

Scribd in the AP - tikhon
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TEC_TECHBIT_SCRIBD_BOOKS?SITE=ORBAK&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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unalone
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.

