Scribd

Scribd was set up by Harvard students Trip Adler and Jared Friedman in 2007. It calls itself a "social publishing" site aiming to "liberate the written word." It also claims to attract 50 million visitors a month, who come to download and upload books and documents for free. Could the site become a Napster for the publishing industry?

HOW IT WORKS

Scribd makes its money from advertising, but pays no royalties to the authors whose books it offers for download. You'll find all sorts here, from car manuals to recipe books. But while publishers such as Random House have looked to work with the site, others such as Penguin have been less than impressed. Novels by JK Rowling, Ken Follett, Aravind Adiga and Nick Horby have all found their way onto the site, without the permission of author or publisher. Scribd says that it removes books within 24 hours if publishers demand it. But is that really enough? Users of the site can download the books directly onto their computers, which means that copyrighted text can be used, edited, manipulated and then returned to the internet in a corrupted form. So why not take Ian McEwan's Saturday, change Henry Perowne into a vampire, then reupload it? It is easy to see a future in which all art is simply mash up.

WHAT IT'S NOT

If Scribd were just a place where people could share their unproduced screenplay or the first few chapters of their unpublished novel, then all well and good. But the site is also practising piracy and helping to devalue the meaning of books. Five years of hard work cannot be reduced to a free download. Scribd is not an online library. Surely, in this revolutionary time, there needs to be a meaningful relationship between traditional forms of publishing and the new digital platform. But how will putting up books on websites like Scribd without permission help create a dialogue? Unless, of course, the owners of this site define "liberation" as artistic theft and are happy to leave it a that.

PEACEFUL TRANSITION

The publishing industry has to work fast to adapt to new modern realities. Guttenberg's invention has been with us for five hundred years. But the acceptance of the inevitability of change does not have to have as its corollary a welcoming in of unrestrained vandalism.