Scribd rewards the creators with digital bookstore launch

Valerie | 21 May 2009, 07:08

A YouTube-like start-up is hoping to do for the book market what iTunes did for music singles. In a bid to stake a claim in the rapidly growing e-book market, document sharing service Scribd has launched a new service that lets publishers charge for their documents and keep 80 per cent of the revenue.

According to an article in the New York Times, using the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and decide whether to encode their documents with DRM (Digital Rights Management) software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Visited by 60 million people a month, and with an audience which has almost doubled every six months, Scribd is currently one of the most popular document sharing sites allowing users to upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and other documents.  The opening of an online retail market for books and documents will be the first time that the two-year-old start-up has charged for the material posted on its site.

Digital news site DMW notes that by comparison, Amazon.com takes 70% of revenue from sales of works posted to its Kindle e-book store by writers, and also controls pricing.

Scibd co-founder Jared Friedman believes that the economics of the publishing industry are changing and the new service addresses piracy issues which the site has been accused of in the past by creating a database of published works to cross-reference against uploads.  He said:

“We wanted to get all the documents in the world in one place and we couldn’t do that if everything was free.

“We’re confident because of the early success of the Amazon Kindle because it shows that people really are willing to pay for great written content if it’s presented in a way that they like.”

The Scribd store will also support emerging talent and “give unpublished authors, or authors who are in a hurry, a well-trafficked Web forum on which to post their books, charge for them and see immediate results.”