Online self-publishing firm Lulu and social document sharing site Scribd have just announced a partnership in which Lulu will begin using Scribd’s iPaper viewer to display Lulu’s free e-books online at the lulu.com web site. In addition to making it easier for users to gain access to these free publications, Lulu will also be using Scribd’s unique feature that allows for displaying AdSense within iPapers to monetize the free content being provided by the e-books’ publishers.
The iPaper format was designed to be sort of a YouTube for PDFs and other standard document formats. With iPaper, publishers can easily upload and share their documents online via the Scribd.com web site. On the site, document creators can publish their files so that others can then also share, email, download, or embed the documents elsewhere. The document creator can also choose to lock down the file to be read-only if they would rather restrict its use – it all depends on privacy settings the content owner selects – no DRM is involved.
Beginning this month on the self-publishing site lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site’s most popular free content made available via the iPaper format. There will be numerous titles offered from a variety of genres including cookbooks, biographies, photo books, books about computers and Internet, and books about arts and photography. And thanks to iPaper’s ability to embed AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.
Over the next three months, Lulu will test the use of Scribd’s iPaper on their site, and, if all goes well, they will then explore rolling out iPaper to include more of their site’s content.
