Friday, February 26, 2010

Scribd Pushes Content to Smartphones, E-Readers
By Dylan F. Tweney Email Author writing in Wired February 24, 2010

While magazine, newspaper and book publishers wrestle with the logistics and technical details of publishing to the Apple iPad, Scribd has an alternative: a “send-to-device” feature that lets people send documents to their e-readers or smartphones for reading on the go.

The new feature, reported in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago and confirmed by Scribd Wednesday, will support most smartphones, as well as the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, Cool-er and Entourage Edge, among other e-book readers.

Scribd, founded in March 2007, is a document-sharing social network that connects mostly written content (documents and presentations) with a social network of readers. The company claims that 10 million documents have been published on the site to date, including non-copyrighted and amateur content as well as some professional, for-pay content from publishers like Simon & Schuster, Lonely Planet, O’Reilly, and the Chicago Tribune.

When reading a document on the Scribd website, readers can now click a “send to device” button that will pop up a menu of possible devices. Select the Kindle, for instance, and Scribd will ask for your Kindle’s email address, and will then send a Kindle-formatted document to that address. For smartphones like the iPhone, Scribd will ask for a phone number; it then texts the URL of a web-accessible PDF file to the phone.

Read more at Wired.

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