The online publishing site Scribd.com has announced that it's forming partnerships with lots of big publishing houses. We're talking Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing, Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications. Not lightweights by any means. So what's the benefit in this?
According to GalleyCat, as of last month, Scribd has 50 million readers and 50,000 new writings are uploaded on it every day. My, what a lot of readers and uploads that is.
And as GalleyCat reports, Bantam Dell has embedded a Scribd viewer within its Web site. And authors like Tess Gerritsen and Charlie Huston are offering up whole novels for free. (Ouch! I'm cringing now.)
Meanwhile, Sony is trying to go one-up in the e-book arena on Amazon, by making a deal with Google for a half million copyright-free digitized books. To quote the article: "Sony is hoping that the partnership and its newly expanded library help slow some of the Kindle's momentum. Amazon currently has 250,000 books in its Kindle library, but it stresses that they are the books people are most interested in reading, like new releases and best sellers."
Okay, so publishers are facing up to digital realities. And companies are jockeying for e-book content (assuming we don't all end up giving that content away--sorry, still fuming about that).
Publishers may be adapting to the brave new world of digital content, but they're still befuddling me with stuff like this. Thanks Michelle Gagnon of The Kill Zone for this trenchant example of publishing decisions I'll never understand. Not to mention an airline travel haiku that made me laugh out loud.
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