While I can for sure appreciate the Scribd service, charging for 24 hour access to "archives" is just silly. It reminds me of Rapidshare, which isn't exactly a brand to live up to.
On the other hand. So does the website that posted the article and requires a login to read the follow-up.
I like that someone called Scribed out and they fixed the situation.
What exactly do you like about Scribd? Every experience I had with is has been negative. Their reader sucks and to download a pdf you have to register. When somebody posts a link to Scribd I always end up searching for another place on the internet that has it. I don't see any value Scribd provides.
Except that they didn't really fix anything, because almost no one knows Scribd distributes their content and hence hardly anyone will enable that setting.
UPDATE! Evil Wylie contacted Scribd and successfully negotiated a resolution. Scribd now offers the option for an author to PERMANENTLY OPT ALL DOCUMENTS OUT of the "archives." This is effective immediately. This doesn't mean that what they did was right (although their terms and conditions allow them to basically do whatever), but they do respond to complaints rather swiftly.
Smart move by Scribd. Diffuse a lot of the "SCRIBD IS PURE EVIL!!!!!" complaints, but only a fraction of a percent of documents will get opted out, so the impact on their revenue is negligible.
What complicates things, and makes them worse, is that a large amount of the content is uploaded by people who are not the original authors/publishers, and don't actually have the rights.
As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content.
Just last week I found a research paper I published while at Cornell on Scribd -- no attribution at all, no permissions, etc. It's a paper that in normal circulation costs $50 to purchase (and has been purchased a few thousand times -- whether $50 is reasonable or not is a discussion for another thread, of course).
I considered letting my editor know about it to see if she wanted me to request it be taken down, but then I figured I'd rather more people see the paper anyway so left it alone.
This move to re-sell the archives is really surprising -- I can certainly tell you that Scribd doesn't make much money selling electronic documents (i.e., ebooks) right now.
The conversion rate there is b-a-d bad--my experience has been ~3 sales per 200+k reads. Other publishers have seen similar rates. They have an audience who is simply not willing to pay.
As far as I can tell, Scribd's primary business model is monetizing pirated content.
I agree completely.
The entire system appears designed to take advantage of the fact that users will upload just about anything, and the rights holders have to actively monitor the whole of the internet for each possible infraction to protect their rights.
Scribd should be upfront with both authors and readers about this tactic. It's very disappointing, and makes me wonder about how various other services are using content that is uploaded/distributed to them on the basis that users can access it for free.
I clicked on the "UPDATE: Scribd Responds!" link, only to get a page with this message:
>You are attempting to access a resource on this site which is restricted. Please login below. After re-logging in, you will be automatically directed to the page you were attempting to access.
Seriously: what's the point of Scribd? All they do - show your document along with ads all over the place and let people download the source PDF after registration. Why not to just put PDF on your site in the first place?
I found it a somewhat more palatable alternative to SlideShare because I was a big fan of the HTML 5 viewer, but I had no idea this was part of their plan. It's a nasty bait-and-switch which isn't signaled when you upload at all.
Or better yet, try not to use a PDF (I know there are some practical examples of why PDF's are good, but in general they could be avoided most of the time) and use markup instead.
On the other hand. So does the website that posted the article and requires a login to read the follow-up.
I like that someone called Scribed out and they fixed the situation.