TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Scribd’ Category

By Chris Meadows

A few days ago I mentioned that independent book publisher Author Solutions had announced an e-book distribution deal with Scribd. Today it comes out they have announced a similar deal with Barnes & Noble for the Nook. As with the Scribd deal, AS e-books will be set at a default price of $9.99, but authors may choose to set their own prices instead.

Erin Cox at Publishing Perspectives notes with some amusement that, shortly after Nintendo announced a classic e-books cartridge, Random House has now announced it will be making video games. The Wall Street Journal article is fairly sparse on details, but notes that this is an effort to find a new revenue stream due to economic pressure from publishing cutbacks and the likelihood that the increasing popularity of e-books will cause lower revenues.

Also on Publishing Perspectives, Edward Nawotka posts an editorial wondering whether the e-book age means an end to the serendipity of finding a good book through browsing bookstores and junk shops.

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By Chris Meadows

A couple of weeks ago, Paul reported on self-e-publishing site Scribd’s plans to add direct mobile download capability.

CNet reports that Scribd has now done so: Scribd-hosted documents can be sent to any of a dozen different e-book devices (including Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Palm, EZReader, and others) with two mouse clicks.

The documents are sent as PDF files via e-mail or SMS message link. At present, only DRM-free titles are supported, but Scribd CEO Trip Adler has plans to expand to copy-protected versions in the future.

Another part of Scribd’s mobile strategy is creating device-specific Scribd reader applications, which will be released later this year. Much as Amazon does with its Kindle Reader app, these will allow readers to download Scribd documents into their device and keep track of where they stopped reading.

By Chris Meadows

CNet has an article about Smartwords, an idea from start-up company Wordnik that sounds terrific but sure seems hard to describe succinctly. As Smartwords’s website puts it:

Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words.

It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.”

Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants to go further than that. With Smartwords, as CNet puts it:

Wordnik and its partners are aiming to bring deep levels of context to any kind of electronic text—be it in e-books on readers like the iPad, Kindle, or Nook, or on computers or mobile devices—by examining words and the words around them and linking readers to potentially vast amounts of information about them.

And that context is not just limited to the words around the one in question; Wordnik CEO Erin McKean suggests it might even go as far as checking out what other books you keep on your device so it knows to offer information only about words you probably haven’t seen before.

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By Paul Biba

From the press release:

… Under terms of the agreement, all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris imprints will be made available for purchase. As well, a portion of ASI’s backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be sold through the site. …

Authors will receive 50 percent of the net sales of their titles through Scribd. A default price of $9.99 will be set for every title, but each author will have the opportunity to set his or her own price. Distribution to Scribd will be included as a free service for all new ASI titles. …

By Chris Meadows

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch notes that independent book publisher Author Solutions (ASI) has entered a distribution agreement with e-self-pub site Scribd. New ASI titles will also be made available for sale via Scribd, and part of its 120,000-title backlist will go up as well. Authors will receive 50% of their titles’ net sales, and can choose to set their own price or leave it with the default of $9.99.

Brad Stone at The New York Times’s “Bits” blog notes that multimedia e-book publisher Vook has raised $2.5 million in venture capital funding. Vook’s founder, Brad Inman, is planning to expand the company, take on more creative talent, and create tools that will allow the creation of hundreds of Vooks per week. (TeleRead has covered Vook a number of times.)

Yahoo has an Agence France Presse article about New York Times executives at the “paidContent 2010” conference discussing their plan to institute a metered paywall on their site. Key points include that they do not expect a significant loss of traffic, and that while they feel a paywall is right for their particular situation it may not be for everyone.

By Paul Biba

Scribd has teamed up with ProQuestUMI, a publisher of dissertations and theses, to start selling over 14,000 works, form over 14 universities, in its Scribd Store.

ProQuestUMI will charge $49 and sill receive 80% of the sales revenues. This is a big market as they have 2 million doctoral dissertations and master’s theses available from more than 700 active university partners and update their catalog with more than 70,000 new graduate works each year.

You can find out more at here.

By Chris Meadows

We have probably already given perpetual-copyright zealot Mark Helprin more coverage than he deserves, but this TechDirt article from Michael Masnick is too good to pass up.

It seems that Helprin’s book, Digital Barbarism, has been getting nearly universally panned by reviewers. But according to an op-ed by Helprin in the National Review, the reason for that is not that the book might be bad—it is because publishers assigned the very people Helprin slammed in the book to review it.

If nothing else, Helprin does not suffer from an inadequate ego. In the op-ed, he paints himself as some kind of lone holy warrior, defending the sacred trust of copyright against some vast Internet conspiracy theory:

Because corporate defenders of intellectual property think they need only protect established law, they sit inertially in their towers and forfeit the more general debate to their active and numerous opponents. Thus, unwittingly engaged and with neither allies nor organizational support of any kind, I thought the only way to respond to hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of critics mobilized by “public interest” groups richly funded by private interests such as Google, was to write a book.

