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Simon & Schuster has agreed to sell digital copies of its books on Scribd.com, a popular document-sharing web site, reports the New York Times. Simon & Schuster will make digital editions of about 5,000 titles available for purchase on the site, and will sell its books for 20% off the list price of the most recent print edition.
It will also add thousands of other titles to Scribd’s search engine, allowing readers to sample 10% of the content of the books on the site and providing links to buy the print editions. "We are interested in getting our books in front of consumers in as many formats and distribution platforms as possible," said Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster.
Unlike Amazon, which sets the retail price for its e-books and sells them in its own proprietary Kindle format, Scribd is offering publishers considerably more control over how their digital titles are sold, says the NYT. Scribd also gives publishers 80% of revenue, again unlike Amazon.com.