Simon & Schuster will sell ebooks on Scribd.com

If there is one thing I’ve learned about the world of ebooks, it’s that you can’t always predict what publishers will do. Back in May I wrote this post ‘Will book publishers learn from music  and newspaper industries‘. In it, I gave a fairly harsh critique of Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy for arguing that ebooks should not be priced lower than their print counterparts, because you’re paying for the content, not the format.

I’m not going to re-hash how loony her reasoning is (read my early post for that). But you can imagine I was surprised when I read in this New York Times article ‘Simon & Schuster to sell digital books on Scribd.com‘. Apparently, someone over at S&S has some idea of how to integrate digital books into the traditional publishing model.

The current plan is for S&S to sell digital books from many popular authors including Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Mary Higgins Clarke and thousands of other titles from various other authors. The article goes on to say:

It will also add thousands of other titles to Scribd’s search engine, allowing readers to sample 10 percent of the content of the books on the site and providing links to buy the print editions.

“We are interested in getting our books in front of consumers in as many formats and distribution platforms as possible,” said Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster.

I’ll be interested in finding out how successful the plan of letting readers sample 10 percent of a book and then providing a link to buy the print version works out. Personally, I’ll know well before getting into 10% of a book if I’m going to like it or hate it. So this might actually help boast sales for S&S.

Wanna read the entire book in digital format? They got you covered there too. According to the article, you can buy the ebook editions for 20% off  the list price “of the most current print edition”. I still think that for ebooks, these prices will still be too high, even for ebook fans like myself. However, the article also mentions that Scribd will let S&S see what is selling and allow them to adjust prices accordingly. This could be promising!

I think, in large part, the business model that Scribd has set up will allow for some real competition with Amazon – especially when competing for publishers to partner with them.

Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue. Amazon reportedly gives publishers about half of the list price of books sold for the Kindle, but also discounts many titles and in some cases chooses to make no revenue itself from those sales.

By giving the publishers a larger percent of the revenue, Scribd might give publishers a chance to lower the ebook prices even more. I’m assuming, however, that the authors for S&S will receive the standard percentage of revenue for digital book sales – which from what I hear is usually chump change.

And finally, what everyone is always curious about when it comes to ebooks (at least, I am), is the question of DRM. Scribd has that covered too:

Simon & Schuster will sell its books with anticopying software from Adobe, which means those books can be transferred to devices like the Sony Reader and some mobile phones, but not to Amazon’s Kindle.

Good news for me, since I own a Sony Reader. Bad news for Kindle owners though. But this is still a small step in the right direction, as S&S is not locking readers into one specific device. The icing on the cake would be if they offered their books in the open-format ePub, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.

Simon & Schuster’s newfound friendship with Scribd is by no means perfect. For readers, a lot of ebooks will still be cheaper on the Kindle. Ebook pricing is still all over the place and I don’t expect it to be perfect on Scribd.

Yet this is all moving the publishing world forward into the digital realm, and not too long down the road, we should see standardized ebook formats, pricing and everything else. Until then, I will give S&S credit for taking this route, even if it means lightening up their CEO a little (but not much).

What do you think about Simon & Schuster selling ebooks on Scribd? Will the partnership be doomed to fail because of pricing or do you think S&S will see ebook (and print) sales take off? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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• Will book publishers learn from music and newspaper industries?
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