SCRIBD - A RATHER WONDERFUL SITE FOR BOTH READERS AND WRITERS OF eBOOKS

SCRIBD:

In spite of its rather strange name (my spelling checker is going mad with it!), this is in fact a rather good site.  its main thrust is to help authors get their works published, and this they do by the simple means of publishing them on their own website.  Thus, here you may find all manner of literary treasures that have been uploaded by aspiring authors.

GROUPS:

This core activity aside, they also consider that writing should be put into the context of a community, thus writers and readers can discuss books, papers and other forms of writing that they and others have uploaded to this site.  This you do by subscribing to forums that people create for themselves, in which writers can discuss their writing with others by means of threads....   The ones I have checked out are surprisingly active, and the discussions about particular points in a given book are interesting, and often surprising.  In many ways it is a wee bit like a sort of Literary Face Book, in which writers have their own pages, and others connect with them there.  Worth a wander around to see for yourself.

GROUPS FOR COMPANIES AND ORGANISATIONS:

Apart from an truly staggeringly large collection of work uploaded by members, this site also hosts a wide range of groups associated with large companies and organisations (Ford Cars, IRCC, Lonely Planet, Boston Tribune, Simon and Schuster, Harvard University Library... a very long list of groups of this sort .  

So for example, one can read articles from the various Lonely Planet books here... and comment on them too, or one could have a look at  the Ford Motors group in which they have published all manner of documents relating to the vehicles they produce, and energetic discussions happens there too. Or one could.....  Its a long list, go have a look for yourself and see what a superb range of groups there are there.

BOOKS AND OTHER FORMS OF WRITING TO DOWNLOAD:

They appear to have literally hundreds of thousands of books, papers, comics, documents and just about any other form of written or drawn work here, some you can download for free, others you have to pay for, though the prices seem very reasonable.

I have wandered all over the site, and been astounded by the range of material on offer there, it is truly astounding, just about every sort of book, learned paper, handbook, comic, travel guide and so on... in profusion! 

FORMATS:

Sadly they don't supply these in ePUB format, but in PDF, DOC, Power Point, Excel, TXT and Postscript, so it will be necessary to let Calibre lose on the files once you have downloaded them to make them acceptable to your eReader - but we are all used to doing that by now, unless we are Kindle owners,of course, and stuck out there on the edge of all this wonderful stuff.  (Question to self...can Kindles read PDFs?)  

GENRES:

This is simple, they have every sort of literary genre here, no matter what sort of books you enjoy reading, you will find them here, and as I have said in other posts, the books here will mostly be written by people you have never heard of, so every time you download a book from here you are setting out on a voyage into the unknown, which can be incredibly rewarding, and often very surprising.  The one sort of book you wont find here are the tired old classics that thousands of online eBook stores offer.... no Jules Verne, no Dickens, no Tolstoy, just tens of thousands of new, fresh, unknown books to wallow happily in.

UPLOADING YOUR MASTERPIECE:

This couldn't be simpler, you merely cut and paste it into the Upload window, and send it on its way......  They will look after the rest for you.

SELLING OR GIVING AWAY?

You choose whether you prefer to sell your writing, or to let people download it for no charge.   If you choose to try and sell it there, they charge 20% of the price on every copy sold, thus you get 80%, which seems a pretty good deal to me!

STATISTICS:

The numbers of books, papers, words and so on that this site hosts is incredible, I can do no better than to quote from their own website here.......

• Tens of millions of readers every month
• 10 million documents published
• 35 billion words
• 5 million Scribd document reader embeds
• 90 different languages supported

I had forgotten about the languages that they support.... like everything else about this site, they seem to offer books and publications in just about all known languages.....

CONCLUSIONS:
This site is an absolutely superb one, so worth signing up with and then downloading, downloading and still more downloading.  As you may be gathering, I am very impressed by these people and what they have created.   More strength to their elbows, say I!

LINK TO SCRIBD WEBSITE:

SHARE WITH US:
If you visit this site and find any treasures there (You will!!!) please share these with us here, so others can have the same enjoyment from your finds as yourself.

FORUMS FOR WRITERS OF eBOOKS TO MEET AND TALK

I thought it would be useful to have a hunt around the net to see what forums might be out there for writers of eBooks to meet and discuss things related to online publishing and allied matters.

So, full of hope off  I went onto Google to see what I could find.....................

What I found were no end of sites that were primarily set up to sell particular services (editing and marketing your books) or specific software that was designed to help you get your books into suitable form to be uploaded to eBook sites, but remarkably few forums where you could meet other authors and discuss the specific problems of this form of publishing.  Also, to add to my unhappiness, most of the forums I did find that sounded interesting were more or less moribund and the last posts being dated 2006 or even earlier!

To say I am surprised at this lack, would be to put it mildly, as there are lively forums out there for just about any human activity you could imagine!  Anyone interested in a  forum for ant breeding?

I shall shortly be moving this Blog to a Word Press version, (to be called eBookanoid) and shall definitely include a forum in it, as there is obviously room for a lively forum for us all to meet and discuss matters of mutual interest.

However, I did manage to find a couple that seemed lively and relevant and not too burdened with advertisements, and I shall put links to these at the end of this post.

Most of the more or less reasonable ones I came across seemed to be arranged more in the form of comments with longish threads rather than the normal forum format of listing the posts by title and subject, with all the replies attached so you can simply open a thread and follow it.  Clumsy, but manageable, I suppose.

Should you be hunting for technical forums, all about software for online publishing or the legal side of it all, that you will find OK.

Obviously writing an eBook is exactly the same as writing any other book, it only changes when you set about making an eBook out of it, so I suppose the lack of eBook writing specific forums is not totally unexpected and obviously there are oodles of forums for "ordinary" writers to meet and talk - the better ones of  these I shall shortly be looking at and reporting back on for your interest.

So, sadly I have to report that my hunt was pretty fruitless.

Anyhow, here are links to a few that did seem more or less likely to interest and be of help to you good folk.

LINKS:

Techarena:

eBook Snips:

eBook Friends:

Teleread:

SHARE WITH US:

Obviously, if any of you know of a good forum that is specifically set up for eBook writers, do let us know about it, or even send me a review of it for me to post here (of course, as always, I shall credit you with writing it).