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

[tcopeland]

> Now can you kindly get out of my search results?

So true! scribd is like applets used to be - when your browser freezes and no useful content comes up for 5 seconds, you know you've hit scribd and you quickly ctrl-w that tab.

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

[CarpetShark]

Seriously. In the past month, they've been coming up more often and just getting in the way of useful info.

Agreed. Scribd is just a useless waste of space. They come up in results, but then you can't actually use the scribd documents like you would a webpage (say, searching and copying/pasting), or even a PDF. What's the point in having pages full of information if people can't get the information out of them?

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:Good for you

[colesw]

Actually I find a lot of the time I do find the answer I want on a Expert Exchange link, you just need to scroll down to the bottom of the page (past the, please sign up stuff) to see the results.

I assume they had to do this so Google would continue to index their site (ie showing content to google, but not to people)

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...

Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying

[Unoti]

Is it just me, or is Scribd super annoying? Often this happens to me: I'm searching for information about something. I'm clicking through Google links trying to figure out the answer to my question. I click on a promising-looking link, and then I end up on a screwed-up looking site that's basically totally unreadable. I've learned to recognize such piles of crap as scribd documents.

There's a tiny little text box taking up like 6 cm by 5 cm of space with a scrollbar... I have multiple monitors, huge space on my desktop, and they're cramming all the content into this tiny little unreadable scrollable space. After a while I figured out that I could click a couple times and turn the content into something that was somewhat usable. But generally when a search puts me into a scribd document, I just hit the back button and look elsewhere. Only in a fit of pure desperation will I return to the scribd content, but usually I don't have to.

Am I alone in feeling this way? perhaps I'm hopelessly backwards or something, but scribd annoys me greatly.

Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying

[smbruce]

I agree. I saw a "Sexy Web Design" book scroll across in the "What people are reading now..." section. Their web site designers might want to read through that.

Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying

[bcrowell]

There's a tiny little text box taking up like 6 cm by 5 cm of space with a scrollbar... I have multiple monitors, huge space on my desktop, and they're cramming all the content into this tiny little unreadable scrollable space.

On my machine, it's 22 cm x 16 cm.

A lot of people are posting about how much they hate scribd's UI, but I don't see that as the big problem with scribd.

People have posted some of my books on scribd, and that's fine with me, because the books are free-as-in-speech. However, their system has some problems. For instance, if you search on scribd for "Newtonian Physics," which is the title of one of my books, the first 8 hits consist of 8 different uploaded copies of my book. Seems like a lot of scribd users don't bother checking to see whether something is already on scribd before they upload it. Now if I type in some text from my book as a search, only a few of the books come up, not all 8 -- don't ask me why. And when I click on the #1 search result, it's a version of the book from 2001, with an incorrect description and an incorrect license listed for it.

I think the fundamental problem here is that they're not serving one of the traditional purposes of a publisher, which is to act as a filter. Filters can be good or bad. A filter doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, and it doesn't have to be elitist or authoritarian. Google page rank is a filter. Slashdot's moderation system is a filter. Scribd doesn't seem to have enough useful filtering mechanisms. It just seems to act as a huge dumping ground, where anyone can put anything. The trouble is that finding anything there is like saying, "Huh, I need a new cartridge for my antique fountain pen. Maybe I'll go down to the town dump and dig around for one."

Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying

[BKX]

You can get experts-exchange for free by switching your user agent to GoogleBot's in Firefox (There's an extension for this.)

Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying

[drinkypoo]

If you log into google, you can at least show your disapproval for those search results by clicking the "X" box next to them (not to be confused with the Xbox, ho ho ho.) If enough of us do it (and who but nerds even uses those things) then the ranks will change. Likewise you can rank up the results that were actually useful...

Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying

[YenTheFirst]

hmm. for me, If I just scroll down to the bottom of the page, the actual answer is there. I believe this is something of an open secret.

Then again, the given 'expert' answers are often no better than other random forum results.

Learn from Walmart

[n00btastic]

Publishers just need to boycott Amazon if they don't want to be swallowed alive whole. Look at Walmart, who regularly forces it's will on suppliers and companies whose products they sell.

better article; non-event

[bcrowell]

The Fiction Circus article linked to from the slashdot summary isn't as good as the NY Times article that it links to.

This is big news for people in publishing [...]

No, not really. One reason it's not big news is that scribd is currently too small a commercial entity to make any difference in this big marketplace. Another reason it's not big news is that other people are already selling digital books without DRM. Fictionwise and Baen are two examples that come to mind.

So, really, writers have absolutely no incentive to deal with Amazon anymore as their "bookstore," especially since the next generation of ebook readers will surely be touchscreen netbooks, making the Kindle look like a Tiger handheld next to the future's Game Boy.

Well, no. Amazon is a huge, profitable business that readers know about. Scribd isn't. That's a pretty strong incentive for writers to deal with Amazon -- or, more accurately, it's a pretty strong incentive for their publishers to. The author generally doesn't make any decisions about the distribution channels through which a book gets to the public.

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.

USA Only = useless

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry, purchasing documents on Scribd is only available from within the United States"

Lost me right there.

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

[diablillo]

Six years on a novel? Come on, what were you writting? The screenplay for Duke Nukem Forever?

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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