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Scribd Partners With Major Publishers to Bring Books, Exclusive Content to Community of More Than 50 Million

Thursday 19. March 2009 - Random House, Simon & Schuster Among Brands Distributing Works on Scribd

Scribd, Inc., the world’s largest social publishing website, today announced that it has partnered with major publishers to bring books and other professional works to its community of more than 50 million readers. Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson and Manning Publications are among the companies uploading and sharing entire novels, sneak preview chapters and exclusive excerpts from best-selling authors and book series, for free on Scribd.com.
“These partnerships help cement Scribd’s position as the online destination for readers while giving publishers a completely fresh platform to reach a new audience of millions,” said Trip Adler, CEO and co-founder of Scribd. “Now, in addition to original writings and documents contributed by our users — short stories, research reports, even recipes and sheet music — readers can discover premium works by best-selling authors on Scribd.”
Media brands already using Scribd to embed documents on their own websites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, NPR, Fox Business News, and many others. More than 50,000 new documents are uploaded daily using Scribd’s iPaper reader, a technology that makes it easy to upload, share and embed original writings and documents in their “printed” layouts, regardless of file format. Scribd documents are indexed by all major search engines, making them easily discoverable by more than 1 billion Internet users worldwide.
“Scribd has quickly become a unique online community where readers of all tastes can go to discover, explore, and share first-rate content,” said Ellie Hirschhorn, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster. “Its unique approach provides us with the desired flexibility to determine how our content is viewed and used on a case by case basis, and is proving to be an effective tool for creating excitement for our books.”
“Word-of-mouth, recommendations and ‘hand-selling’ are tried and true ways to increase sales, and Scribd makes all those things possible in an extremely cost-effective, online environment,” said Matt Schwartz, director of digital strategy for Random House Publishing Group. “Scribd offers publishers an amazing new marketing platform that will surely generate book sales.”
“In today’s crowded book marketplace, publishers are always looking for new technologies that help their authors and books stand out,” said David Marshall, Director for Digital Communities at Berrett-Koehler Publishers. “By offering our book excerpts for free to tens of millions of Scribd readers, we reach an extensive, new audience and help people try before they buy. In initial trials, our book excerpts on Scribd received hundreds of thousands of reads, dramatically increasing our community of readers.”