Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Scribd is a document sharing site that has had great success based on its sharing features and iPaper (which lets you embed documents in various formats into any webpage).

Scribd has also gotten a lot of flak from authors like J.K.Rowling and from publishers because some portion of the documents shared on Scribd are illegal texts of popular books.

Today Scribd is announcing a move designed to -

1. Play off of the Kindle’s success. 
2. Make some money off of its users as opposed to just handing out free sharing.  
3. Avoid copyright lawsuits by appeasing publishers with an alternate outlet.

Kindle Store Vs Scribd – Top 5 Points

1. Scribd is Publisher oriented – Publishers get to set prices, they get 80% of the cut, and they get to choose DRM or not.  
2. Scribd will be releasing an iPhone App to take on Kindle for iPhone. 
3. Scribd will focus on the long tail of non-professional content.
4. Scribd already has 60 million unique monthly visitors.
5. Scribd thinks that by allowing for DRM free PDFs and similar DRM free formats they can entice Kindle owners.

Is Scribd a viable alternative to the Kindle Store?

This move by Scribd highlights -

1. The battle between Amazon (which wants to control the Kindle eco-system) and Publishers (who want to take the lion’s share of book profits by utilizing alternate channels).  
2. The battle between the concept of ‘free everything’ that the Internet has encouraged Vs the traditional model of creators getting paid.

Scribd has very few users of good intent – for the last two years Scribd has not only encouraged sharing content, it has also encouraged (by not policing content)  sharing of copyrighted works illegally.

With this move they’re trying to get these users to switch over to paying for this content. 

The other audience that Scribd is targeting is users who would buy an eReader and then hope to get cheaper content. To be quite frank, the fact that publishers get to set prices pretty much rules out the possibility of prices being lower than the Kindle Store. In fact, the prices on Scribd for books from the big publishers will show the amount of effort Amazon is putting into nurturing the Kindle and Kindle edition books.

Overall, Scribd is a bit of a danger – However, Kindle Store Vs Scribd is the equivalent of Google (traffic of good intent) Vs Facebook (people sharing photos, wasting time, and trying to get a date). Amassing tens or even hundreds of millions of users isn’t worth much if they aren’t buying anything.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | kindle vs scribd, scribd