by SEO Consultant
J. Cave
J. Cave
Scribd.com is moving into rapidly growing ebook market it announced on Monday. The two year old document-sharing startup - which attracts around sixty million visitors per month - will offer both established and independent publishers the opportunity to earn up to 80% on sales of their documents and ebooks. Founded two years ago with a $14 million investment - the Californian startup has primarily focused on generating organic traffic through search engines and building revenue through onsite advertising which Scribd claims has already made the company profitable.
Although when Scribd launched, the company's focus was entirely on advertising, the recent growth of the ebook market - as well as ebook readers such as Amazon's kindle - have given the company another opportunity to increase profits.
While Amazon may be responsible for developing the ebook market for Scribd, it won't be getting anything back. Scribd's decision to allow authors to sell ebooks at any price they want - and only take 20% of the sale - means the document-sharing site can easily undercut Amazon.
The TimesOnline gives an example of San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Kemble Scott who has made the decision to sell his latest book for only $2 on Scribd. While the $1.60 he earns from this may not seem like a lot, it is more than the estimated $1.13 he made per sale on "SoMa", his first book which was on sale for $15.
Publishers moving to Scribd include technology publishers O'Reilly Media who have made 650 of their popular ebooks available for sale within the Scribd store as well as other mainstream publishers such as Random House and Simon & Schuster.
While the move to enter the ebook market will no doubt be profitable for Scribd, it is also likely to present a solution to the growing problems of ebook piracy that have hit the site. For the past few months, Scribd have come under fire from authors like J K Rowling and Ken Follett as pirated versions of the author's books were made available on the site.
Since launch Scribd's traffic has doubled every six months. The move to allow publishers to set their own prices for ebooks could make Scribd the new itunes of ebooks
