GigaOM » Scribd

Scribd and the new era of the $10 textbook

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:17:35 +0000

The traditional textbook publishing model, based on dead trees and middlemen, can force students to shell out hundreds of dollars for a stack of photocopies. Now, two law professors are showing how easy it can be for academics to offer an alternative at a fraction of the price.

Eric Goldman and Rebecca Tushnet are both trademark experts and popular bloggers. This week, they offered a new package of course work called “Advertising and Marketing Law: Cases and Material” for sale on Scribd for just $10. In a blog post, Goldman explains the economics behind the $10 price tag:

Compared to 99 cent or free eBooks, a $10 downloadable book may sound expensive. But, compared to the typical law school dead-trees casebook, $10 is a ridiculous bargain. Many print casebooks of comparable size cost $150 or more. … While we could easily justify a higher price than $10, we’re not exactly philanthropists. Here’s how I see the math: a $150 casebook may have a $110 price wholesale (or less). At 10% royalties to the authors, Rebecca and I would share $11. At the $10 download price, Scribd takes $2.25 a download, leaving us author royalties of $7.75. So discounting the retail price 93% perhaps reduces our royalties by less than 30%. Let’s hear it for disintermediation! Plus, just like any demand curve, the lower price point should lead to higher sales, which may, in fact, make our approach profit-maximizing.

The book will be available to read and mark-up on any electronic platform and can be printed as well. The authors are not applying any digital rights management to the book, but are relying instead on the low price and a moral appeal to limit unauthorized sharing.

The book is available on Scribd, a popular document-sharing platform, that has already attracted the interest of the publishing community. In 2009, Simon & Schuster signed a deal to use Scribd as a potential Kindle competitor, offering excerpts and complete works from Stephen King and others.

Interestingly, in his blog post, Goldman blasts Scribd as a “horribly limited platform” and complains that it requires users to provide their Facebook profile to complete the purchase. He adds that he and Tushnet intend to switch to an alternative eBook platform as soon as they can find a better one.

Goldman and Tushnet are part of a larger phenomenon of disruption in the textbook publishing business that is leveraging digital distribution possibilities and eliminating intermediaries. Other examples include sites like BenchPrep and Boundless Learning that offer personalized or open source content via mobile and the web.

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Taking SOPA/PIPA to the streets: Protests on for SF, NYC

Colleen Taylor — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:56:50 +0000

San Francisco City Hall

A number of tech industry companies and organizations are taking to the web to protest the proposed anti-piracy legislation in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA.) But the demonstrations don’t stop with site-wide blackouts planned for Wednesday by a number of web giants including Wikipedia, Scribd, Reddit and others: People also have plans to meet up in real life and take the protest to the streets.

In San Francisco, an anti-SOPA and PIPA rally is planned for 12:00pm PT in the Civic Center, where the city’s government offices are located. Venture capitalist Ron Conway is scheduled to speak at the rally, and a number of tech industry groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Hackers & Founders, and SV NewTech are organizing the event. More information is here.

In New York City, an anti-SOPA and PIPA meetup is scheduled to begin at 12:30pm ET outside the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at 780 Third Ave. The event is organized by NY Tech Meetup. More information is here.

In Seattle, three separate events are being planned by a group called Seattle Against SOPA. All meetups will begin at 11:30am PT. More information can be found here.

If you know of any other anti-SOPA and PIPA rallies planned for meatspace, please weigh in using the comments.

Photo of San Francisco City Hall courtesy of Flickr user Kwong Yee Cheng.

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Scribd launches Float, an app for the digital bookworm

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:00:28 +0000

Scribd, the San Francisco-based document sharing company, has launched a new iPhone and web application called Float aimed at putting all of a user’s reading materials — from books, to blog posts, to newspaper and magazine articles — in one integrated format. But will the app be too ambitious for its own good?

Float is aimed at recreating users’ personal libraries in an entirely digital format. The app collates content from more than 150 sources in the publishing industry, including the Associated Press, Fortune, TIME, and People Magazine. Float can also be used to read books and some blog posts; it picks out tweets and Facebook messages that include links to reading materials and incorporates them into the Float stream.

Float’s real strength lies in its super-slick user interface. It organizes the text from all these disparate sources into one coherent format on which users can zoom in or out, or overlay settings to adjust for direct sunlight or eye strain. The app also allows users to archive and organize what they’ve read and save articles they plan to read for the future.

