• PaidContent.org, Monday, May 18, 2009 12:16 PM

Scribd, a document sharing site, is beginning a beta test of an ecommerce platform for Web publishers, in an effort to tap into news companies' increasing interest in charging consumers for digital content. According to PaidContent.org's David Kaplan, the startup believes that the rise of Amazon's Kindle has made the notion of buying texts online more acceptable. The document sharing company also plans to launch an iPhone app that lets publishers sell their content directly to iPhone users.

Unlike Amazon's rev-sharing model for the Kindle, which takes as much as 70% of the revenue from some content providers, the new Scribd Store lets content providers keep 80% of the revenue. They will also be able to set their own prices and DRM options. Prices range from $1 for a novel to $5,000 for an in-depth market-research report on China, Kaplan says.

"For the most part, there's a lot of work that's going to be uploaded, so we wanted to lower the barriers," Tammy Nam, Scribd's VP-content and marketing, said of the reasoning behind the pricing and DRM structure. "Our main objective is to get new content to the site. We think it's going to be a lot like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) in a lot of ways, where you'll have a mix of amateur and professional content sellers. But in particular, as a site with 60 million monthly readers, we believe there is a huge long tail of non-professional content."

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