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.

THE BEARD - A SORT OF REVIEW

As I promised in my post about Smashwords, once I had downloaded a book from them I would write a review of it, to give you a small idea of the sort of books you might come across there, well here is the first one......

THE BEARD, by Andersen  Prunty

This is a truly extraordinary book, a sort of collision between a Surrealist writer such as Jacques Prevert and writers such as John Bunyon or Dante.

Mr Prunty is the author of a number of other books, apparently all much in the same vein; books such as The overwhelming urge, Jack and Mr Grin, which can be purchased from Amazon, among other places as hard copy or eBooks.

The synopsis on the website doesn't really do this book justice, and I quote:

"Seven-year-old David Glum watches as his grandfather is abducted by a legendary herd of elephants. Twenty years later, David returns to his parents' home to focus on growing a beard, a goal he feels sure he can accomplish. Hilarity ensues."

The book starts in a reasonably calm way, with a rather touching description of a young boy and his relationship with his Grandfather, and nothing much about the first couple of pages gives one any reason to expect anything especially strange to happen in this book - to be honest, reading this chapter I began to think that perhaps my more or less random choice of a book had been a bad one.  That is until the above mentioned elephants put in their appearance.

From that moment on, things became stranger and stranger by the minute.  I shan't describe anything more of the plot, as this would take away the genuine pleasure that you will experience should you read this book - well, I hope you will experience pleasure reading it, I did.

Basically it is a tale of an anabasis,  a voyage of self discovery and a very wry commentary on the world we live in.  Also, it is an extremely enjoyable book to read.  The further into it I got, the less easy I found it to put  it down and get on with other things. It completely captivated me; all the various - and extremely strange - characters are surprisingly sympathetic and (this is a real achievement on Mr Prunty's part) believable.  As is the wildly off-beat world they all inhabit.

As you can probably see, I was extremely happy that I had stumbled across this book, and have no hesitation in recommending it to you.

For me this is one of the great joys of free online books, I can risk experimenting with books and authors I know nothing about, and I frequently stumble over real treasures in this manner. Another powerful argument for owning an eReader, no?

SHARE WITH US

If you also read this book, or even if you happen to be the author, I would be very pleased if you would let us know what you thought of it.  Should you be Mr.Prunty, I would be intrigued to know how this very curious book came about.

Now for the technical stuff about this book:

Anderson Prunty's website:  click here

You can download it here, and it is free too!!

SUPPORTED FORMATS

Online reading: HTML

Online reading Java Script

DOWNLOAD FORMATS

Kindle:   .MOBI

ePUB

PDF

RTF (readable in most word processors)

LRF

Palm Doc PDB for Palm reading devices

TXT

BOOKS ON BOARD - A SPLENDID SOURCE OF eBOOKS

When I started out in the wonderful world of eReaders, I very quickly discovered this on-line bookshop which I feel strongly we should all know about.

Apparently they have something in the region of 400 000 titles available!  An astonishing number of books if you stop to think for a minute - how on earth have they managed to accumulate so many in such a relatively short time?   At the very least this means that no matter what sort of book you enjoy reading, you have a very good chance of finding it here.  It also makes them serious competitors with Amazon, and a very good alternative if your eReader isn't a Kindle!

In spite of this enormous number of titles, they have managed to create a site that is remarkably easy to find one's way around in, so it is really a very pleasant experience wandering around this particular book shop, very reminiscent of mooching around a real book shop I find.

I have bought a wide range of books from them, and always been happy with these books.  They provide a good synopsis and are very clear in which particular format the books come in, and warn you very clearly to make sure you are downloading the correct format for your eReader (providing a good description of how all the various formats apply to various eReaders).  Basically they offer eBooks in all formats with the exception of Amazon's, obviously.

On the few occasions when I have had problems with downloading books, and have written to them about these problems, they have replied extremely rapidly and to good effect, they obviously place high importance on good customer relations - not something one can say of many such sites in my experience!

Having wandered happily around their site, I have been very impressed by the prices they charge, not only are the discounts good, but they also have a sort of bonus system, so every time you buy a book from them, you are awarded a credit for your next purchase, which mounts up very rapidly in some cases - in fact on one memorable occasion I somehow ended up with two books that owing to the bonuses offered on those particular books, I not only got for free, but was left over with about 10 Dollars worth of credit, just from that one transaction.... Couldn't understand how that came about, but accepted it gratefully.

Payment with them couldn't be simpler, one can use a credit card, as with most on-line shops, but they have been sensible enough to set up a Pay Pall account too, which I use when buying from them.

The only problem I find, sadly all  too often, is that a number of the books they offer can't be bought where I live, or at least in my case, where my Pay Pal account is registered (which is France).  But this is not their policy, it is the Publishers who place these restrictions..  This is something that the world is going to have to work out ere long, the thorny problem of copyright around the world.

If you use them, you have to register first, but this doesn't release a swarm of spam into your inbox, simply a weekly newsletter announcing the latest books and deals, which on occasion is interesting.  For some reason I don't quite understand they seem to emphasize heavily the considerable range of Romances they have on offer in their range, but if this is not your sort of reading, once you get past titles such as "He Told Her he Loved Her" and similar, you can wallow happily around in any other sort of book you like.

Without any reservations I can recommend this shop to you all for your book purchases.

LINK TO BOOKS ON BOARD: