Scribd Becomes a DRM-Optional E-Bookstore

Miracle Jones writes "In an effort to compete with Amazon and Google, the document-hosting website Scribd will now be letting writers and publishers sell documents that they upload. They will be offering an 80/20 profit-sharing deal in favor of writers. Writers will be able to charge whatever they want. In addition, Scribd will not force any content control (although they will have a piracy database and bounce copyrighted scans) and will let writers choose to encrypt their books with DRM or not. This is big news for people in publishing, who have been seeking an alternative to Amazon for fear that Amazon is amassing too much power too quickly in this brand-new marketplace, especially after Amazon's announcement last week that they will now be publishing books as well as selling them."

Comments

Good for you

[dmomo]

Now can you kindly get out of my search results? When I am looking for technical resources on-line, I don't want your stinking eBook. Focus your SEO on people who want your product.

Seriously. In the past month, they've been coming up more often and just getting in the way of useful info. I click on the link from Google because it looks like the info I want. Then I get this silly flash app that slows my computer down. The content in that app may well have relevant info, but that's not how I care to consume it when I am looking up references.

They've really cheapened themselves in my mind. This was my first impression of them. SEO Scum. Now when I see that they actually have an interesting product, I'm soured on them. Kudo's for taking on the Giant in the e-book space. Shame on you for littering the Web.

Re:Good for you

[e9th]

I wouldn't worry too much. As Scribd starts to compete with Google, their search rankings will begin to shrink, almost as if by magic.

Re:Good for you

[el americano]

Ah, the infamous, "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page"

I blame Google for this more than Scribd. You might think if I took the time to customize my search by including words that won't appear on irrelevant sites then Google would actually check if the terms I've entered are there! When I search on a result page for a term and get nothing, only then do I realize I've been duped. I don't even see a way to work around this limitation. Using something other than Google seems to be the only solution.

Re:Good for you

[Brian Gordon]

I'd love to see Google's SearchWiki nonsense actually work in this kind of situation. You should be able to click the X and never see anything from that domain again. Your Xing shouldn't just affect that results to that one query.

Re:But the real question is...

[Brian Gordon]

I wouldn't want my bank account tied to it if I'm profiting from commercial copyright infringement...

Eh Sonny?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Scribd? Are those guys the complete fucking morons that managed to turn what are pretty much normal PDFs into nigh-unreadable embedded flash monstrosities for no conceivable reason? Those guys?

I can sympathize with the video guys who went flash. Until HTML 5 finally lurches its way into ubiquity, it is pretty much the best option. But text? The stuff that the internet has been carrying just fine thanks since it was an ARPA project? WTF?

Re:Eh Sonny?

[Anonymous Coward]

Scribd's "iPaper" page is laughably false. I remember it being even worse before, but it's still bad now:

iPaper is a rich document format built for the web

Kinda like PDF?

iPaper will display documents in the same way regardless of whether you're using Windows, MacOS, or Linux

So, it's like PDF?

Your readers no longer have to download files or extra software to view your documents

Because every computer in the world comes with Adobe Flash and not Adobe Reader. No sirree.

But it gets worse:

You can convert just about any major document format into iPaper, including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs,OpenOffice documents, and PostScript files.

Because apparently, PDF converters don't exist. There is no such thing as Acrobat Distiller or PDFCreator.

Scribd documents are indexed by major search engines

That's kind of like saying that "Volkswagen cars use engines" and touting that as a feature.

Scribd's iPaper document viewer is embeddable in any website or blog

Conclusion: Scribd is a needless Flash-based frontend to PDF. In fact, I remember that when Scribd was launched, it actually used Macromedia's FlashPaper, obviously used by Macromedia to turn people away from Adobe Reader (before they got acquired by Adobe, of course).

Great...

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Now everyone has a vanity press and considering Sturgeon's Law already applies to commercially-published books, I think it will have to be revised four percentage points. Thanks, internet.

Re:But the real question is...

[MaskedSlacker]

Did you miss the part about bouncing copyrighted uploads from sources other than the rights holders? Obviously, any such system will be playing catch up permanently, but there's not much more they can do without chilling effects. You however, can do much more by working on your reading comprehension.

No Prestige

[curmudgeon99]

I don't know about you, but I didn't spend 6 years on a novel to piss it away on a free site. Anybody can do that. The standard of excellence will still remain publication by a major.

Re:No Prestige

[horza]

One of my favourite novels, Catch-22, took eight years to write. Some authors like to reach depths in their novels greater than the Barbera Cartland. This is why it is important to find a way of rewarding authors online, if not by scribd as they seem to have wrecked their reputation then by somebody else. You can reward a musician by going to their concerts, even if you pirate their music. A movie has made its money back through the box office even if you download a pirate version instead of buying the dvd. However if everybody downloads the pirate ebook where does the author get his revenue?

Phillip.

so?

[Lord Bitman]

Scribd sucks. every time I've seen a link to it, it seems like it's trying to be as crippled and useless as possible. The whole site seems to operate on "allow users to upload someone else's copyrighted work, display it to people in such a useless fashion that any copyright holder who might complain would assume it's some officially sanctioned DRM-loaded crapware"

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