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John Wiley & Sons has signed a deal with Scribd to market and sell e-books, including the For Dummies series and Frommers travel guides, through the "social publisher's" online store.
Scribd has also struck deals with Barnes & Noble subsidiary Sterling Publishing, Chronicle Books and University of Chicago Press. They join the more than 150 professional publishers that are now selling in the Scribd Store. The books are not available for sale outside the US.
Trip Adler, chief executive and co-founder of Scribd, said: "We're thrilled to have Wiley, a venerable brand, and so many other publishers join the Scribd community. Our goal is to bring content creators and readers together in the best and most convenient way possible while giving professional publishers an additional revenue stream and control over how their content is consumed on the web, mobile devices and other platforms."
Scribd was last week revealed to have been sent the most notifications about copyright infringement from the UK Publishers Association's portal since its inception a year ago. However, the PA added that Scribd was the most compliant in removing offending material, usually within 24 hours.
Peter Balis, Wiley’s director of digital content sales, highlighted Scribd's "aggressive copyright protection technology" as one of the core reasons for entering into the partnership.
"Scribd's community of 50m readers offers a built-in marketing machine for Wiley books. At the same time, their aggressive copyright protection technology helps to ensure that the community is sharing and discussing written works that do not infringe on the rights of authors and copyright owners," he said. "At Wiley, we also believe that consumers want choice about when, where and how to read their books. Scribd is an important part of this strategy of choice."
In 2009 alone, the Scribd community uploaded and shared more than 5m free and for-purchase works, with books making up more than 200,000 of that number. The company said it was expecting that number to more than quadruple in 2010.