From The New York Times and reporter Brad Stone:
In another sign that book publishers are looking to embrace alternatives to Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book store, Simon & Schuster has agreed to sell digital copies of its books on Scribd.com, a popular document-sharing Web site.
Books from best-selling authors like Stephen King would be among the titles available for purchase on Scribd.com.
Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS, plans to announce Friday that it will make digital editions of about 5,000 titles available for purchase on the site, including books from best-selling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Higgins Clark. It will also add thousands of other titles to Scribd’s search engine, allowing readers to sample 10 percent of the content of the books on the site and providing links to buy the print editions.
“We are interested in getting our books in front of consumers in as many formats and distribution platforms as possible,” said Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster.
Unlike Amazon, which sets the retail price for its e-books and sells them in its own proprietary Kindle format, Scribd is offering publishers considerably more control over how their digital titles are sold.
Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition. Amazon sets a price of $9.99 for many popular e-books, meaning titles there might be less expensive. But Scribd will allow publishers to see what is selling and change their prices accordingly.
Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue. Amazon reportedly gives publishers about half of the list price of books sold for the Kindle, but also discounts many titles and in some cases chooses to make no revenue itself from those sales.
Simon & Schuster will sell its books with anticopying software from Adobe, which means those books can be transferred to devices like the Sony Reader and some mobile phones, but not to Amazon’s Kindle.
Scribd, a start-up based in San Francisco, also says it is working on a reading application for the iPhone, which should be ready in a few weeks.
The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework and recipes. About 60 million users a month read documents on the site, embed them in blogs and share links to texts over social networks and e-mail messages.
Scribd has been criticized by publishers in the past for allowing users to upload pirated copies of their works. In an effort to combat the practice, Scribd will use the digital files of Simon & Schuster’s books to find and remove unauthorized copies from its site.
Trip Adler, Scribd’s chief executive, says the company is also talking to other major American publishers. “This is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales,” Mr. Adler said.
Untreed Reads is very pleased to announce that we have completed negotiations with author Edward Wright and Jonathan Lyons of Lyons Literary, LLC to publish the second book in the award-winning John Ray Horn mystery series.
