Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

My library co-op uses the same system, and while they do have books I want to read, they're often out of stock of the ebook. That irritates me enough to not borrow ebooks from them.

My library has overdrive as well, and I get the books on the kindle (app). There's an option to read on their site, but the software sucks compared to the dedicated reader. I think they also do adobe's epub as well.

To respond to your note about browsing.

Typically books are arranged alphabetically and thematically. Some times, shelf placement is a variable in marketing.

When you take shelf placement as marketing to it's logical extreme, you end up with something like Amazon -- where you've optimized for conversions rather than overall user experience. As any Sales / Marketing person can tell you, best experience != most conversions.

People are indecisive when confronted with many choices.

I could see browsing as a great ideal for subscription services though. Amazon and most e-commerce is a bad comparison though, as browsing is generally bad for transactional businesses (due to reasons above). This is yet another reason why traditional book stores are at a disadvantage.

I completely agree about the terrible state of browsing in online bookstores.

In terms of non-fiction, I've discovered tons of books at a university library by searching the catalog for a few books on a given topic, then going to the shelf and looking at all the books around it, which I would not have otherwise found.

I'd love some kind of Dewey Decimal browser with a bunch of extra filters. I don't know if that's feasible.

Honestly, I reckon that using _much_ larger thumbnails would be a big step forward in the experience. Most people pick books by their covers, then check out the blurb on the back. Amazon's thumbs are tiny, hell even the product page has a tiny image. I think that experimenting with size alone would get you quite a long way.

Perhaps take a cue from fashion brands like Gilt who have had to recreate the retail experience for shoppers.

(someone please do this . . . please)

It varies a lot, depending on what you read. I basically had my local library of classical literature and philosophy all to myself, but I'd have to wait months to get something like the next Harry Potter.

Maybe it's more of a feature than a bug. :)

This is in a class of things I'm worried about. The good institutions & traditions that we built over decades (or in this case, millennia) becoming obsolete, dying and taking all the side benefits with them. Many lost their primary purpose, but they had so many important auxiliary purposes that I'm worried about losing them. For millennia, libraries stored knowledge and people went there to access it. All sorts of things naturally grew around this resource. Universities and their predecessors are one example but there are also small informal institutions. A group of friends meeting in a library because it is a a safe and quite place to do homework is an institution of sorts. A couple of homeless people using it as a safe place to hang out, read books and feel part of society is another example, especially if their interaction with others there is special in some way (it is).

There are lots of things like this. Churches. How do we do churches without gods? How do we allow young people to spend a few years focusing on their minds without universities. Can we have universities after going to lectures becomes obsolete?

Technology is eating a lot of things. It's eating them faster than we can replace them.

What happens to all the information we have converted to digital form if a worldwide disaster occurred?

Think like a nuclear war and the resulting EMP wipes out most of the US/EU/Asia electronics.

Think even a massive solar flare that fries the majority of the electronic equipment.

It looks like they're using a custom font with scrambled letters (essentially a caesar cipher) and your browser isn't loading/using that font.

This is probably an attempt at DRM.

Hey Tucaz. Is this problem persistent for you? Does it happen even after refresh?

If so, dont hesitate to contact me personally at gabriel (at) scribd.com and I will look into this issue.

of all the companies you listed, Scribd is the only one I've heard of.

Also safari books for tech content

This is awful. Scribd is not the answer. So I guess nothing to see here, moving along.

( I work for Scribd )

This is extremely valuable product feedback. You are completely right that the Scribd product delivered a terrible experience in this case. And the reason goes to the heart of one of the most difficult product design issues we've had: combining user generated and professional content.

An explanation is not a substitute for a fix, but in a nutshell what happened here is that you found copies of Frankenstein that had been uploaded by users. While the books we receive from publishers are ePub formatted and reflow nicely on a phone with controllable font settings, many user-uploaded works are PDFs.

We definitely do not a good enough job of messaging whether content is UGC or publisher, PDF or ePUB. We are working very hard on this. In the meantime, if you want to keep trying the app, here are some simple tips if you want to look at books only: - You can search through books only (click the books tab in search results) - Look for the "verified" badge which appears on publisher-provided material - The content browseable from http://www.scribd.com/browse/books is only publisher provided books.

I'd love to hear more product feedback - this was very helpful for us. Feel free to email me directly (email is in my profile).

From the article: "Basically, a publisher gets paid only if a reader chooses one of its particular books — and it only gets paid in full if the book is read in full."

Sounds like it's free to browse, but the publisher gets paid if the book is actually read. I assume that publishers would pay authors at whatever rate they were already paying for ebooks.

They just turned those former pirates into a revenue stream. It's a good business move. Either spend tons of money litigating pirates to just have them go somewhere else, or at least make some money off of the inevitable.

It seems that scribd's business model now more prominently features selling access to publisher content - seems like a fine decision to me.

I'm not sure if "producer or publisher" are supposed to be distinct entities in this context?

Either way, that's not an intuitive conclusion. I've seen a lot of films on Netflix I would have never seen otherwise. Lots of Korean films for example. I can't think of another way I'd have been exposed to this content. So in that respect, if the publisher is seeing any compensation at all it seems like a good investment.

I've also seen a number of older US releases that are on my "eh, got a couple hours to burn, I'll give it a shot" list. I wouldn't have bothered to commit to a $3.99 iTunes rental for those features, but on Netflix it's "sure, why not?".

I (and most people I assumed) don't really have the patience to wait a few years for 1st-tier media to drop on Netflix, so it really doesn't substitute existing consumption.

Except in children's programming I guess now that I think about it. Much more convenient to have Curious George or what have you without the barrage of advertisements on cable.

First they invented DRM for HTML5. Now they've figured out who to sell it to.

Yes, to me they always looked like a strictly value subtracting service in terms of functionality, making the documents they host less convenient to read than they were in their original form.

1.5 books a month is probably higher than the national average, but you'd be surprised how voracious a lot of readers are. I probably read 2 books a week, and I'm by no means a power reader by the standards of those who really are. I know quite a few people who regularly plow through 5 a week. Especially fiction readers and readers of "snackable" nonfiction (Jon Krakauer, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, etc.).

Power readers are probably a small niche, but they're also a profitable niche. Younger readers (13-16), especially female, tend to consume YA novels like we consume HN posts. Vast fortunes have been made catering to that segment.

I read only non-fiction and sometimes I have to read through 20-40% of the book to decide whether I want to finish it. I think many people do same with fiction(especially fan-fiction). So there's niche for these people too. Many of these people are also bad at finishing books and such services will unfortunately encourage this behavior!