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Scribd Becomes a DRM-Optional E-Bookstore

Posted by kdawson on from the going-legit dept.

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."

11 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Good for you by dmomo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good for you by tcopeland · · Score: 5, Informative

      > 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.

      --
      The Army reading list
    2. Re:Good for you by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

    3. Re:Good for you by el+americano · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
    4. Re:Good for you by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying by Unoti · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying by smbruce · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Informative

      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."

      --
      Find free books.
    3. Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      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...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Eh Sonny? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  4. USA Only = useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    Lost me right there.