Major Book Publishers Join Scribd

TechCrunch today reports that document sharing site, Scribd, today announced that it has partnered with a several big name publishers (including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications), to legally offer a limited amount of content free of charge. According to TC, publishers have begun to add an array of content to the site’s library, among it full length novels and brief excerpts.

I’ll admit, I’d never used or heard of Scribd until this past weekend. My younger sister is in college and she was singing its praises on Saturday. The site is apparently a huge part of her studies (she uses it for sheet music and German textbooks mostly) and while an awful lot of the content is PowerPoint presentations or school essays, it was quite a nice surprise to pull up sheet music I’d spend time and money looking for offline. With the addition of free content, particularly full novels, we can see Scribd’s popularity skyrocketing.

What do you guys think? We figure it has huge potential when it comes to lesser-known or new authors who are trying to get their work out in the open and read. As long as it builds up a decent enough user base, it could be great for all those penniless writers dying to make it big and of course, offering popular, well known authors is bound to help. How many of you use (or have heard of) Scribd? Let us know!

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