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Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

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Re: Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

#51

Post by hosh »

weeksie wrote: post #45
hosh wrote: post #35

I generally like where this going, though I disagree with the assertion that "it will be easier to browse". The potential for browsing will be increased. However, the actual user experience of browsing for books on the internet still pretty much sucks. Most places take the low-hanging fruit and have pretty good searching capability. However, searching and browsing are not the same experience. Recommendations (like fr…

Honestly, I reckon that using _much_ larger thumbnails would be a big step forward in the experience. Most people pick books by their covers, then check out the blurb on the back. Amazon's thumbs are tiny, hell even the product page has a tiny image. I think that experimenting with size alone would get you quite a long way. Perhaps take a cue from fashion brands like Gilt who have had to recreate the retail experienc…

Sure, and I think that is just the first step. I'm with you on the "retail experience" though maybe not necessarily a recreation.

I'm thinking more along the lines of an art gallery, or a museum, or an amusement park. You have paths with one or two limited choices, and allow you to wander from exhibit to exhibit, collection to collection. You have maps or indices to take you directly to a particular area if you are busy. The point is to have an experience, the way you can wander around a mall looking at things. It is not efficient, and that's the point.

The word "browsing" comes from the way browsers behave in the wild. These are grazing animals that wander along with the herd, eating things as they come. What Scribd and Netflix does is technically not browsing.

Re: Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

#53

Post by snowmaker »

g4m8i7 wrote: post #20

I've spent some time with this. NB This is my experience on the Android app and the website. In the app, searching is abysmal. There's no way to specify the type of keyword you're searching for, so if it's an author, you'll probably have to wade through a sea of wildly irrelevant results to find that maybe they don't even have anything from that author. I grabbed two different versions of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein,…

( I work for Scribd )

This is extremely valuable product feedback. You are completely right that the Scribd product delivered a terrible experience in this case. And the reason goes to the heart of one of the most difficult product design issues we've had: combining user generated and professional content.

An explanation is not a substitute for a fix, but in a nutshell what happened here is that you found copies of Frankenstein that had been uploaded by users. While the books we receive from publishers are ePub formatted and reflow nicely on a phone with controllable font settings, many user-uploaded works are PDFs.

We definitely do not a good enough job of messaging whether content is UGC or publisher, PDF or ePUB. We are working very hard on this. In the meantime, if you want to keep trying the app, here are some simple tips if you want to look at books only: - You can search through books only (click the books tab in search results) - Look for the "verified" badge which appears on publisher-provided material - The content browseable from http://www.scribd.com/browse/books is only publisher provided books.

I'd love to hear more product feedback - this was very helpful for us. Feel free to email me directly (email is in my profile).

Re: Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

#54

Post by bentcorner »

dunham wrote: post #43
bentcorner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple substitution cipher, not a shift/caesar cipher. Neat idea, but I wonder at the effectiveness of it.

Hmm, I guess I've been using that term incorrectly to describe fixed substitution ciphers. It's been a few decades since I learned this stuff. It's effective at preventing a simple copy/paste or "view source" but ineffective against an adversary of any sophistication. I've seen this used in PDF files before. There, if you have a pristine copy of the embedded font, you can just look up a copy of the character program…

Yeah, exactly. I OCRd the first line of the text and manually decrypted the first line of the book just to verify that's what was happening. You could mitigate it by having more complex font files with multicharacter glyphs and include non printing characters in the stream. Probably a "good enough" solution to stop the copy/pasting folks. Anybody knowledgable enough to crack this is is probably not going to waste the time and torrent the book anyway.

Re: Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

#55

Post by weeksie »

hosh wrote: post #51
weeksie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I reckon that using _much_ larger thumbnails would be a big step forward in the experience. Most people pick books by their covers, then check out the blurb on the back. Amazon's thumbs are tiny, hell even the product page has a tiny image. I think that experimenting with size alone would get you quite a long way. Perhaps take a cue from fashion brands like Gilt who have had to recreate the retail experienc…

Sure, and I think that is just the first step. I'm with you on the "retail experience" though maybe not necessarily a recreation. I'm thinking more along the lines of an art gallery, or a museum, or an amusement park. You have paths with one or two limited choices, and allow you to wander from exhibit to exhibit, collection to collection. You have maps or indices to take you directly to a particular area if you are b…

That's certainly part of it as well. If you look at fashion sites you definitely have a limited, curated selection of items to choose from. Still, I reckon a basic UI change alone would do wonders before even bothering with the harder stuff like curation.

Re: Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

#56

Post by _hcuq »

netcan wrote: post #12
iamben wrote: post #4

Whilst I'm pretty sure I'd use this or something like it, it's kinda sad the traditional libraries I used so much (and for free) when I was younger can't keep up with the pace of convenience. I often wonder how long it'll be before the smaller towns (sadly) lose them completely. That said, good luck to them :-)

This is in a class of things I'm worried about. The good institutions & traditions that we built over decades (or in this case, millennia) becoming obsolete, dying and taking all the side benefits with them. Many lost their primary purpose, but they had so many important auxiliary purposes that I'm worried about losing them. For millennia, libraries stored knowledge and people went there to access it. All sorts of th…

Technology is eating our souls.

Re: Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

#57

Post by dgreensp »

AsymetricCom wrote: post #39
dgreensp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First they invented DRM for HTML5. Now they've figured out who to sell it to.

I don't know why, but I've determined that Scribd is evil where Amazon is not. This is an intuitive conclusion based on lots of observation. I think that intuition is based on the fact that Amazon made DRM on Kindle to satisfy their publishing customers so those customers were more willing to distribute to a wider audience where Scribd made DRM to empower themselves and restrict distribution of re-appropriated conten…

Yeah, ditto. The attempts to "go social" and monetize felt sleazy.

Guess what, when I'm googling for some PDF or I find some guy's slides, I don't want to tell my friends, and I don't want to "buy the article" for $14.99 or whatever like it's frickin' JSTOR.

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