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Could cstross or someone with equivalent knowledge tell us how this affects authors? If publishers like it someone must be getting screwed. Scribd is less a 'netflix' for books and more like a 'megadownload' for books, with the occasional academic paper for that 'we need bittorrent to get linux' veneer of respectability.

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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.

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