YouTube has been a huge success in getting vast numbers of video clips online, and in establishing the Flash-based FLV video format as a way of making them almost universally accessible. Scribd is trying to do the same thing for the written word, using its Flash-based iPaper publishing format. You just upload a document, and Scribd converts it automatically.
The site was launched two years ago, and reckons to attract about 60 million users a month. More than 50,000 documents are uploaded every day.
Like YouTube, Scribd is also trying to negotiate a place in the commercial world. A couple of weeks ago, the site launched a beta version of the Scribd Store, which enables professional authors and publishers to upload works for sale - at any price they care to set. Sellers get 80% of the revenue.
Random House, Simon & Schuster, Lonely Planet and O'Reilly Media are among the publishers giving the site a go. If you are interested in Tim O'Reilly's new book about Twitter, for example, you can read quite a lot of it on Scribd, with some groups of pages withheld.
Freelance journalists, amateur authors, students and others can also offer their works for sale, of course. And given the financial problems in the newspaper and book publishing industries, many writers are hoping this will become a viable marketplace. At worst, it lets writers try to make money from stories that they can't sell elsewhere, with the advantage (and disadvantage) of not having to negotiate with a stream of editors and publishers.
Perhaps not many readers will be keen to pay for things on Scribd, given the amount of free stuff that's already on the web. Still, Scribd is working on an iPhone reader. Since we know mobile phone users are prepared to pay for trivial applications and ringtones, this approach could be successful.
Like many web 2.0 sites, Scribd combines user-generated content with social networking. A Scribd document has a button for Share This, with links for Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc. You can also embed an iPaper article in your blog or website, just like a YouTube video. Scribd members can comment on articles, or at least click the button for I Like This.
The idea is that audience participation will promote the good authors and texts, because users can see which are the most read and most liked items.
Members of Scribd can also start groups on topics of their own choosing, and these provide mini-forums.
One potential problem is that Scribd could fill up with pirate copies of popular books. Scribd tries to filter out copyright works and takes them down when they are reported, but it still creates friction with some authors and publishers. However, many also recognise that the publicity is valuable, and that Scribd is a potential outlet for out-of-print and print-on-demand books.
And if ebooks like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader really take off, Scribd and similar sites could become too important to ignore.
* Internet
* Web 2.0
* iPhone
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/01/netbytes-scribd
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