Scribd Launches Online Store
By Andrew Albanese -- Publishers Weekly, 5/17/2009 5:32:00 PM
Surging “social publisher” Scribd unveiled the next step in its evolution today with the beta launch of the Scribd Store, an e-commerce solution that allows anyone—from major publishers to individual authors—to upload and sell their works. The venture expands Scribd’s existing library of free documents, a service popular enough to generate more than 60 million unique users, making it one of the world’s most popular web sites. At launch, the Scribd Store will include never-before-released novels from authors Tamim Ansary, Joe Quirk and Kemble Scott; Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein's The Twitter Book, will be available as well as books from the World Bank and Lonely Planet.While Scribd has been in the news lately—and has raised fears of digital piracy—Tammy Nam, v-p of content and marketing told PW the company was committed to policing its site for infringement. Nam said Scribd has a state-of-the art Content Management System (CMS) system in which works are checked against a database—if a document matches a document in its database, the upload is blocked. She conceded the company gets a number of takedown notices every week—but noted that those notices are dealt with quickly and that the notices even have a positive aspect, as they help the company beef up its database, and strengthen its anti-piracy efforts. All works sold in the Scribd Store are added to the CMS automatically.
The Scribd Store offers a generous revenue sharing agreement with sellers getting 80% of revenue. Publishers and authors also have complete control over price and packaging—they set the price, or set no price at all, and can dictate what to sell, whether entire documents, chapters, even pages. They can also dictate reading options—for example, allowing for works to be viewed on Scribd only, or enabling PDF downloads, PDF downloads with DRM, or ePub downloads. Sellers can also offer downloads to mobile phones and devices.
In addition to the launch of the Scribd Store, the company said it is planning to launch an iPhone application in the coming months. The store is available immediately and is open to buyers and sellers in the United States, with international launches to follow.
