
Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’ - gotosleep
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/scribd_book_subscription/
======
philwebster
It would be great if public libraries offered this service (or one like it) to
their patrons. My local library offers Overdrive Media Console [1], but the
selection always seems to be lacking and the apps are subpar. An electronic
rental service with books that people actually want to read would be killer
and could save libraries money. My library system has cut back on inter-
library requests because of shrinking funding, and an electronic delivery
system could help cut costs.

[1] [http://omc.overdrive.com](http://omc.overdrive.com)

~~~
freehunter
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.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Not sure what system my library uses, but mine has a wait-list that will check
out the ebook for you when it's your turn.

Either way: given that many public libraries offer ebook rentals for free,
Scribd should be marketing to _them_ rather than directly to customers.

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hosh
I generally like where this going, though I disagree with the assertion that
"it will be easier to browse".

The _potential_ for browsing will be increased. However, the actual user
experience of browsing for books on the internet still pretty much sucks. Most
places take the low-hanging fruit and have pretty good searching capability.
However, searching and browsing are not the same experience. Recommendations
(like from Amazon) is not browsing -- it's prompting based on intentional
searching.

To do online browsing well, you have to come back to what the UX for browsing
in a library or a bookstore feels like. You wander around spaces, and pick out
books that catch your attention. Illustrations on book covers means a lot
more. And for people like me that process information kinesthetically, the
spatial relationships of the books (where it is on the shelf, which shelf it
is on, how many steps it takes to go down one aisle, how wide are the aisles
in relation to how far I can stretch my arms, etc.) matters a lot more.

I've toyed with the notion of creating a dedicated Android app to prototype
this idea. That is, creating an online browsing experience to replace my
bookshelf so that I can show it off for guests. Some of the lessons that can
be extracted from creating that would apply to an online browsing experience
-- or a physical retail experience that includes an online component.

Looking at how Scribd redid their site to support this, I think they
understand some of the issues. But in the end, it looks more like they are
copying Netflix rather than really rethinking at a more fundamental level of
what "browsing" means as an experience.

~~~
TillE
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.

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

See, that's what I mean. When you're creating a space to show off or show case
books, you're not really using any structured form of organization. The
experience is more a form of an art. It's more like creating an art gallery or
a museum than it is replicating a category system. The category system is
easy; crafting a museum experience, that's harder.

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iamben
Whilst I'm pretty sure I'd use this or something like it, it's kinda sad the
traditional libraries I used so much (and for free) when I was younger can't
keep up with the pace of convenience. I often wonder how long it'll be before
the smaller towns (sadly) lose them completely.

That said, good luck to them :-)

~~~
netcan
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.

~~~
stevenally
Technology is eating our souls.

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taeric
Doesn't Amazon already have tie ins with libraries?[1] Combined with the
Kindle "lending library" and Amazon's amazing marketing at the moment, I'm not
sure they are a company I would want to compete with. Best of luck!

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200747550)

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tucaz
I just signed up for it but it doesn't look very good to me. Not sure what's
wrong.

[http://i.imgur.com/6wMjmeI.png](http://i.imgur.com/6wMjmeI.png)

Edit: tried the mobile app and it looks great there

~~~
dunham
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.

~~~
bentcorner
It's a simple substitution cipher, not a shift/caesar cipher. Neat idea, but I
wonder at the effectiveness of it.

~~~
dunham
Hmm, I guess I've been using that term incorrectly to describe fixed
substitution ciphers. It's been a few decades since I learned this stuff.

It's effective at preventing a simple copy/paste or "view source" but
ineffective against an adversary of any sophistication.

I've seen this used in PDF files before. There, if you have a pristine copy of
the embedded font, you can just look up a copy of the character program to
find the original value. But it's effective against naive pdf to text or pdf
to html services.

Then again, you could just ocr the rendered text, so I guess the obfuscation
technique only has to be as effective as rendering the text as a bitmap.

~~~
bentcorner
Yeah, exactly. I OCRd the first line of the text and manually decrypted the
first line of the book just to verify that's what was happening. You could
mitigate it by having more complex font files with multicharacter glyphs and
include non printing characters in the stream. Probably a "good enough"
solution to stop the copy/pasting folks. Anybody knowledgable enough to crack
this is is probably not going to waste the time and torrent the book anyway.

