Scribd Becomes a DRM-Optional E-Bookstore 93
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."
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.
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.
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?
USA Only = useless (Score:5, Informative)
"Sorry, purchasing documents on Scribd is only available from within the United States"
Lost me right there.
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."
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.)
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...
Re:Is it just me, or is Scribd Super Annoying (Score:2, Informative)
Then again, the given 'expert' answers are often no better than other random forum results.
Re:Good for you (Score:2, Informative)
I assume they had to do this so Google would continue to index their site (ie showing content to google, but not to people)