(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 saw on BoingBoing the other day that allows people to “censor” their own blog posts with a link to show how people can fight SOPA censorship themselves. The nice thing about the Internet is that it’s very good at getting out word on things like this. The problem is, will that be enough to kill the bill?

(Found via TechDirt.)

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.

(Found via eBookNewser.)

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 Scribd. It will also allow Instapaper-like slurping of content via a browser bookmarklet. One clever feature is that the app will support either scrolling of text by sliding your finger up and down on the screen, or flipping to a whole new page by sliding it left or right.

Scribd plans to start running ads against some content later this year, but also plans to offer a Netflix-style service where one flat fee allows access to paywalled content from a number of publishers. This is an idea with some potential—as TechCrunch points out, it seems more likely to succeed than requiring people to pay separately every time they want to read something—but time will tell if they can get enough publishers on board to make it appealing.

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 to be able to download, The change was being made, and money was being charged, without content writers’ knowledge or authorization.

There followed much outrage from the blogosphere, many members of whom took a predictably anti-Scribd stance. (Oddly enough, Mike Masnick at Techdirt reports that a few people suggested that since Goldman was getting a free service from Scribd, he was “not a customer” and so shouldn’t complain. As Masnick points out, just because no money exchanged hands doesn’t mean no value did.)

Subsequently, Scribd emailed Goldman a link to a public apology by Scribd CEO Trip Adler (which they since took down temporarily to make “final considerations”, but put back up again after TechCrunch reported on its disappearance).

In the apology, Adler explains that the real intention of the Scribd Archive program was to “encourage readers to contribute to the Scribd community,” either by uploading documents themselves (for which they would gain free download access for 24 hours) or else by paying a small fee.

He also points out that Archived documents are still free to read on-line regardless of whether they can be downloaded. Adler admits that Scribd made the mistakes of not communicating the program clearly to content contributors, and not making it easy for people to opt out of having their documents included in the archive.

Adler says that Scribd is now committing to being more open about the archive, adding a clear opt-out procedure to Scribd users’ account settings page (I just went and opted my own writings out of the archive; it’s as simple as clicking a checkbox and pressing a button), notifying people when their documents are due to enter the archive, and setting up an advisory board to incorporate community feedback.

This is welcome news, though it does not fully undo the damage Scribd did to its reputation with the unannounced archive program in the first place. It’s never good to make your customers feel like they’ve been baited and switched, and undoubtedly there will be many users who will not find the apology and changes announced therein to be enough (especially considering how they tried to take it down for changes after making it). It may take some time for Scribd to gain back its users’ trust.

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 how easily we can obtain any public-domain book we want, and a number that are still under copyright as well. (Of course, they’d also be saddened by just how few people bother to read those anymore.)

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 the money they’ve been raking in from the Google ads they’ve posted on my e-book pages hasn’t been enough for them.

I was not made aware of this new policy by Scribd at all; a reader kindly brought it to my attention. If you have free stories or documents hosted on this site, chances are they’re doing the same to you.

I immediately contacted Scribd.com and demanded an explanation, which they provided at their leisure. Basically they washed their hands of any liability and ethics by telling me it was my problem, not theirs. In order to prevent Scribd from further profiting from my free books, I have to remove each e-book individually from their archives (for instructions on how to do this, see Scribd’s instructions here.) As I discovered this morning this is going to take a considerable amount of time for me to accomplish, and it’s not a permanent solution; they tell me I’ll have to check the documents regularly to see to it that they aren’t arbitrarily returned to the archive, where Scribd can then again start charging people to download them.

I find the situation particularly ironic, as anyone can bootleg my work on the internet with no problem, yet when I try to give it away for free, greedy people still try to make a buck off it. Writers just can’t win.

Thanks to Michael Pastore for the link.

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 of it be through social networking and blogging? Would anybody care enough to check it out?

It would be an interesting experiment. And to be honest, the idea of making money from it is probably the only way the story would actually end up getting written. At the moment, I have so many demands on my time it is hard to find any excuse for leisure—and certainly writing a story would feel like a leisure activity otherwise.

And if Greg Stolze was able to get away with charging $1 for a 3,000 word story, perhaps I could get away with charging that much for one that will almost certainly be longer. (Perhaps I could get fancy and do a Storyteller’s Bowl/Ransom Model sort of thing, and say that if I sold 100 copies I’d make it free to everyone. If only 70-some people read my free stories, it doesn’t seem likely I would make that many sales.)

Maybe this weekend I’ll write it down and give it a shot.

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 was angry that a copy of her book was found on Scribd, even though Scribd promptly removed it once notified (as per its obligation under the DMCA) and added it to its filter to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Ironically, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers in this case was one of peer-to-peer cause celebre Jammie Thomas’s defense attorneys.

However, Techdirt points out that another copyright lawsuit against Scribd has found a judge who is allowing it to go forward, at least until it reaches the point of a summary judgment. I suspect that lawsuits against Scribd, or YouTube, or any other site that allows users to upload their own content are essentially going to be inevitable, DMCA or no.

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” setting on Shifti.org, converted them back from wiki into DOC format, and uploaded them to Scribd.

