Smashwords has announced they’ve signed a distribution agreement with publisher Scribd. From the article:
Smashwords today announced a distribution agreement with Scribd, which operates one of the world’s largest publishing platforms and online reading communities. Scribd receives over 80 million monthly readers to their platform according to their website.
There are two distribution components to the Smashwords agreement with Scribd.
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- Smashwords will supply books to Scribd’s new ebook subscription service, where for $8.99 per month subscribers can enjoy unlimited reading.
- Smashwords ebooks will also be available for individual sale to Scribd customers under our standard retailer terms.
Ever since Scribd launched in 2007, I’ve admired their publishing platform, their social reading technology and their commitment to content creators. Scribd has built a massive audience of millions of readers, and these readers are now accessible to the 70,000+ authors and publishers that distribute with Smashwords.
This seems to be the season of really awkward reports on self-publishing. In yet another “remarkable study into self-publishing,” that distracts with colors and pictures, self-publishing gets another black eye from someone who doesn’t really know the topic.
Patricia Santos Marcantonio made a post over at The Other Bunch Press website about self publishing:
Yep. Since 2007, the self-publishing part of the ebook pie has been sizable. In just a few years, the self-published author has gone from zero to hero, owning 25% of the top 100 ebook market, as reported by Amazon. No matter how many reports traditional publishers put out – saying people are eschewing ebooks, that kids don’t like ebooks, and that ebooks are the bane and scourge of the publishing world – it appears that those bought-and-paid-for ‘statistics’ aren’t based on the cold hard numbers generated by their greatest imagined enemy: Amazon.