What does social publishing do?
What YouTube did for video, these sites want do for documents — reports, ebooks, templates — you name it. You got words, they want ‘em.
- Lets you easily share your eBooks on Twitter, Facebook, et al.
- Makes it easy to embed eBook readers into web pages
- Provides some SEO benefits from indexing the pages and the author profiles
- Allows their community to rate, review and discuss your offering
- Takes a slice of your sales, of course
Here’s a brief rundown of the heavyweights of the doc-sharing universe.
Scribd
With over 10 million published documents, Scribd means business. They support the largest variety of file formats and there is no charge whether your publication is free or for sale. I have noticed that if you want to download something you’re put through a slightly annoying series of prompts to sign up, though it isn’t required.
Notable Contributors: Steve Martin, Barack Obama, The New York Times
DocStoc
The MySpace of document sharing, it’s messy and extremely popular. DocStoc also gives authors the option of free or paid distribution, and you can link your AdSense account for a little extra revenue. This seems counter-intuitive to me from a business standpoint — if I my eBook is about Awesome Widget Design, do I want an ad for someone else’s widget design services to appear on the page?
The DocStore looks a bit niftier, more of a curated collection of eBooks for sale. A lot of these look like traditional books that have just been uploaded as PDFs, which makes viewing a bit awkward.
Notable Contributors: StartupNation, The Crown Publishing Group
Issuu
This visually rich collection claims 6 million visitors per month. A free account lets you share free documents, for $19/month you can sell your wares. They offer mobile apps and a suite of developers tools.
Notable Contributors: Penguin Group, Google, and Random House
Calaméo
Europe’s answer to Scribd and it’s reflected in the diversity of languages you’ll see in the selection of eBooks. The free version offers plenty of room for your goods, but you’ll have to shell out 12 EURO per month for analytics.
Yudu
Yudu is a bit document sharing, a bit social bookmarking – it will take your documents, audio, photos and even websites. It seems the best selling products on this site are magazines from the UK. You can upload your content instantly, no log in required.
Smashwords
Smashwords has partnered with Barnes & Noble and Fictionwise.com in order to appeal to the literary crowd. Authors can offer works for free or sell them, and will receive 85% of net sales which is a comparatively large cut.
The formatting is more suitable to text only eBooks – advanced formatting like worksheets and precise layouts are not supported.
Note: I’ve left out Wattpad.com because it’s fiction and poetry focused and eDocr.com because it’s British and pricey.
Kelly, nice collection of resources you have here. Thanks–I’m going to bookmark this.