I looked at a half dozen books at SCRID and they were all PDF.

They’re adding EPUB capability within the week or so.

But part of the speculation on why S&S is doing this is to fight the pirates. By releasing the official S&S books, they enter Scribd’s database, and thus help Scribd to weed out the illegal copies – as well as give Scribd a financial incentive to do so.

Scribd in PDF? I was browsing their support sections, and they tell pubs that Scribd prefers – I think even ‘strongly encourages’ – pubs to upload in PDF format with the fonts embedded, and cover as page 1, and narrow margins, with lots of metadata in place, and with or without Adobe DRM (that’s up to the uploader).

Couple nice things about Scribd are that the pub/author can determine what sort of a preview to offer – by percentage, number of pages starting at the cover, or with specific pages. And then you can ‘embed’ the preview in your blog or website, which is cool (though I think all these previews and Scribd paper are flash-based, so iPhones can’t see them or use them).

Scribd also has a lot of flexibility built in along other lines: you can let readers read only online, or download; if you let them download, you can let them print or prevent them.

But the nicest thing of all? With David, I salute the competition. In the bad old days of paper-only, whoever owned the copyright released their editions. You got a hardcover, you got the mass-market paperback, maybe a bookclub edition if your genre work was approved by the club, maybe a Reader’s Digest version, maybe syndication in magazine serial rights.

In these brave new days of e, e-retailers are going non-exclusive, so that authors and pubs can put up their ebook editions on Kindle, on Scribd, in Fictionwise, and a bunch of other formats.

And the differences between the Scribd model and the Amazon model add up to a lot of confusion and turbulence and choice in these early frontier days, until at last everything shakes out into (probably) 2 or 3 formats and 1 or 2 pay models.

The names they mention (I also heard Jimmy Carter on the list) are well known, but they have also been writers for a while. Also, I’m trying to make sense of the 5,000 number — it seems a bit low for an entity the size of S&S. Additionally, I’m not sure a $20 ebook fits the profile of the average Scrib’d user. So here is my guess:

You will find older Stephen King books for $6.40 or less. These things are now available in paperback for around $7.99 from the S&S web site. Or possibly it will be even older books that are not now available in print. This limits the S&S risk from this ‘experiment’. The 7,000 additional books that are in effect advertised on Scrib’d, but sold as paper books by S&S will be related to the ebooks. So if S&S is sitting on a overrun of book B they may put up an ebook of related book A and use it to try to move book B.

I don’t expect this to involve new release A-list books.

I looked at a half dozen books at SCRID and they were all PDF. They can’t be converted with formatting errors, I’m not going to read them on my Mac, and I don’t have a portable PDF reader. The Sony, based on reviews, is a bit off and I don’t need a Kindle DX just for PDF reading.

The question is: Who really reads a whole book in the PDF format? And how?

And as competition in the marketplace grows the split with Amazon will likely turn a bit more in the publishers favor.

So publishers can set their selling prices themselves – is that necessarily a good thing?

From the NYTimes article:

“Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition.”

Are they idiots??? I don’t know many people who even pay that much for paper books – It’s rare that I find a paper book that isn’t available for at least 30% off list price.

Will the marketplace support those prices? Do they really expect people to pay more for an ebook than a pbook?

Time will tell but I don’t think the mass of ebook buyers are going to pay 20 percent off list. Amazon has sort of set the bar at the $9.99 price point.

“This is a vastly more sustainable arrangement than over at Amazon’s Kindle Store, where bestsellers typically go for $9.99 but only because Amazon is subsidizing them.”

I have no idea how long Amazon may continue to subsidize prices at the $9.99 – just as you have no idea how sustainable pricing at 20% off paper list will prove to be.

All I know is that I’m glad Amazon is selling/subsidizing many ebook titles at $9.99 and will buy ‘em (or rent them as you prefer) as often and as long as I can

Unfortunately, if S&S follows past patterns, consumers will have the gain of ePub obliterated by exorbitant pricing — a no-win scenario for everyone — publishers and consumers.