Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Sunday, May 17, 2009

But first...

Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies
Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Scribd has been in the news lately because authors have been highly annoyed to find their works uploaded without permission. The site is working on a filter to prevent that, and their new store--which premieres tomorrow--will allow anyone to upload and sell a document of their own. Interesting, no?

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