But the app is also inherently limited, at least in its current form. Since Float does not utilize standards such as Atom or RSS, Scribd’s engineering team has been tasked with incorporating each of the different content providers into Float’s unique interface. That is a fine strategy for a launch with 150 hand-picked publishers, but can Scribd realistically scale the app to include all the long tail content that makes the Internet such a great tool for discovery? “Our goal is to have every blog and every news service included in Float,” Scribd CTO Jared Freidman told me in a pre-launch interview. But can the company really do that with just 50 full-time employees? “We have very smart engineers,” Freidman said. That may be so, but there is only so much that a team of that size can do, especially when it comes to the kind of customized integration it seems that Float has built itself on thus far.

Overall, Float seems genuinely pleasing to use, and imparts an easy fluidity between different types of media in a way that had not previously been perfected on mobile devices. As Freidman put it, “It’s really quite an ambitious idea, and I don’t think anyone has tried to combine so much into one single ecosystem.” That level of ambition could ultimately wind up being Float’s downfall — or the key to its success.

Here are some screenshots of Float (click to enlarge):

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Prop 8 Ruling Is Scribd's Most Viral Doc Ever

Liz Gannes — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:56:16 +0000

Scribd just emailed us to let us know that today’s California Proposition 8 ruling, which was delivered at about 1:45 p.m. PT today, is the most viral document in the history of the site. After federal judge Vaughn Walker overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban, a Scribd user who goes by the name goodasyou uploaded a PDF of the ruling to the site. The document is currently receiving more than 1,000 reads per second, with nearly 150,000 total reads an hour after the ruling. Scribd is fighting to keep its servers up. Update 3:20 p.m.: It’s now receiving as many as 6,000 reads per second.

“A typical viral document gets 100,000 reads in 24 hours, this document has over 100,000 reads in about 24 minutes,” said Scribd CEO Trip Adler. Scribd recently improved its Facebook and Twitter integration, which (along with the historic nature of the document) is speeding its spread across the web.

Prop 8 Ruling FINAL

Scribd Now Sends Docs to Mobile Devices

James Kendrick — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:15:13 +0000

Scribd is one of those things that you really appreciate once you try it out. The method of displaying virtually any complex document with proper formatting and controls to facilitate the reading is simply great. I especially like how well the research papers on our subscription-based service, GigaOM Pro display in Scribd. What does this have to do with mobile tech? I’m glad you asked. Scribd has now added a “Send to Device” feature that does exactly what it implies — sends any Scribd doc right to your phone.

Most Scribd content is paid content, so this is adding more value to the purchase. It’s a great way for authors and publishers to get their content out to a big, mainstream audience. Even more exciting is the quiet news that Scribd is working on a “series of mobile applications tailored especially to the Android and iPhone operating systems.”

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The Price of E-Book Progress

Scribd Goes Mobile With Long-tail Books

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:00:49 +0000

Scribd, the document-hosting service that calls itself “the largest social publishing company in the world,” has launched a series of mobile services and features for sending books and other documents to any portable device, including a set of open APIs, and according to CEO Trip Adler, the company plans to launch mobile apps for the iPhone, Android and iPad in the next few months. He also said that Scribd, which has about 50 million unique visitors a month, will soon have published more books than the entire U.S. publishing industry did last year.

“We’ve spent the last few years building a repository of 10 million documents,” Adler said in an interview in advance of the launch. “Now we’re launching a way to really easily read these documents on any mobile device. So whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation or a book or a homework project, you can now send that to any mobile device and read it there.” One of the problems with the e-reader market, he says, is that “people don’t really know what to buy, or what to read on them — with these new services, as long as it’s on Scribd you know that you can read it on any device.”

Scribd’s launch involves three separate products:

A “send-to-device” option that will now appear at the top of every document the service hosts, which pulls up a list of all the devices Scribd can send to, including the Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader, etc.

The Scribd Open Platform for E-Readers (SOPED), a development platform and set of application programming interfaces that companies can use to integrate with Scribd’s mobile services.

A series of mobile apps for the iPhone, Android, Kindle, iPad and other portable devices that make it easier to send and receive Scribd documents and books.

Adler told me that Scribd briefly thought about coming out with its own e-reading device, but “only for about a minute. It didn’t really make sense, because we’re a web software company, not a hardware company. So we decided to embrace as many different devices as we could.” Through a variety of different protocols — email, text messaging, etc. — the new “send-to-device” service supports the Kindle, the Nook, the iPhone, the Android, Windows Mobile devices, the BlackBerry, the Palm, the Onyx, the JetBook, the EZReader, the IRex and the Cool-ER. Adler said support for other devices will be coming soon.

In contrast to companies like Apple and Amazon, which are concentrating on signing deals with major publishers for established authors, Adler said that Scribd focuses on what the company calls “the long tail of content.” That means anything from a student’s PhD thesis or a PowerPoint presentation to a self-published children’s story or a cookbook. “We specialize in all kinds of material that isn’t being published by traditional publishers,” he said. “About 95 percent of the content on Scribd is free.”

