Major Book Publishers Join Scribd
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: Scribd, Publishers, Free, Content, books | Themes: The Internet
TechCrunch today reports that document sharing site, Scribd, today announced that it has partnered with a several big name publishers (including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications), to legally offer a limited amount of content free of charge. According to TC, publishers have begun to add an array of content to the site’s library, among it full length novels and brief excerpts.
I’ll admit, I’d never used or heard of Scribd until this past weekend. My younger sister is in college and she was singing its praises on Saturday. The site is apparently a huge part of her studies (she uses it for sheet music and German textbooks mostly) and while an awful lot of the content is PowerPoint presentations or school essays, it was quite a nice surprise to pull up sheet music I’d spend time and money looking for offline. With the addition of free content, particularly full novels, we can see Scribd’s popularity skyrocketing.
What do you guys think? We figure it has huge potential when it comes to lesser-known or new authors who are trying to get their work out in the open and read. As long as it builds up a decent enough user base, it could be great for all those penniless writers dying to make it big and of course, offering popular, well known authors is bound to help. How many of you use (or have heard of) Scribd? Let us know!
Read the full story on TechCrunch.
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We (the world) definately need a better community for book reading. My problem walking in a book store is that there are thousands of books, and I have no idea if any of them would be something I am interested in. If there was a site that offered previews, discussions, recommendations, etc... it might encourage me to buy more books. Instead, I just stick with authors I know.
I've used Scribd a couple times, and found a few full copies of copyrighted e-books. I'm surprised they came to this agreement rather than taking legal action.
That's some pretty forward thinking, and I commend the publishers for doing so.
Never heard of Scribd, but I am familiar with Project Gutenberg.
However, this is not quite the service I am looking for. I want a service built on the concept of Rhapsody - charge me a monthly service to get access to a digital library of books from major publish houses.
How much would I be willing to pay? Probably up to that magical "just under $20 per month" price, but in the $10-$15 would be more comfortable. This would at least get the major publishers to get some of my cash, as right now most of it goes to used book stores.
@Tindytim: Me too! Like I said in the article, my sister uses it all the time. A lot of that is text books she either can't afford, or doesn't want to take out of the library. She can get full versions of her German lit as well as full translations of the same texts. Wonderful that publishers just decided to jump on board rather than throw a spanner in the works!