Right, Mark. Just keep thinking that.

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By Chris Meadows

One of the most commonly misunderstood things about lawyers is that, as with forensic debaters, they may often choose to argue two opposite, competing sides of the same issue. This is hardly unusual for them—it’s their job to advocate for whatever side they choose, or even both sides if they think the particular cases have merit.

Our pop culture tends to latch onto this and portray any lawyer who does not have a Perry Mason- or Matlock-like dedication to proving clients innocent as being some kind of slimy mercenary—but when you get right down to it,  it’s a very important part of our legal system that people be able to hire someone to advocate for them regardless of public or personal opinion.

I bring this up because otherwise, the natural inclination when people hear that the law form that represented Jammie Thomas against the RIAA is now suing Scribd for copyright violation is to consider them two-faced slimy mercenary bastards—and I have little doubt among the Slashdot crowd there will be a lot of that.

Lawyers Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara are representing the author of a book who found her work being offered on Scribd, but they are seeking class-action status to represent “every author who owns a valid registered copyright in a work infringed by Scribd.”

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By Joanna

What are e-book buyers thinking when they shop?

I can’t speak for all buyers, but if you want to know why I buy or don’t buy from various sites—well, here’s the lowdown. No ESP needed. I hope this is useful to retailers and aspiring self-publishers of e-books, although most of the sites named here don’t accept titles from the latter group.

Self-publishers face a daunting learning curve these days. So many stores, so many formats, what to do? Many novices begin with Amazon—Amazon makes it easy, and enjoys a large market share. But the company’s Kindle side officially focuses just on the United States, leaving out me and many other voracious readers (I’m Canadian). Sorry, Amazon. Here’s where I am buying e-books.

Stop One: Fictionwise

Fictionwise (screenshot), which normally does not deal with the self-published, is my preferred e-book store, for several reasons. Firstly, the Fictionwise site is the most pleasant of the big storefronts to navigate. I have checked out its main competitor, Books on Board, and can never seem to find things there when I just browse; I need to have a certain title in mind.

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By David Rothman

“Scribd, the so-called ‘YouTube for documents’ that’s recently also become an Ebook store, has been seeing a major drop in traffic over the last two months.” – Tech Crunch. Click on graph for more detail.

Related: Techmeme roundup.

Also of interest: The AP on legal free e-books to promote authors’ titles (via MobileRead). While the AP call this “the latest craze,” this is really old news—especially for series-related titles in the SF community.

By Paul Biba

This is from The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Newsletter. I tried to link to The Chronicle site but it seems to be down right now. For the full article check here later.

… the Harvard University Press created its own Scribd profile, and the press has already posted hundreds of works for download. “We can’t spend all of our time chasing down every single pirated copy of a book that’s put up, and it’s not a good use of our time,” said Daniel Lee, director of digital content for the Harvard University Press. “We’d rather participate voluntarily, I think, in a good-faith effort among our partners and with Scribd and sort of fight against it. We’re cognizant of the proliferation of piracy online.”

The university is not the first to begin offering content on the Web site — New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have about a dozen articles on their Scribd pages. What differentiates Harvard from the others, though, is that Harvard is charging for its content — and charging the same price as a hard-copy of the same material would cost.

“I’d be surprised if, with the same pricing model, people will be willing to pay for content that can only be viewed online,” Mr. Lee said. He said interest might increase in publishing the material online if Scribd were to develop a way for the books to become portable. Materials downloaded through Scribd can only be viewed through the site’s software, and cannot be printed or replicated. “If we allow the content to be downloaded with no restrictions, it could eat into our print sales.”

By Paul Biba

It looks as if Scribd is becoming the new ebook repository. From a press release:

Scribd, the world’s largest social publishing company, today announced that it has signed a deal with Harvard University Press (HUP) to sell nearly 1,000 digital books through the Scribd Store, a recently launched e-commerce marketplace for written works. HUP joins other university presses such as New York University Press and MIT Press that are already offering free previews of books and reports to Scribd’s readership of millions. The Harvard announcement comes a month after the company announced a similar deal with publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster.

“Scribd’s goal is to collect all the world’s written information — whether for free or for purchase — in one place and then make those works available to as many people as possible,” said Trip Adler, CEO and co-founder of Scribd and a Harvard alum. “Harvard University Press has brought to light some of the world’s most thought-provoking ideas in the form of printed books. We’re thrilled to bring this amazing content to a much larger potential community of information seekers.”

Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the heads up.