That said, Scribd spokesperson Michelle Laird noted that the company is also working with major publishers such as Simon & Schuster and Random House. Although some publishers have criticized the company in the past for hosting copyright-infringing copies of their works, Adler says that Scribd has “made tremendous progress with our copyright management system.” Laird noted that Wiley & Sons — publishers of the popular “Dummies” series of self-help technical books — has also agreed to put some of its content on Scribd, after being satisfied by the company that it would be protected.

Adler said that the number of books published through Scribd is “doubling every six months or so,” and that soon the company will have published more books than the entire U.S. publishing industry did last year, a number he estimated at about 300,000. The Scribd CEO also said that he isn’t concerned about competitor DocStoc’s recent launch of an online store for selling documents. “Jason at DocStoc has been saying that we’re just a book publisher, but we’re really not,” he said. “We host all kinds of documents.”

Laird noted that while DocStoc requires those who sell through its store to be approved, Scribd “allows anyone to sell in our store.” Among the document services that Scribd has deals with, she said that ProQuest provides hundreds of thousands of graduate-level theses that students can read and use to study for a graduate degree. The service also has a branded, embeddable reader that is used by publications such as the New York Times to host documents related to new stories.

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The Price of E-Book Progress

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Here’s Kate

Evolution of the E-book Market

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:00:15 +0000

The emergence of a commercially significant electronic book (e-book) market in the past three years has been the result of two quite-recent technological developments. The first, and most critical, has been a breakthrough in the technology for manufacturing reflective electronic paper displays (EPDs), allowing for the introduction of affordable, lightweight and portable e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.

The second has been the rollout of reliable “3G” wireless broadband networks, which have made it possible to deliver digital books directly to reading devices without the intermediate steps of downloading files to a PC and then transferring them to a reader. Direct-to-device sampling and delivery, particularly with Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone, have enabled impulse-driven e-commerce, which has been critical to early consumer adoption of e-books.

The technology for e-books, however, remains nascent. The Kindle and its ilk are very much first-generation devices that deliver the minimally acceptable experience. Further development of the business will be closely tied to future technological developments, including flexible and color displays, format standardization and rich-media applications. As the market grows, there are numerous opportunities for other technology players, from social networks to cloud service providers and more. This report examines the trends and opportunities ahead.

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WatchDox Makes Document Security Simple

Aliza Sherman — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:21 +0000

Every so often, a new app hits my radar that gives me that “Wow! Awesome! Right On!” feeling. Launching into public beta today, WatchDox by Confidela is such an app. If you want to share a document securely with someone, WatchDox can do that. But it also does much more, namely letting you specify permissions on the document, such as the whether it can be printed, copied or forwarded. Then you can track all the activity of your document so you can see all the places your document has been sent, by whom and when, who opened it and when, who printed it and when — a complete document activity audit. Yet its features are practical, sensible and uncluttered.

Watchdox uses a secure Flash-driven viewer that requires no special software download or login. When you send or receive your first WatchDox doc, you simply enter your email address to start the quick authentication process. Access to documents is controlled via email; you are authenticated when you receive an email from the site and click on a link. Easy. Of course, you must have full control over your email address and inbox — and be confident that is also true of anyone you share your documents with — for this security model to work.

If you edit a shared document, all the recipients will see the newly updated document the next time they access it. You can revoke permissions from any recipient at any time. You can also add an expiration date to documents, after which they won’t be viewable by the recipients.

All of the documents you send and receive are stored in your “My Documents” box. You can store up to 50MB on WatchDox with the free version, and documents automatically expire after 30 days. At any given time you can send up to two documents for a total of 15MB. The system is based on Amazon Web Services, so should scalable for enterprise-level needs. WatchDox provides document security for Box.net, so you might already be using it.

Watchdox is free to use while in beta. There will always be a free version for individual users, but Confidela will also introduce premium plans starting at $15/month per sender (there is no limit to document recipients).

Right now, to send and view documents, you must visit the WatchDox site unless you have Microsoft Outlook; a plugin is available that automates the document sharing process from your inbox.

One neat security-enhancing feature is that if you click away from a Watchdox document browser window, the document is instantly blurred by a virtual “curtain.” This is a clever way to mask private and confidential content from people peeking over your shoulder.

While services like Scribd have made it much easier to share documents online, WatchDox takes things to the next level by adding no-hassle (no password required) security, including a virtual paper trail.

