Scribd opens up e-Reading on mobile devices

Scribd, which bills itself as the world’s largest social publishing company, made its debut in the mobile space today with the lofty goal of becoming the universal adaptor for e-readers and, in doing so, expanding access to millions of written works on any mobile device. That includes e-Readers with a “send-to-mobile” feature and eventually smartphones through a Scribd application.

Scribd’s open strategy allows it to avoid the e-Reader wars and run on any device, including the Apple iPhone, Google Android, so called e-book killing Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble's Nook and the Amazon Kindle. In doing so, Scribd can potentially get a piece of the action whether smartphones or e-Readers, a new category of device offering wireless connectivity sans a service contract, prove to be the most successful. The two have been in competition since the category’s rise to fame, although they are also increasing blurring lines. Amazon, for example, has begun to open its Kindle service up to smartphones, including the iPhone and most recently BlackBerry.

Scribd has more than 10 million documents in its arsenal and has partnerships in place with a number of major publishers including big names Random House and Simon & Schuster. The three-year old company includes professional, full-length content from these publishers, but the majority of its focus is on non-professional content, including school reports, amateur writing and recipes, or articles from sources like the New York Times and Forbes. Scribd attracts more than 50 million users per month, according to Tammy Nam, Scribd’s vice president of content.

“Professional publishers and content creators love Scribd because we give them access to an instant readership, built-in marketing and distribution through the social Web, Scribd community and also through different mobile platforms,” Nam added.

The send-to-device feature puts a mobile button on every DRM-free document Scribd offers, which – when clicked – sends an SMS to a network-connected device to direct the user to download the content. On the Kindle, the reader would open the document through Kindle email or downloaded it through a USB port. The goal of this feature is to put the focus on the content that people consume every day and not on the device, Nam said. Most consumers aren’t aware of what the device can do, which is something Scribd hopes to teach them, she added.

“Web-enabled devices have been around a long time, but the market is mature enough now that this strategy makes a lot of sense,” Nam said. “No one has taken this approach. We’ve flipped the equation. So much of the conversations so far have been around the e-Reader device, but we’re flipping it to say the device itself is irrelevant. It’s about the content and giving people the ability to consume that content on whatever device they have.”

Scribd is also making public a series of APIs, the Scribd Open content Platform for E-Readers and mobile Devices (SOPED), which gives device manufacturers the ability to integrate Scribd's search, social and other functionality into their devices. Its first customers for the platform are Interead and Onyx International.

Rounding out its mobile strategy, Scribd will next month introduce a mobile app for the iPhone and Android-based devices, where Nam expects the most e-Reading traction to occur first. The company sees a huge opportunity in smartphones in general, based on their large – and growing – market share, she said.