Scribd positioning self to become Amazon competitor, sell books on Kindle?

The de facto place to buy Kindle books is, of course, Amazon. Given how tightly this allows Bezos & Co. to manage things we’re guessing this is how the company would like to keep it, but there may be direct-to-kindle competition brewing from an unlikely source: Scribd. The site, which started off as a place to dump and share random documents, has been following the YouTube path and is now selling access to fully copyrighted works. Many of those are downloadable as text, Word, or PDF documents, meaning Kindle users can already conjure up some conversion magic and get them on their devices. But, according to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, straight to Kindle distribution is next. The question is: will they be for-pay titles, or only the billions of pages of free content the site offers? Places like Feedbooks and Gutenberg.org let you download free content direct to the Kindle already, but we’re not aware of anyone selling that content yet — other than Amazon, of course.

Scribd positioning self to become Amazon competitor, sell books on Kindle? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This post is tagged: Amazon, content, digital distribution, DigitalDistribution, Kindle, Paid Content, PaidContent, scribd