A new breed of publishing services on the web are rapidly expanding their offerings to fresh markets and devices.
Docstoc, which allows the sharing of professional documents, opened its DocStore to individuals on Tuesday, while Scribd, its larger rival, announced on Wednesday easier ways of making its documents accessible on eReaders and other mobile devices.
Scribd , whose startup perks include go-karts and a zip-line for racing around its Soma office, showed me its new Send to Device feature. It allows users to convert and send documents for viewing on smartphones such as Android devices and the iPhone and eReaders such as the Nook and Kindle.
For example, clicking on “Mobile” and then the “Kindle” button on its website brings up a box with instructions on how to move the file onto the Kindle by inserting its email address, choosing PDF or plain text format and clicking on Send to Device.
Trip Adler , co-founder and chief executive, said the mobile strategy would be extended soon with Scribd apps for better viewing of documents on the iPhone and Android phones. A third initiative is Soped – the Scribd open platform for eReader devices – a set of APIs that will allow eReader vendors to tap into Scribd’s content.
Scribd is also switching from its PDF standard format toEpub , which it says gives a better reading experience. It’s DRM features should also encourage major publishers to release more of their content through Scribd.
Scribd describes itself as the largest social publishing company in the world, with more than 50m readers each month. Around 10m documents have been enabled with the Send to Device feature.
Mr Adler said its mobile strategy would benefit eReader makers, smartphone platforms, publishers, authors and consumers.
“If you’re an author and you write a book and you want to get that book on people’s Sony Readers or Nooks or Kindles, there’s a whole separate process for each device. Now we make it really simple for the book to be immediately available to every device,” he said.
About 95 per cent of Scribd’s content is available for free. Until it works out DRM issues with the big publishers, it is looking at sharing advertising revenues and subscription methods to monetise its library of largely user-generated content.
