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...

PaidContent has an article on “the anti-web movement”—the trend toward moving electronic versions of magazines away from the web and into salable apps that offer the lure of easy revenue and a different form factor from what the web can currently do. 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...

TechCrunch reports that self-e-publishing site Scribd is moving away from its current Flash format for uploading and viewing documents, and converting everything into HTML5. 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...

Publishers Weekly is reporting that Scribd has teamed up three vendors to provide print on demand service to its customers. Blurb.com will be doing paperback books, HP's MagCloud will be doing periodicals and Mimeo will be for documents of just a few pages. Scribd said that it will be looking for further POD partnerships in the future. 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. ...

A few days ago I mentioned that independent book publisher Author Solutions had announced an e-book distribution deal with Scribd. Today it comes out they have announced a similar deal with Barnes & Noble for the Nook. As with the Scribd deal, AS e-books will be set at a default price of $9.99, but authors may choose to set their own prices instead. Erin Cox at Publishing Perspectives notes with some amusement that, shortly after Nintendo announced a classic e-books cartridge, Random House has now announced it will be making video games. The Wall Street Journal article is fairly sparse...

A couple of weeks ago, Paul reported on self-e-publishing site Scribd’s plans to add direct mobile download capability. CNet reports that Scribd has now done so: Scribd-hosted documents can be sent to any of a dozen different e-book devices (including Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Palm, EZReader, and others) with two mouse clicks. The documents are sent as PDF files via e-mail or SMS message link. At present, only DRM-free titles are supported, but Scribd CEO Trip Adler has plans to expand to copy-protected versions in the future. Another part of Scribd’s mobile strategy is creating device-specific...

CNet has an article about Smartwords, an idea from start-up company Wordnik that sounds terrific but sure seems hard to describe succinctly. As Smartwords’s website puts it: Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words. It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.” Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants...

From the press release: ... Under terms of the agreement, all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris imprints will be made available for purchase. As well, a portion of ASI's backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be sold through the site. ... Authors will receive 50 percent of the net sales of their titles through Scribd. A default price of $9.99 will be set for every title, but each author will have the opportunity to set his or her own price. Distribution to Scribd will be included as a free service for all...

Gear Diary is reporting, from a Wall Street Journal article, that Scribd is going to add a "send to" button to send content to the Kindle, Nook, iPhone and other mobile platforms. This is evidently a month or so away, but this could have a huge impact on ebooks and edocs given Scribd's size and reach....

The line between e-books and other Internet writing has been diminishing over time, with commercial e-self-publishing sites such as Smartbooks or Scribd, independent story hosts such as Shifti.org, and fanfic downloaders and converters that turn stories posted on fan-fiction hosts into formatted e-books. One of today’s big buzz-words is “the cloud”, referring to the practice of storing data on remote Internet servers for access anywhere. The e-book sites I mentioned above are places where reading material sits in the cloud—but writing is moving to the cloud, too, to let people work on documents remotely without the...