If You’re Not on Scribd, You Should Be

Scribd.com made waves this week when they announced more formal relationships with traditional publishers – like Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications – to legally offer some of their content to Scribd’s community, free of charge.

If you’re not familiar with Scribd:

“With Scribd’s iPaper document reader, anyone can easily upload and immediately share their original works on Scribd.com or any other website. iPaper transforms PDF, Word, PowerPoint and many other file formats into an elegant web display. Your work can be shared with Scribd’s community of passionate readers, and because every word of your document is indexed for search engine optimization, your screenplay, novel or even sheet music and recipes also can be discovered by the world.” Source: Scribd.com

Multi-purposing Valuable Content

Scribd is a great place to multi-purpose content and expand your reach. What’s more interesting about Scribd is the ability for others to share your document in their own context (on their blog or website, like I have done below) without breaking the link to the original material. This is a great opportunity for marketers who want to control their content distribution and have access to the reports of when and where the content is being consumed. What’s more, if the originator of the content decides to edit/change/update the original document, additional revisions can be added and attached to same document, updating all the dispersed versions at the same time.

Scribd’s reporting capabilities are almost non-existant at this time, only giving you access to see basic information like a view count. However, it’s my hope they’ll expand these capabilities to include referrer information and to embed information as well, making their reports far more useful and engaging.

One of Scribd’s values in online content distribution is your ability to read or preview a document before you download or print it. Gone are the days of downloading PDFs from websites, trying to locate the downloaded file on your desktop, and then printing and filing the document for later consumption. Scribd allows you to access the entire document without downloading it. That’s premium usability.

Scribd.com Enters Monetization Phase

With their formal publisher announcements this week, Scribd.com is officially entering the monetization phase of the life cycle.

As you can see, Scribd has grown tremendously in the last four or five months; and with as many as 50 Million readers and 50,000 documents added every day, Scribd contains a huge amount of data and content. (Remember, keep your content relevant, frequently distributed and high-quality.)

Now that Scribd.com’s growth has slowed down, the opportunity for marketers to create and distribute valuable content is primed and ready. Take advantage of Scribd.com’s features and make Scribd.com the one place for ‘printed’ document distribution online.

Takeaway Message

You’ll have to read my Scribd.com iPaper embedded below:

My Question To You

What do you think about Scribd?