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Random House, Simon & Schuster and several other publishers announced a wide-ranging partnership Wednesday with Scribd to begin to release an increased number of best sellers as free e-books — a major marketing push to harness the long tail of a literate social network that boasts some 50 million loyalists.
The publishers have already been conducting trials for a few months, offering a few books (around 8-10) and some excerpts on a limited time basis. But this new partnership is a sign that they view the platform as much more than simply another testing ground, and that they plan to include a much greater flow of content which they hope will boost both print and e-book sales through e-book sharing and word of mouth on sites like Twitter.
It’s less about creating a new revenue stream for e-books on Scribd and more about enhancing existing print and e-book channels by using the crowd as the new tastemaker.
"When we’ve done these free books, we’ve seen a significant amount of people microblogging about that promotion and saying how much they enjoy the books, and basically that gets the author’s name and book title out there among many different people," said Matt Schwartz, director of digital strategy for Random House Publishing Group.
Scribd, which launched in 2007, allows anyone to publish a document online in its signature embeddable iPaper viewer. Along with navigation features like search and zoom, the books can be download (as a .pdf) and viewed on compatible e-book readers or shared across numerous social networks including Digg, Facebook and Twitter. There are also links around the free books where readers can purchase works from the same author directly from the publisher.
"Its unique approach provides us with the desired flexibility to determine how our content is viewed and used on a case by case basis, and is proving to be an effective tool for creating excitement for our books," said Ellie Hirschhorn, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster.
Shwartz said along with the viral component, a major factor for Random House in choosing Scribd was its massive audience. The site boasts around 50 million unique readers, more than 50,000 documents are uploaded daily, and it is ranked fairly high at 73 on Quantcast which doesn’t include traffic from embeds on other sites.
“This readership just keeps attracting more and more publishers, and then more publishers come and they put more content on the site and then that just in turn attracts more readers and creates this nice viral loop that’s just growing organically,” said Scribd CEO Trip Adler.
One way they are leveraging this readership is by pushing slightly older books out as teasers to generate buzz for an author in hopes that they will buy the rest of the books.
"Random House put up this book by the author Tess Garretson, and within a few weeks it got over 30,000 views on Scribd. They really couldn’t get that kind of exposure anywhere else on the Internet," said Adler.
A number of major news organizations like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal use the service to upload and embed documents in stories, and President Barack Obama used it during his campaign to share documents with voters and uses it now to share public information from the White House like the 2010 budget proposal.
For book publishers, Scribd is not the only platform they are utilizing with the rising e-book hype, but the viral components are limited elsewhere. Random House also offers a collection of free books on Lexcycle’s Stanza iPhone app, and publishers have allowed excerpts of many of their books as a preview-before-buying on Google’s book search.
A mobile Scribd site already exists as well that allows readers to view all of the documents, and Adler says they are also working on an iPhone application.
The Patriot Witch by C. C. Finlay
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