Quote:
Originally Posted by Joykins
Ok, I got on there (using their website), read a book, and have some thoughts.
Searching and browsing shows only book covers. This makes it impossible to use the browser to search for a specific title or author on the page. I have also seen what appear to be the wrong covers for books (you can mouseover the cover to get more info; in these cases the mouseover shows a completely different book than the cover).
This all combines to make searching for books fairly tedious and slow. You have to hit the database several ways to make sure you've got everything they have by a specific author. I put a number of hours in, though, and have a few hundred books to read in my library.
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Their search function is quite terrible. The reason I found some of those great books I posted about above--I did a search on the TITLE of my book--I got 5 other titles listed before mine. NONE of them had the same title as mine (in other words what I entered was exact, but what was returned was a random set of books that contained the word "Witch.") When I enter my author name (or any other author name) I get the same randomness.
I contacted Scribd as an author to see if I could upload some titles for the sub service because not all of my title are with Smashwords. Their answer: No, but I could upload titles for sale. As an author or a small publisher that's a bit limiting. I like the sub service. The sale side isn't bad, but it has to be worth it because juggling multiple accounts as I already do is a pain. I'd much rather be able to upload a sale version AND a sub version so that readers could choose what they wanted to do.
Some of the small publishers might want to put their whole catalog up there on the sub service--but going through Smashwords is kind of iffy. I have more titles marked to go there than are showing up. My guess is they will never show up either, not without a lot of effort on my part to figure out "why" and support contact and so on.
That said, I think some of these things will get fixed as Scribd finds out what readers want. And Scribd seemed open to the idea of working with actual small publisher (without defining small). They probably do not want to have to support individual authors who have under 20 titles or something along those lines. Most small publishers will have 20 plus and growing so it's more beneficial for them and readers.