Simon & Schuster Cuts Deal With Scribd

Posted on June 12, 2009

Simon & Schuster has cut a deal with Scribd, a popular ebook website. 5,000 Simon Schuster titles are now available on the site including books by Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark. The ebooks will sell for $9.99. Simon & Schuster was attracted to Scribd's large audience and anti-piracty measures.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Simon & Schuster will set the retail price for each book. It says some publishers are concerned about Amazon's practice of pricing Kindle best-sellers at $9.99.

Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer at Simon & Schuster, told the WSJ, "It means new revenue on the sales side and lets us experiment with various pricing models. They [Scribd] have a large audience, which is important to us, and they've made an effort to install anti-piracy measures."

Simon & Schuster's titles can be purchased and downloaded from Scribd as an Adobe Acrobat file. This file cannot be printed. The Scribd website claims 60 million monthly visitors.

Scribd has had problems with authors. In April, J.K Rowling launched a fight against Scribd when copies of her books appeared on the site without her permission. However, lately the site seems to winning over publishers. Some media outlets are calling Scribd the "YouTube of ebooks."