Scribd.com has unveiled its redesigned home and profile pages, which emphasize the social aspect of written works and allow the site's millions of online users to not only share, download, read and purchase e-books but also to share comments and follow authors, publishers and each other.
“The next major evolution of the 'print' medium will be social, with readers participating in the never-ending life of the document, the book, the presentation,” said Trip Adler, CEO and cofounder of Scribd. The company launched new social publishing pages to “make it super-easy for people to instantly share what they are reading and publishing with their followers on Scribd,” he explained.
Adding social elements to scribd.com, dubbed Scribd Social, is the third peg in the company's strategy, said Michelle Laird, Scribd's communications director. Scribd first worked to build its library of content, texts that range from published paper books to unedited manuscripts. Scribd then worked to make those texts available to users when and where they want it—either to read on a computer, buy through the Scribd Store or download to a device of the user's choosing, including the iPhone, for which Scribd has its app approval pending.
Adler demonstrated the social features on Scribd.com to PW; these include a “scribble box” for user comments to post in real time, publisher feeds, a follower/following system and a one-click publishing widget. Scribd is working on allowing people to create reading lists to share and is working with Twitter and Facebook to interface with those sites as well. The idea is for scribd.com to become an interactive reading community. Even while the features are in beta testing, communities have sprung up, such as one around vampires.
David Marshall, senior manager of digital media at Berrett-Koehler, said he has seen hits on the company's Scribd pages jump even before the official launch of Scribd Social. In beta last week, B-K went from zero to 5,000 followers. B-K used Scribd's social component to share news of its Amazon promotion for one of its titles, Be the Hero: Three Powerful Ways to Overcome Challenges in Work by Noah Blumenthal.
Since B-K first began uploading excerpts from its books on Scribd last year, the San Francisco—based house has been experimenting with other ways to use the site—from uploading entire e-books to documents about publishing. A couple of weeks ago, Marshall said, he uploaded the essay “Ten Awful Truths About Book Publishing” by B-K president Steve Piersanti. “Within three hours of posting, it made it to the front page of Scribd,” Marshall noted. And B-K appreciated getting comments from readers in real time.
Potential seems to be the key word in considering Scribd. Recently, Sarah Rotman Epps, a media analyst at Forrester Research, blogged about the challenges and opportunities Scribd faces. “We think Scribd could make a play as the Tunecore of publishing,” she wrote, explaining that Tunecore is a service customers can use to distribute music and videos to channels like iTunes, Amazon and retailers where they can be bought. “It's easy for authors to self-publish works on the Web, but they don't have an easy way of getting those works into all the stores and the devices where others want to read and/or buy them, and Scribd could fulfill this need in the market,” said Epps.
Whether Scribd Social establishes the San Francisco company as the distributor of social media about the printed word remains to be seen. Even Scribd's people do not know exactly what to expect when the company activates the site's social media August 10.
