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Scribd Becomes a DRM-Optional E-Bookstore
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon May 18, 2009 08:31 PM
from the going-legit dept.
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."
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Good for you (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.
Re:Good for you (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.
Parent
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Re:Good for you (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Parent
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I opened a Scribd account just to write scathing things when they show up in my search results. I've also taken to reporting these hits as spam to google in the hopes that someone will investigate.
It's very frustrating - most of the time, my search terms only ever appear on the list of search terms that has brought others to the page. 95% of the time, it's just an SEO feedback loop.
Re:Good for you (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.
Parent
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I don't get this. How is using a parrot the only solution?
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You mean like Googeefree [googeefree.com]? Just ask the author to add Scribd to Expert Exchange, the other cloaking SEO.
Phillip.
Re:Good for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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So what's the interesting product? The summary makes them sound like just another vanity publisher, albeit on bits instead of on paper.
(I confess I didn't actually look at their site, as I generally don't follow links when the summary looks so much like a regurgitated press release.)
Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying (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.
Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Parent
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[Scribd] 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."
Great analogy :). However, my girlfriend said (sounding offended) that antique fountain pens don't use cartridges, as they are a new invention.
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They're not filling one of the traditional purposes of a website either, which is to present content in a highly-portable markup language that is readable in all web browsers.
Instead, they used Flash to embed PDFs into a little window on a website.
With YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and now this, I really feel like the Internet is just getting stupider by the mon
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There are several different issues here.
First there's the fact that PDF is almost completely nonproprietary (i.e., the functionality required by the vast majority of users for reading and writing PDFs is nonproprietary), whereas flash has a lot more propriet
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It just seems to act as a huge dumping ground, where anyone can put anything.
And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying (Score:5, Informative)
You can get experts-exchange for free by switching your user agent to GoogleBot's in Firefox (There's an extension for this.)
Parent
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Thanks for that, but I'd rather show my disapproval by not giving them traffic. What I'd really like is an easy way to remove those results from my searches - experts-exchange, about.com, and a few others.
Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying (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...
Parent
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Then again, the given 'expert' answers are often no better than other random forum results.
Learn from Walmart (Score:4, Interesting)
better article; non-event (Score:5, Informative)
The Fiction Circus article linked to from the slashdot summary isn't as good as the NY Times article that it links to [nytimes.com].
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.
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Scribd's "iPaper" [scribd.com] 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 [sourceforge.net].
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
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This is copy protection at its finest. It's quite good as an anti-copying device, as it really makes attempts at breaking it not worth the time and effort, but not always necessary. Perhaps it should be up to the author what format in which the text appears.
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it really makes attempts at breaking it not worth the time and effort
From my experience with scribd.com, it's unnecessary. The content itself already accomplishes that.
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Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
USA Only = useless (Score:5, Informative)
"Sorry, purchasing documents on Scribd is only available from within the United States"
Lost me right there.
No Prestige (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Dude. I hardly think getting published is any kind of suitable benchmark for excellence. Have you not been to a bookstore? An author's biggest hurdle in achieving financial success from his/her work isn't dealing with piracy, it's dealing with obscurity.
I can't find an article to link to right now, but Cory Doctorow has had muc
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so? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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You might have hit on to something--maybe their plan is to go DRM free without anyone noticing because no one wants to use their site anyway.
This is a competitor for Lulu not Amazon (Score:2)
Lulu and similar are the real competitors and I doubt they're too worried.
Scribd + flashblock is usable (Score:2)
Just use flashblock to block that annoying PDF-reader-from-hell they embed in their pages and click the PDF link above the (now inactive) flash thingy. That way you can gain access to whatever they have to offer without having to suffer their misguided attempt at making it 'easy' to access it. Use Evince or gv or whatever to read the PDF (or a usable alternative if you're on an OS which is not supported by these, eg. Windows) and stay clear of Adobe's attempt to take over your computer.
In other words, navig
Re:But the real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Which is probably where identity theft and money laundering come in.
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All that means is YouTube didn't want to pay the lawyers to win the case.
That being said, I'm not saying rightsexploiters (the traditional publishers) will be happy, but it seems clear they don't INTEND to let people upload other people's work for sale. As I said though, trying to police it themselves is a losing battle (short of restrictions on who can upload that will likely have chilling effects), and leaving it to rights holders to police will end in lawsuits.
However--book piracy (I mean actual piracy
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but *IAA will sue you for 9 songs ...
Well, somebody ought to be sued for that awful movie...
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I really don't get the twitter hate. It seems like "blogs are just for internet attention whores" all over again. We've seen how that turned out already (I should know, I was firmly in the "what petulant crap, nothing of value will ever come of that" school of thought when I first heard about blogs--and I was wrong).
There isn't any NEED for a hell of a lot of shit we do--depending on how you define need. But twitter lands on Maslow's hierarchy as easily as fancy cars or painting. Far easier in fact.
I fi