It was an interesting and remarkably easy experience—I actually had more trouble reformatting the DOC files than I did uploading them to Scribd. All I had to do was click an “Upload” link, select the file, and edit the metadata. Not only were the files automatically published to my Scribd profile, but they were announced to my Facebook list. (There is also an option for linking a Twitter account in, but Twitter was down when I tried it so I haven’t gotten around to that yet.)

The documents look much the same on Scribd as they did in OpenOffice Writer, down to keeping the same page formatting and section separators. One slight problem is that, using a 10-point font, the text is rather small on the screen since Scribd by default shows a full page at a time. But it is possible to zoom in and see the text larger, or to download it in PDF, DOC, or text format.

At the moment, Scribd lists 34 total readers for my two stories, but the only comment is one I left admitting that I wished I could do something about the quotation marks in the story I uploaded. I wonder whether anyone actually has bothered to read them yet, and what those 34 views represent?

At any rate, uploading to Scribd turned out to be quick and easy, and its integration with social networks makes promoting your work to your friends easy. I can see how and why it’s becoming such a well-known solution for self-publishers, and its new HTML5 interface works great. If I get a good response from these posts, I might just have to put a few more things up.

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 been posted “publicly” to the Internet.

But over the last few years, that conventional wisdom has been eroding. There are a number of authors, most notably John Scalzi, who got their start by posting works online for free. And now io9 reports that Marta Acosta’s young-adult vampire novel, The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove, is set to be published in hardcover by Tor after being posted to Scribd, where it became the number-one downloaded (the article says “#1 selling”, but can you really call it “selling” if it’s available for free?) young-adult novel.

Of course, unlike Scalzi, Acosta is not a newly-discovered writer; she already has a successful adult vampire series, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula. The following she already had for that series may well have led to the success of Shadow Girl—adults do read young-adult novels, and vice versa.

And furthermore, this isn’t even a book that publishers were unaware of. Going back to what I said about the conventional wisdom, in this case the book had already been submitted to Tor, but was apparently languishing in the slushpile. Acosta said:

My book had been with Tor and a few other publishers since last October. We hadn’t heard anything back and I was beginning to despair. That’s when I put the book online as a free read. I don’t know that having it on Scribd inspired the offer, but I was able to get reviews that were presented to the editor who expressed interest. Also showing her the number of reads made a difference.

So here we have a case of a published author posting her new work that was already under consideration to the Internet for free where anyone can read it—and instead of making the publisher reject it, Tor only ended up wanting it more. So much for the conventional wisdom, hmm?

It’s also worth noting that, unlike The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, another book that went the free-publication-to-professionally-published-book route, Shadow Girl is still available free in its entirety as of this writing.  Update: As of 7/15, it had been taken down.

(Found via TechDirt.)

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 wonder, though, whether they were intentionally positioned to be caught, to draw attention away from more competent agents still at work.

After the desktop OS and browser wars of the late 90s settled down in to uniform web standards, many of us had thought the web, which runs through my veins, would become the mobile platform of choice in the same way. But, the rise of the revenue-making app store sales channel has coincided with publishers’ realisation that, if there are precious few ways of monetising content on the desktop web, then little would be different on the handset or tablet flavour.

But at the same time, another PaidContent piece notes that Scribd is calling out publishers for wasting time, money, and effort creating their own iPad apps. It’s not that they shouldn’t create iPad apps at all, but that Scribd can do it for them better and cheaper using its new HTML5 framework.

As an example, on May 25th Scribd released a free special issue of Forbes profiling Warren Buffett, which has since been read over 26,000 times.

While the Forbes issue is not technically a magazine app, it certainly can act the way apps like Wired’s does, including allowing for interactive content and ads. Because it’s html5,  the downloaded Scribd digital mag would have enough cached material so that users can still read even if they’re not connected to the internet.

Whereas Wired’s app takes up 500 megabytes of space, Scribd’s HTML5 apps can be much smaller and lighter. It can also be read on a lot more different devices—both tablets and desktop environments.

While I favor keeping as much content as possible on the web where anything with a browser can access it, Scribd’s HTML5 version seems like a potentially reasonable alternative.

Erick Schonfeld writes:

Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”

This means Scribd documents will be viewable (and look great) in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser, among others. In fact, they will be viewable in an estimated 97% of browsers, without the system slowdown or crash risk inherent in Flash.

Although Apple made a stir recently with its forbidding of third-party development environments such as the Flash-based one Amazon had been developing, Friedman has been working on this project for the past six months.

The conversion kicks off with just 200,000 of the most popular documents today, but by the time Scribd finishes will include every page.

Blurb will deliver paperbacks in 7-10 days after an order and it worked out its own API to make publishing of material posted on Scribd an easy thing to do.

While it probably could stand to be a little better-organized in some cases (why did the essay on using hashtags in Twitter come several sections before the “beginner’s guide to Twitter”?), it has a lot of information that could be useful to journalists only just getting their feet wet in the digital arena.

Find it on Scribd as a free PDF file, or embedded below the jump.

Society of Professional Journalists Digital Media Handbook, Part I