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ernesth
After 24symbols, youboox, publie.net, izneo, oyster (and probably lots I do
not recall), we have a new contender as the netflix/spotify for books? What
makes scribd better or more challenging to amazon?

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

~~~
julien_c
youboox, publie.net, and izneo are French market based.

------
silveira

      #!/bin/sh
      for word in $(cat /etc/dictionaries-common/words);
      do
         echo A Netflix for $word;
      done

------
g4m8i7
I've spent some time with this. NB This is my experience on the Android app
and the website.

In the app, searching is abysmal. There's no way to specify the type of
keyword you're searching for, so if it's an author, you'll probably have to
wade through a sea of wildly irrelevant results to find that maybe they don't
even have anything from that author.

I grabbed two different versions of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, both of which
the website proudly stated were included in my subscription. Neither was a
truely optimized ebook. More like PDF images, so the text or pages didn't
scale.

The reading experience on the app is sub par. No options for font type, size,
or color; no background options; or margin options. No "night mode" or
similar.

There's also often not an indication that a book is just a preview on the
website. I added Cormac McCarthy's Child of God to my library, and the app
told me that it wasn't available in my country (US), but I could read it on
the website, but I discovered it was a preview only.

Related to that, when searching on the website, it seems to prioritize
purchase-only books over subscription books. I understand the why, but it's
really frustrating to have to start scrolling to get to what most people will
be looking for.

Then there's the trouble with having to wade through the sea of user-uploaded
content. It seems like there should either be a separate app for the
subscription portion, or at least a way to search ONLY that.

All in all, I really wish this was something I could see myself paying for,
but right now, I think it's kind of a mess.

~~~
snowmaker
( 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](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).

------
panzagl
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.

~~~
chaqke
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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judk
Interesting that publishers would play ball with scribd, whose business model
features selling access to pirated documents.

~~~
drharris
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.

~~~
panzagl
Yeah, but these pirates put their own DRM on everything and generally get in
your way as much as any publisher paywall. This is more like hiring Hell's
Angels to provide event security.

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mbesto
_‘This works so well in video and music. It’s inevitable that there’s
something to do here in the book space too’_

This works well for the _distributor_ and the _consumer_ but has yet to work
well for the producer or the publisher. (note - I recognize it's unpopular to
support the publisher in this case)

~~~
ssmoot
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.

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yalogin
Finally Scribd found a business model. I never understood what their value
proposition was.

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

~~~
AsymetricCom
I don't know why, but I've determined that Scribd is evil where Amazon is not.
This is an intuitive conclusion based on lots of observation. I think that
intuition is based on the fact that Amazon made DRM on Kindle to satisfy their
publishing customers so those customers were more willing to distribute to a
wider audience where Scribd made DRM to empower themselves and restrict
distribution of re-appropriated content. Also, mandatory Facebook
integration..

~~~
dgreensp
Yeah, ditto. The attempts to "go social" and monetize felt sleazy.

Guess what, when I'm googling for some PDF or I find some guy's slides, I
don't want to tell my friends, and I don't want to "buy the article" for
$14.99 or whatever like it's frickin' JSTOR.

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GotNothing
$8.99 is too high for this to be worth while for most readers, IMO. I'm a
pretty regular reader and I'm lucky to get through 1 and half books a month.
Most books I buy are under this price (around $5)... I can sample from Amazon
before I buy, so I don't see the benefit here unless you're a power reader and
most people are not.

~~~
jonnathanson
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.

------
gdilla
Not really a challenge to Apple. Apple doesn't care about books. Any garden
you buy an ebook in can be read on an iOS device via ereader apps, including
Scribd's app. Apple is happy to let app publishers innovate on software
products since they are almost all optimized and catered to iOS users.

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infocollector
Instead of using Scribd, you can just build your own searchable and sharable
digital library: [https://register.blib.us](https://register.blib.us)

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rholdy
I saw an article about a similar company recently and, like this one, I was
still left with an important unanswered question.

How is this service better than a library card?

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devx
I've been waiting for something like this to happen in books. Should be great
for people who read at least one book per month.

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grogenaut
so that's why their main site hasn't been updated in quite a while.

