never feel better if you could “just pay”for what everyone thinks they could not
Congrats for Scribd!
I know we’d like to get to that same point with the textbooks’ publishers. Great job for those guys.
(Hanan wePapers.com)
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
I’m just now checking out Scribd. Thanks for the great post!
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sooner or later, all the printed stuff has to made online. Most of it is available already, where royalty issues are not there. There are lots of books available from other countries and languages as well. Maybe, we need better formats online.
I write gay romance, and have my books posted on Scribd, both for $$ and for free. My goal as a writer of gay literature is to hopefully help others who may be experiencing sadness, loneliness, or perhaps even despair in their lives for being gay. I don’t write for the sole goal of making money. I don’t think that has ever made anyone truly happy. Helping others gives meaning to one’s life, not money.
~B.K. Wright~
scribd is not a complete site specialy for students becouse it doesn’t have complete notes about any subject even about major subject.