Scribd Store Beta begins selling eBooks

In March 2009, Scribd announced that it had partnered with several major publishers to make promotional chapters and some books available for free through its Web site. The new Scribd Store beta allows anyone with a Scribd account to upload electronic documents, sell them, and keep 80% of the author-determined sale price, minus a 25-cent transaction fee, or 40 cents if the document is protected by DRM.

Electronic texts sold through Amazon.com’s Kindle Store return 35% of the sale price to the author. Xlibris, a self-publishing service for authors, pays a 25% royalty for purchases of self-published books sold through its site or 10% for purchases made through a third-party site like Amazon.

In March, Scribd announced that it had partnered with several major publishers to make promotional chapters and some books available for free through its Web site. Though not every major publisher is ready to sell through the Scribd Store, Friedman said that publishers like Lonely Planet and O’Reilly Media have chosen to sell their content through the new Scribd Store. He expects that more will follow.

Scribd is often referred to as the YouTube of documents, and it has been dealing with the same piracy problems that prompted Viacom to sue YouTube in early 2007 for $1 billion. Scribd has been criticized for years for hosting copyrighted content without authorization. In 2007, it deployed a text-matching system to help curtail the posting of copyrighted texts.

Authors like Ursula Le Guin still come across unauthorized copies of their work on Scribd and elsewhere.

Source: InformationWeek

Posted: May 28th, 2009
Author: Floresiensis
Categories: Latest News, Ursula Le Guin

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