Scribd - possible new ebook sales platform, starting Monday

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