Scribd opens internet store for e-books

Scribd (www.scribd.com) the document sharing website has opened a new e-book online store stating its claim in the rising e-book market. Following the same business model as iTunes, Scribd hopes to attract users with high commission fees and a higher customer base.

Using Scribd, book authors can set their own price for their work and keep 80% of the revenue, which is much higher than its closet rival Amazon. Authors can also choose which devices their content can be used on, including:

Personal Computer
Electronic book reader such as Kindle
Smartphone such as iPhone

The security side of Scribd is also quite impressive. Users can choose whether their material is protected in a similar way to DRM Helping to prevent anyone from copying the text and redistributing it elsewhere for their own gains.

Scribd has been going for just over 2 years now and it's the first time that they have decided to charge for material on the site. In the past, all material submitted was on a sharing basis for free. All e-books could be shared between all members. It is thought that Scribd is visited by more than 60 million people on a monthly basis. Documents include PowerPoint presentations, legal contracts and templates, mortgage advice and other documents. Using their iPaper format, documents are embedded into a web page and available for all users. Up to 50,000 documents are uploaded on a daily basis.

iPaper is a rich documents format, similar in most ways to PDF (portable document format). It was purposely built for the web and for Scribd. Using Adobe Flash, iPaper is platform independent and capable of running on any web browser with Flash installed. Whether you use Windows, MAC OS or Linux, iPaper will function fine.

As with other sharing sites, Scribd has been plagued with piracy claims. Users can posted copyright material on Scribd that infringes all copyright laws. Scribd says that they are acting on these cases immediately to keep their site clean.

Like the iTunes store, Scribd will allow users to sell individual chapters on their books. Much like selling an individual song from an album.

Authors worldwide have praised the new idea and it is expected that the site will become one of the major players for e-book sales in the coming years.

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