Simon & Schuster to Sell Ebooks on Scribd.com

Simon & Schuster is going to put about 4,500 book titles for sale on a relatively new website that caters to e-readers, reports BusinessWeek. The publisher, which handles authors such as Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, and Dan Brown, said the ebooks will be available starting tomorrow on Scribd. The site, explains Spencer Ante, is like a YouTube for books, where anyone can upload documents for sharing. But now it's starting to catch the attention of major publishers as an alternative to Amazon.

“We are interested in getting our books in front of consumers in as many formats and distribution platforms as possible,” said a Simon & Schuster executive. Files can be read on a computer or saved as Adobe Acrobat files, but they can't be printed, notes the Wall Street Journal. They can be read on Sony's e-book Reader and, soon, on iPhones, but not on Amazon's Kindle. Scribd will give publishers more leeway on pricing than Amazon does.
(More Scribd stories.)