Of course, I concede that just sharing a document online reduces its security; however, for documents that don’t have “National Security” stamped at the top, this app seems like a winner.

How are you sending your documents securely?

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Bookgoo: Strange Name for a Useful Collaboration Tool

Aliza Sherman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:00:35 +0000

In the world of branding, Web 2.0 companies are clamoring for name originality. Bookgoo is out there in terms of weird names but in terms of applications for collaboration, their technology rocks. The company set out to “empower users to collaborate more effectively.” And you, dear Web worker, get the benefits of their hard work.

Through Bookgoo, you can upload a document (pdf, html, doc, xls, jpg, gif) or URL and opt to make it either private or public. At first, I was envisioning another Scribd. Then I thought it sounded a bit like Backboard, a feedback site I recently reviewed here. But that is where the functionality diverges from both of those sites into a nifty annotating tool for marking up documents in a way that makes Google Docs look a little plain vanilla and some of the online whiteboard apps available seem a bit old school.

Bookgoo actually makes marking up a document fun. Upload your document, invite others to view it and provide their input, and then watch the annotating begin.

On Bookgoo, you get your dashboard view of your document activity on you “Goo Gate” where you can: 1) Add notes to the document by highlighting particular text and typing in related notes; 2) Draw on the document; or 3) Change the pen color when you draw.

The annotations you make lay over the document, but do not change it. Even when you highlight text by clicking and holding your cursor then dragging it over text, the text is not actually modified but the highlighted words contain the related comments.

Because Bookgoo doesn’t change the document, the tool works well for commenting on and pointing to changes that should be made. Then someone can download the original document from the site – without the annotations – and implement the modifications from viewing the modifications online.

Other things you can do with your Bookgoo include:

1. Subscribing to a document RSS feed. Get notified each time someone modifies your document.

2. Emailing documents to a friend. You can allow others to access the modified document directly from the document page. This feature, however, brought up the question of privacy for me. Currently, Bookgoo does not offer different levels of privacy features and even their “private” mode is not very private and definitely not secure. Of course, if you have very sensitive documents, uploading them to the Internet at all is a risk.

3. Adding a document to your MyGoo page. If you upload a document, it is automatically archived on and accessible from your MyGoo page. However, if you are invited to annotate someone else’s document, you can also add that to MyGoo for easy access.

4. Sharing a document with a group. You can create groups and must do this first before adding a document to the group.

5. Adding the document to your social networks and other sites. The presence of an AddThis button brought me back to my questions about privacy. At this time, even if you opt to make your document private, once you share that URL with others, they have the ability to share your document broadly. The company calls their privacy option “pseudo privacy” for this very reason. Therefore you need to trust those to whom you give access or keep really private documents in much more secure environments.

Some of the downsides or limitations of Bookgoo:

1. Lack of more robust privacy features. Bookgoo plans to release role-based permissions soon.

2. Inability to use word documents newer than Microsoft Word 2003. Support for newer docs is pending.

3. Difficulty sifting through larger documents for annotations. Another upcoming feature will be “page inspection” for large, multi-page documents so you can inspect 10 pages at a time to locate annotations deep within a document.

4. Still somewhat buggy. While doing the first demo with the company, I uncovered several bugs that rendered some of the key features inoperable. The Bookgoo tech team rectified those problems so that everything seemed to work well during the second demo. But you may end up finding a few more bugs here and there.

The folks at Bookgoo don’t anticipate ever charging for any level of their application and see their business model as more a software licensing venture as well as experimenting with Ad Sense. They simply want to offer Bookgoo free to the general online community.

Gotta love their spirit!

How do you annotate documents collaboratively online?

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Scribd Launches New Feature to End Email Attachments

Jason Harris — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:00:06 +0000

Scribd is a document hosting service that we’ve touched on before that allows users to bring their documents into their online service for viewing and later use. Scribd recently launched a service called iPaper@Scribd that is aiming to do away with annoying email attachments by granting users the ability to convert documents to the company’s iPaper format.

Using iPaper@Scribd is drop dead simple. To get started, cc: ipaper@scribd.com in your outgoing email attachment and fire off the email. As a result all your other recipients will receive a link to the Sribd hosted document a few moments later. Alternatively, you can just email Scribd your document and forward on the link when you receive it back from your web service.

If you use the first option mentioned above, it may really annoy your email recipients. This is because they’ll receive two emails – one with the original attachment and a second Scribd email with a link to their version of the document.

On another note, considering you’re uploading business documents to the Internet, we would not recommend putting up business sensitive documents that may contain proprietary business information.

Scribd has been used to display business documents on blogs for a while and I think it will be a great tool for people who wish to share documents in a very easy manner.

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