Mar 30 2009
Piracy and Legitimacy
Scribd has 55 Million visitors, lots of pirated books, & burgeoning legitimate business interests. A couple of weeks ago, Scribd announced that it had an agreement with Random House to host full length free works by popular authors like Tess Gerritsen whose work on Scribd was “read” 30,000 in three weeks. This week, brings us news that JK Rowling and Ken Follett are trying to battle with Scribd to keep their books off the Scribd site.
The main takeaway from this article is how clueless publishing is:
Ken Follett’s publisher, Macmillan, was unware that World without End had been uploaded on to the Scribd website for more than five months, and had been read more than 500 times there. Macmillan said it was “now looking into this”
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Mar 30, 2009 @ 08:23:46
raising fears that the piracy affecting the music industry may have spread to books.
MAY have? Oy.
Mar 30, 2009 @ 08:40:33
Anyone have a clue what Random House is doing?
Their eBook strategy is either
too clever for my understanding
or simple insanity.
I guess time will tell.
Mar 30, 2009 @ 11:49:12
Ruh roh, time for some knee-jerk reactions! You know, instead of getting informed about piracy and its effects (what do you mean there are positives? Get out of town!) and making GOOD decisions about how to proceed with Scribd.
DRM will save us! Right? Wait, what is DRM again?
Mar 30, 2009 @ 13:03:21
If I were Ken Follett’s publisher I would be interested in why his book in a matter of over five months had only been read over 500 times.
Mar 30, 2009 @ 13:34:05
What a shock that Rowling’s name pops up with this one.
LOLOLOLOL!!
Mar 30, 2009 @ 16:00:27
Just a thought — but the people I know that read Follett’s work wouldn’t touch a computer, for anything other then email, with a ten foot pole. They’re more apt to change their address then their book-buying habits. I don’t think they would ever go from print to ebooks.
Gerritsen probably plays more to a female audience and women are more likely to read online or with a dedicated ereader — because we’re
smartermore likely to try to stay on top of new ideas and trends.Apr 01, 2009 @ 13:13:47
Man, I hope Scribd doesn’t go away. It’s an awesome resource for finding how-tos and man pages for open source software. I’d hate to lose that.