Scribd in the AP

Congrats to Scribd and all, but this is just further proof about how clueless Random House is. They seem to have latched on to this idea of embedding without having taken the time to realize why users embed things.

People embed things with the hope that other people will look at them. Videos count. Music counts. Book reading requires a particular effort that is best served by providing a link to a large site that can handle the look better, versus embedding a small box with small text.

When I published my novel, I originally embedded it on my web site using Scribd. There were very few embed clicks. Providing the link gave me far more hits, since Scribd's web site gave a better-sized default viewer. If Scribd would let me link to the full-screen version, I'm sure I'd get even more readers.

Random House straddles the line between knowing they should be doing something offline, and not knowing what to do. They're by far the most liberal of the seven big publishers (though they've got nothing on Kensington/Rebel Book Press), but even that isn't helping them with online sales. Publishing is in need of a vast change, and Random House wants to keep their current conservative model while adding a few little feelers at the end of their system. It's the equivalent of bands adding a MySpace profile: you might entice some new people, but just having a place to show off a few songs isn't enough, unless you're so small you're not signed on anywhere, which is when you can take advantage of word-of-mouth. If Random House is publishing you and advertising your book, putting parts of that book on Scribd will give you nothing new.

The solution to this "put text online" system isn't to deal with something that simulates a PDF viewer. That's inevitably going to have issues. Scribd doesn't let me two-finger scroll, or two-finger zoom, and even if it did, PDF reading is a pain. The solution that I think is most apparent is to display the writing as HTML, using SIFR to process the text and get it to look the same on every computer. That way you have a graceful degradation, and the focus isn't on display (past a very minimal point): it's on text. This model works for everything but ergodic literature, which requires a system of its own for display (and even then, the goal ought to be to figure out how to display the page as native HTML: introducing a PDF-like system is indicative of a failure if your goal is to have a good reading experience rather than to just get hits).

It frustrates me how many sites focusing on the display of text never think about how ugly the text they're displaying is. That's a mindset that needs changing first and foremost. The fact that it's been around for so long is a condemnation of those designers as-is.