"Scribd" entries

Four short links: 28 June 2010

Four short links: 28 June 2010

Reflective Spaces, Slow Media, Chinese Genomics, and a Code Blog

  1. They Don’t Complain and They Die Quietly (Derek Powazek) — In this hyper-modern age of real-time always-on location-based info-overload, perhaps a moment of true peace and quiet is the greatest gift one can receive.
  2. The Slow Media ManifestoSlow Media inspire, continuously affect the users’ thoughts and actions and are still perceptible years later. Steven Levy ran a Slow Media session at Foo. (via Bruce Sterling)
  3. The Dragon’s DNA (The Economist) — Beijing Genomics Institute putting more DNA-sequencing capacity into the top floor of a refurbished printing works than is available in the whole USA.
  4. Scribd Coding Blog — very interesting blog about the technology behind and inside Scribd. They process over 150M polygons a day, building web fonts from the fonts in PDF files, and tell you why it’s not straightforward. I wish there were more of these genuinely interesting technology blogs from companies that do interesting things.

What Ebook Resellers Should Learn from Scribd

Scribd made a splash when they opened up a “Scribd Store” for selling view and download access to documents. Their terms (80% to the document publisher) are quite generous, though one reason publishers keep so much is that most of the merchandising (including pricing) is self service — Scribd could learn a lot from other media retailers if they’re interested in really promoting document sales.

Scribd Store Sets New Standard for Ebook Ecommerce (and 650 O'Reilly Ebooks Included)

There are more than 650 (DRM-free of course) O'Reilly ebooks now on sale in the new Scribd store, which officially launches Monday morning. Full details over on O'Reilly Radar: For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive — publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare…

Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership

Scribd and Lulu have joined forces to combine Scribd's iPaper format, a Flash-derived viewing technology optimized for bandwidth and speed, with Lulu content. From ReadWriteWeb: Beginning this month on the self-publishing site Lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format … And thanks to…