Scribd secures online deal with major publishing houses

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 19 March 2009 17:26

IT Industry - Deals

Scribd, the world’s largest social publishing website, has secured agreements with major publishers to bring books and other professional works to its community of more than 50 million readers.
 

Trip Adler, CEO and co-founder of Scribd today announced that the company was partnering Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson and Manning Publications, and that each publisher would be uploading and sharing entire novels, sneak preview chapters and exclusive excerpts from best-selling authors and book series – all free of charge -  on Scribd.com.

“These partnerships help cement Scribd’s position as the online destination for readers while giving publishers a completely fresh platform to reach a new audience of millions,” said Adler said. “

Now, in addition to original writings and documents contributed by our users – short stories, research reports, even recipes and sheet music – readers can discover premium works by best-selling authors on Scribd.”

Adler said media brands already using Scribd to embed documents on their own websites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, NPR, Fox Business News, and many others.
 
“More than 50,000 new documents are uploaded daily using Scribd’s iPaper reader, a technology that makes it easy to upload, share and embed original writings and documents in their “printed” layouts, regardless of file format.
 
“Scribd documents are indexed by all major search engines, making them easily discoverable by more than one billion Internet users worldwide.”

According to Ellie Hirschhorn, publisher Simon & Schuster’s chief digital officer, Scribd has quickly become a unique online community where readers of all tastes can go to discover, explore, and share first-rate content.

“Its unique approach provides us with the desired flexibility to determine how our content is viewed and used on a case by case basis, and is proving to be an effective tool for creating excitement for our books.”

And, in further endorsement of Scribd, Matt Schwartz, director of digital strategy for Random House publishing group said “word-of-mouth, recommendations and ‘hand-selling’ are tried and true ways to increase sales, and Scribd makes all those things possible in an extremely cost-effective, online environment.

 “Scribd offers publishers an amazing new marketing platform that will surely generate book sales,” Schwartz said, while at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, David Marshall said that in initial trials, the company’s book excerpts on Scribd received hundreds of thousands of reads, “dramatically increasing our community of readers.”