Comments on: Simon & Schuster to Sell E-books on Scribd

By: Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already? « The Scholarly Kitchen

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:31:43 +0000

[...] While the journal was a brilliant solution to the dissemination problems of the 17th century, I think it is safe to say that dissemination is no longer a problem that requires journals. The Internet and the World Wide Web allow anyone with access (including, increasingly, mobile access) to the Web to view any page designated for public display (we will leave aside the issue of pay walls in this discussion). If dissemination were the only function served by journals, journals would have long since vanished in favor of blogs, pre-print servers (e.g. ArXiv), or other document aggregations systems (e.g. Scribd). [...]

By: How Libraries Can Find Money in Clouds « The Scholarly Kitchen

How Libraries Can Find Money in Clouds « The Scholarly Kitchen — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:50:20 +0000

[...] have in mind the (mostly) consumer service Scribd, with which readers of the Scholarly Kitchen are already familiar. Scribd is a cloud-computing alternative to institutional repositories (IRs). By using Scribd, [...]

By: thorn

thorn — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:03:02 +0000

i have the same hope w/r/t format portability, whether that’s managed by selling content drm-free, or by providing readability/registration on multiple devices. also holding out some hope that amazon, like apple before it, will eventually change its business model of exclusivity for paid content. (i may have a kindle, but nobody owns me, man…)

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:32:49 +0000

Here’s a good recent article on the dangers of consolidation of media into a small number of gatekeepers:
http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=178058&page_number=1

I’m particularly interested in Scribd’s copyright management system:
http://www.scribd.com/copyright
Because of the nature of documents, they may have a leg up on things like YouTube or music sites, as one assumes it’s easier to recognize common text than it is video or audio. I like that they add anything from a DMCA takedown notice to their banned database, and that they’re willing to work with publishers in a preemptive manner, letting you upload copyrighted works which they’ll block from the site.

By: Valentina Kalk

Valentina Kalk — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:32:35 +0000

Scholarly publishers are warming up to Scribd, too. World Bank Publications has recently signed an agreement to sell over 1000 e-books from Scribd. Surprisingly, the first World Bank book purchased from Scribd was really a “niche” one: “Angola: Oil, Broad-based Growth, and Equity” . What is amazing is the statistics on the “views”: our publications have been viewed nearly 19,000 times in the period June 1 – June 19, 2009, and nearly 1000 people added them to their favourites. For a very academic publisher with an average print-run of 2000 copies per book, this is quite amazing.