TechCrunch has a piece on Scribd, the document-sharing platform with 100 million registered users and 90 million monthly active users. The piece focuses on the iOS news aggregation app, Float, that Scribd developed and almost sold to Yahoo for between $2 and $8 million before Yahoo decided to walk away in February. Float had gotten off to a good start, with up to 200 news partners and good ratings at the app store. However, it soon ran up against some stiff competition: “When we originally launched Float, Scribd wanted it to be Instapaper and Read...

Wikipedia isn’t the only site considering a public demonstration of the evils of SOPA. Scribd has gone ahead and done it. Scribd has added a script to its page that blanks out documents word by word before users’ eyes, followed by a pop-up explaining what’s happening and why we should all be concerned about SOPA. This analysis of why SOPA is unconstitutional is cited as an example. (At least, in theory. It didn’t work on my computer, nor on those of some others who posted comments on Scribd’s post.) That puts me in mind of a tool I...

The United States Senate has reached an agreement with Scribd to provide ad-free hosting document hosting for public Senate documents, as well as an “official Scribd liaison” presumably to help the Senate figure out how to use it. They will be using a number of other digital services as well, such as Sharepoint and UStream, to give the public a greater view into Senate proceedings. Of course, it remains to be seen just how many people will actually bother to take advantage of this openness, but it’s nice to see the Senate taking advantage of new technological platforms....

Scribd is launching an iPhone app called the Float Reader, through which it hopes to become “the Netflix of reading.” Unfortunately, I can’t try this app out on my first-gen iPod Touch—it requires iOS 4.0—but from the news coverage it looks like an interesting attempt to bring some of the benefits of iPad-only reader apps like Flipboard to the smaller smartphone interface. The Float Reader provides access to a user’s Scribd documents, as well as to articles from 150 partners including The Atlantic, Time, Salon, and TechCrunch, and to excerpts of articles friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or...

For those who’ve been following the outrage about Scribd instituting a paid archive feature in which the site charged for downloads of content that had been meant to be downloadable for free (we covered it here), TechCrunch reports on the latest development. Our earlier report on the issue came from Lynn Viehl’s blog (and subsequently, Scribd responded with an editorial in the Huffington Post), but another vehement denouncement of Scribd’s apparent malfeasance came from law professor Eric Goldman. It turned out that Scribd had started moving older files into an archive for which there was a charge...

SaveDelete has a list of the 30 best websites to download free books. I’m not familiar with all of the sites it lists, so I’m not entirely sure that all of them are completely legit. But then, you find some unauthorized books even on otherwise completely legit sites like Scribd (which is one of the thirty). It’s nice to see that even with all the fuss going on about agency pricing and restrictive DRM, there are still so many free books available to anyone with an Internet connection. People from previous centuries would be amazed and thrilled at...

This is a part of a post from author Lynn Viehl's Paperback Writer blog.. It deserves to be read in full, but I must point out that I can't verify anything that it contains: It's been brought to my attention that Scribd.com has begun charging people to download my free e-books hosted on their site. To get around my copyright and the free distribution notice I've placed in each e-book, they are using an archive subscription scam to make their money (this also neatly avoids them having to pay me any royalties on the profits they make.) Evidently all...

As I mentioned back in July, I’ve posted a couple of stories to Scribd just by way of trying out the service to see how well it worked. I’ve since ended up with a number of Scribd subscribers (including Slate writer Farhad Manjoo; I’m not sure entirely why), and my stories have been read a little over 70 times each. Now I’m wondering whether I should try writing another story—the idea for which came to me in a dream the night before last—and posting it there, for sale for $1. Would anybody buy it? How effective would promotion...

Self-publishing supersite Scribd is off the hook for copyright infringement, at least in one case, after a lawsuit against it was either settled or abandoned (depending on who you believe). The lawsuit in question charged that Scribd’s use of a complete digital copy of a text in its anti-infringement filter was itself a copyright infringement. Most copyright notices these days do include a warning against unauthorized digital copying and storage of the book in question, but Scribd’s attorney holds that in this case it is clearly a fair use. The suit came from a children’s book author who...

The other day, after I used my Facebook credentials to create a Scribd account in order to download The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove, the fact that I created an account was shared to my Facebook friends—and a number of them subscribed to my Scribd feed. This was news to me, as I had not actually contemplated putting anything on Scribd for subscribers to read. But on the other hand, now that I had a Scribd account, it presented an opportunity to try it out. So I took a couple of the stories I wrote for the “Paradise”...

Until a few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that posting your fiction on the web for free was the best way to assure that publishers would never want it, because publishers want something exclusive that nobody else has seen before. This is why forums like Baen’s Bar, where works can be posted in the “slushpile” for criticism and consideration, require a sign-in, with userID and password. Even though it takes about thirty seconds to set up an account and anyone can do it, it’s a sufficient fig leaf that authors who post there can say their work has not...

The “Monday Note” blog writes about a free e-book on Scribd that may be a little dry for some people’s tastes, but sounds very interesting all the same—the Department of Justice Complaint vs. Russian spies (June 2010). This document summarizes the DOJ’s investigations against the recently arrested Russian spies, and from their summary reads like a primer in espionage ineptitude (from the Russian side). After decades of reading spy stories about how careful espionage agents have to be, it’s a little shocking to see how downright sloppy these Russians were. It does kind of make you...