Scribd has launched Scribd Store today, where anyone (in the US) can sell written material. Scribd is a document-sharing website founded in 2007 with more than 50 million users and more than 50,000 documents uploaded daily – to be downloaded free. There have (surprise, surprise) been concerns about books being shared without copyright owners’ permission despite the site’s efforts to remove infringing material. Now, in the Store, you can upload and set a price on the download. Does that make a cross between YouTube and eBay? A few independent publishers have signed up so far. Mashable sees some reasons for publishers to get involved:The pricing is very flexible; as a publisher, you can set a price on individual chapters, exact selection of pages, or you can seralize your book for one dollar per chapter…. There’s another very interesting aspect of Scribd’s store: the works added to the store are also automatically added to Scribd’s existing Copyright Management System (CMS). This means that if you add a document to the Store, you can be sure that Scribd will take care to remove and pirated copies of it from the free sharing part of the site. It’s a neat little carrot and stick combination that might prove to be crucial in driving publishers and authors to participate in the Store.
Book piracy: NYT
Scribd: Publishers Weekly
Scribd Store: FT
I wonder what sort of checks beyond basic boilerplate they will perform on whether people have the right to upload (and that includes legitimate publishers making wrong assumptions as well as chancers) given that the Kindle Beta was messed up. And while I can't imagine people getting away with selling Harry Potter, but what about all those orphaned works?
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