Scribd Store Sets New Standard for Ebook Ecommerce (and 650 O'Reilly Ebooks Included)

Andrew Savikas
May 17, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

There are more than 650 (DRM-free of course) O'Reilly ebooks now on sale in the new Scribd store, which officially launches Monday morning. Full details over on O'Reilly Radar:

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.