Scribd-S&S deal: Setback for Amazon but win for publishers, writers, ePub and Adobe
Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Higgins Clark are among the authors of the 5,000 e-titles that Simon & Schuster will offer through Scribd.
Currently known as the YouTube of text, Scribd lets people post their own contributions
They also can embed them in blogs—everything from sample book chapters to recipes—and traffic is said to be some 60 million visitors a month.
More pubs in talks with Scribd
Other large publishers are in talks with Scribd, according to the New York Times, and O’Reilly already does business with Scribd. Smart—of both Scribd and the publishers, for whom Scridbt is pledging serious anti-piracy efforts.
“This is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales,” the Times quotes Scribd CEO Trip Adler about the Scribd deal. Also see BusinessWeek text and video.
Gaining leverage against Jeff Bezos
Needless to say, not just huge conglomerates but also smaller houses and self-publishers will benefit if Scribd grows at the expense of Amazon and its Kindle format. No, I don’t want Scribd, either, or Google, to dominate the book business. Here’s to competition!
Publisher partners of Scribd will enjoy eighty percent of revenue and can set prices—far more attractive terms than at Amazon. This is a vastly more sustainable arrangement than over at Amazon’s Kindle Store, where bestsellers typically go for $9.99 but only because Amazon is subsidizing them.
“The benefits of the deal with Scribd is two-fold," PaidContent.org quotes S&S’s Ellie Hirschhorn. "We get to expand our distribution to Scribd’s 60 million users, plus we expect incremental revenue. As for the revenue split, we don’t talk about that specifically, but we always look at the margins as well as the marketing opportunity." S&S will use limited inside-the-book-style previews to push 7,000 paper books (not now in digital format) through Scribd, not just e-books.
Win for ePub, too
ePub will also come out ahead. Alas, S&S will use Adobe DRMed ePub, but it’s still ePub, at least, not the Kindle format, and the files will be compatible with the Sony Reader and some cellphones.
As reported in the New York Times, Scribd itself is working on an iPhone app. One handling Adobe DRMed ePub? More bad news for Amazon? Now let’s remember Google’s partnership with Sony on nonDRMed public domain ePub books; commercial ones to follow? Looks as if ePub is on a roll.
Scribd Community Director Jason Bentley has tweeted that the Scribt Store currently supports ePub. Other sections of the Scribd site are offering PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, text and Postscript, among other formats.
Related: Wikipedia item on Scribd and collection of press clips about the company.
June 12th, 2009 at 7:33 am
It is a big gain for consumers as an increasing number of e-reading devices are coming to market or having their firmware updated to handle DRMed ePub.
Unfortunately, if S&S follows past patterns, consumers will have the gain of ePub obliterated by exorbitant pricing — a no-win scenario for everyone — publishers and consumers.
June 12th, 2009 at 9:00 am
“Publisher partners of Scribd will enjoy eighty percent of revenue and can set prices—far more attractive terms than at Amazon.”
And as competition in the marketplace grows the split with Amazon will likely turn a bit more in the publishers favor.
So publishers can set their selling prices themselves - is that necessarily a good thing?
From the NYTimes article:
“Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition.”
Are they idiots??? I don’t know many people who even pay that much for paper books - It’s rare that I find a paper book that isn’t available for at least 30% off list price.
Will the marketplace support those prices? Do they really expect people to pay more for an ebook than a pbook?
Time will tell but I don’t think the mass of ebook buyers are going to pay 20 percent off list. Amazon has sort of set the bar at the $9.99 price point.
“This is a vastly more sustainable arrangement than over at Amazon’s Kindle Store, where bestsellers typically go for $9.99 but only because Amazon is subsidizing them.”
I have no idea how long Amazon may continue to subsidize prices at the $9.99 - just as you have no idea how sustainable pricing at 20% off paper list will prove to be.
All I know is that I’m glad Amazon is selling/subsidizing many ebook titles at $9.99 and will buy ‘em (or rent them as you prefer) as often and as long as I can
June 12th, 2009 at 9:09 am
I’m not too impressed. SCRID reminds me of a room full of used audiobooks on cassette for sale dirt cheap at the Seattle Friends of the Public Library–about a buck for an unabridged book. There were books I wanted and the price was right, but the cassettes were completely useless to me.
I looked at a half dozen books at SCRID and they were all PDF. They can’t be converted with formatting errors, I’m not going to read them on my Mac, and I don’t have a portable PDF reader. The Sony, based on reviews, is a bit off and I don’t need a Kindle DX just for PDF reading.
The question is: Who really reads a whole book in the PDF format? And how?
June 12th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Just a wild guess here, but I think this deal involves backlist titles.
The names they mention (I also heard Jimmy Carter on the list) are well known, but they have also been writers for a while. Also, I’m trying to make sense of the 5,000 number — it seems a bit low for an entity the size of S&S. Additionally, I’m not sure a $20 ebook fits the profile of the average Scrib’d user. So here is my guess:
You will find older Stephen King books for $6.40 or less. These things are now available in paperback for around $7.99 from the S&S web site. Or possibly it will be even older books that are not now available in print. This limits the S&S risk from this ‘experiment’. The 7,000 additional books that are in effect advertised on Scrib’d, but sold as paper books by S&S will be related to the ebooks. So if S&S is sitting on a overrun of book B they may put up an ebook of related book A and use it to try to move book B.
I don’t expect this to involve new release A-list books.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Another thing to consider about Scribd is a piracy reputation. It’s like the napster of e-books. I wonder if they can clean that out before this project gets going.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:54 am
I second the notion that Scribd, by letting pub’s set prices, plays into pub’s greed, and will result in higher prices for readers. This is not going to go well.
But part of the speculation on why S&S is doing this is to fight the pirates. By releasing the official S&S books, they enter Scribd’s database, and thus help Scribd to weed out the illegal copies - as well as give Scribd a financial incentive to do so.
Scribd in PDF? I was browsing their support sections, and they tell pubs that Scribd prefers - I think even ’strongly encourages’ - pubs to upload in PDF format with the fonts embedded, and cover as page 1, and narrow margins, with lots of metadata in place, and with or without Adobe DRM (that’s up to the uploader).
Couple nice things about Scribd are that the pub/author can determine what sort of a preview to offer - by percentage, number of pages starting at the cover, or with specific pages. And then you can ‘embed’ the preview in your blog or website, which is cool (though I think all these previews and Scribd paper are flash-based, so iPhones can’t see them or use them).
Scribd also has a lot of flexibility built in along other lines: you can let readers read only online, or download; if you let them download, you can let them print or prevent them.
But the nicest thing of all? With David, I salute the competition. In the bad old days of paper-only, whoever owned the copyright released their editions. You got a hardcover, you got the mass-market paperback, maybe a bookclub edition if your genre work was approved by the club, maybe a Reader’s Digest version, maybe syndication in magazine serial rights.
In these brave new days of e, e-retailers are going non-exclusive, so that authors and pubs can put up their ebook editions on Kindle, on Scribd, in Fictionwise, and a bunch of other formats.
And the differences between the Scribd model and the Amazon model add up to a lot of confusion and turbulence and choice in these early frontier days, until at last everything shakes out into (probably) 2 or 3 formats and 1 or 2 pay models.
June 14th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Sounds like a joke!! Who wants to read PDFs, especially if they’re more expensive than more convenient e-books (eReader, Mobipocket, Kindle). Amazon must be laughing, if they’re even noticing.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
They’re adding EPUB capability within the week or so.