Prepress
Lulu.com Teams Up With Scribd to Offer Most Popular Free Content via iPaper
Thursday 17. July 2008 - iPaper available to Lulu.com users beginning in July
Lulu.com, the premier site for digital content on the Internet, is partnering with Scribd, the leading platform for online document sharing and publishing, to test iPaper, Scribd’s document viewer built for the Web. Lulu.com users will test iPaper on select content for a three month period beginning in July.
iPaper is the first full-featured viewer that lets users view any type of document directly in their web browser, serving as an Internet alternative to a PDF. There is no software to download, allowing users to publish and view documents more quickly while retaining the popular features of a PDF, such as full text search within documents. iPaper also allows documents to be easily indexed by search engine crawlers.
“Lulu has always been on the leading edge of new functionality that provides the best user experience to be able to manage and distribute their content online,” said Bryce Boothby, President and COO of Lulu Enterprises. “We think that working with Scribd and looking at ways iPaper can help us to further empower creators, in addition to the tools that Lulu already provides, will be great for Lulu users.”
Scribd (www.scribd.com) offers a set of tools that allows anyone to use iPaper on their own website. Now iPaper offers new distribution options for Lulu creators, including one-click emailing documents, embedding documents simply on any websites or blogs, and various networking features, like the ability to share documents with friends.
“Scribd and Lulu have both been pioneers in the online publishing market, pushing the boundaries beyond traditional media distribution tactics,” said Trip Adler, Scribd’s CEO and Co-founder. “Integrating iPaper into Lulu is a great next step for both companies, and Scribd is proud to offer new options to Lulu and its authors.”
Lulu.com will include a broad sampling of some of its most popular free content in the test. Select titles will be from a variety of genres, including cookbooks; biographies and memoirs; photo books; computer and Internet; and arts and photography. At the conclusion of the test period, Lulu and Scribd will explore rolling out iPaper to include more content on Lulu.com.