Scribd - possible new ebook sales platform, starting Monday

[redsymbol]

Just saw a story in the NY Times about a company named Scribd. My account is new and I don't have enough posts to publish links yet, but if you go to the New Your Times website and search for "scribd", the article will show up near the top (it's dated May 18th, even though it's still the 17th as I post this).

Scribd is a company you may not know about (I only do because it was funded by a friend of a friend). They have secure online document-publishing system that is fairly widespread already, online. So far, it has been only for posting free content. Starting this coming week, however, they are apparently going to allow document (ebook) publishers to charge users for access.

This makes it an electronic document marketplace. I.e. a sales platform for those of us publishing ebooks.

I see some plusses and minuses from our perspective.

Plusses:
1) Scribd will handle a lot of the details about copy protection, payment collection, etc.
2) This platform will soon allow people to purchase products for their Amazon Kindle, and for reading on their iPhone.
3) It will be very easy to set up, I think.

Minuses:
1) Expensive. Scribd keeps 20% of the purchase price. Not the most outrageous, but certainly you can implement cheaper solutions.
2) No affiliate program, at least no hint of it in the article. From what I know of scribd, I predict they won't launch with that feature, and won't bring it in for some time (if at all).

Thoughts? Are there situations where you'd use something like this? I'd imagine doing so if I wanted to set up something very quickly for a test, before moving it to a cheaper system w/ affiliate sales if it proved successful.

Thanks,
Aaron

PS. Can someone who isn't a newbie could post the direct link to the article, as a convenience to people? Thanks

[xlfutur1]

Yes, it does sound interesting. 20% is not bad if you look at it as just an affiliate commission. Most affiliates won't push anything that is not a 50% take, so keeping 80% of the sale is pretty good if they take care of everything.

Yeah its a good website, the iPaper at times seems a little picky when it comes to uploading PDF's but it depends upon what program created the PDF's...

Here is the link for it: Scribd

Also another one but this site is not as popular and does not bring as much traffic but you never know maybe the service will take off..

Upload & Share PowerPoint presentations and documents

Here just checked, I joined both sites at the same time and uploaded the same documents

Scribd I have - 3 months ago 544 Total Views
On SlideShare I have - 3 months ago 119 views

I have been a little active on these sites but not as active as others but the above should give you a general idea of the posible traffic.

James

[TheCren]

Here's the link for you guys: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/te...=scribd&st=cse

I know of and use Scribd (as kennyk3 said) as an SEO tool. So I think marketers a) probably had something to do with the reason Scribd has decided to do this and b) will pick up on this and use it to its fullest capacity.

[dave147]

I understood that scribd don't allow commercial links or commercial PDFs? Has this changed?

Originally Posted by dave147

I understood that scribd don't allow commercial links or commercial PDFs? Has this changed?

Define commercial because I have a few articles on there that I turned into PDF files and uploaded... Have not had any problems..

The PDF's include a resource box ...

James

[dave147]

Originally Posted by TheRichJerksNet

Define commercial because I have a few articles on there that I turned into PDF files and uploaded... Have not had any problems..

The PDF's include a resource box ...

James

What I mean is if you are selling something they will delete your account and ban you from the site. That was before, was there a change of policy?

[Sam101]

Originally Posted by TheCren

Here's the link for you guys: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/te...=scribd&st=cse

I know of and use Scribd (as kennyk3 said) as an SEO tool. So I think marketers a) probably had something to do with the reason Scribd has decided to do this and b) will pick up on this and use it to its fullest capacity.

Thanks for the tip. Do the links inside the "ipaper" document have any value or do the links in the other data (author bio, etc where they specifically ask for a URL) have link juice? I am curious to know as I have put links in both places.

[jjpmarketing]

I don't know about the links, but about a year ago around the STSE2 promo time I uploaded a document to their site and it got ranked lightning quick. Shortly after is when they disallowed commercial content.

I haven't used it since, but I was more or less testing out a theory from one of the ebooks Stompernet sent out. They were very right about it.

I am sure now it would be very much like Hubpages. You can't directly promote something in the body, but you can probably put a non-affiliate link to a TLD (meaning no sub domains, /directory, /file.html type of URL's) in the document.

But since I haven't used them in a while I don't have a clue what their actual TOS says nowadays.

Dennis