Comments on: Scribd almost has it right—but how do I find good books? ‘Independent publishers’ a possible solution?

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:28:39 +0000

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By: Steve Weber

Steve Weber — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:45:03 +0000

I don’t think Scribd needs to reinvent the wheel. They can employ collaborative filtering and social networking/reviews, the same thing that enables niche and self-published work to rise to the top on Amazon.

Most, perhaps 99 percent, of the stuff on Scribd now is crap. The Kindle bookstore isn’t much better. That doesn’t necessarily mean we need traditional gatekeepers.

There is no “barrier to entry” for publishing a Kindle edition, other than the use of a word processor and Internet connection. It’s the revenue split Amazon is trying to get away with that stinks. Glad to see some competition.

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:31:19 +0000

What's needed is something like AlexLit, a great collaborative filtering system for books. In its heyday, it was an amazingly good resource for finding new reading matter. Sadly, it's not in good working order right now, and the placeholder page still claims it will be coming back in 2008. If it were up and running, and people could enter Scribd titles into it, then it would soon start popping out recommendations including them. The site could (if its operators wished) even be set up to give recommendations specific to Scribd books, if some provision were made to mark books as Scribd when they were entered. It's a shame that Alexlit is lying fallow right now. Something similar could be created from scratch, but it would have a huge startup time. It took months to gather enough user book rating data that Alexlit could start giving recommendations.