Amazon Won’t Be The Only One Selling Kindle Books Next Year [Kindle]

Scribd, the YouTube for print, is working on a new way to get e-books onto your Kindle without buying them from Amazon.

Right now, to get one of the tens of millions of Scribd documents has — books, papers, and other content — off the web and into a Kindle, a user has to email the document to his or her Kindle email address.

Trip Adler, the company's CEO and founder tells us it will be a "seamless" experience next year.

Trip couldn't tell us if his plan was part of an official Scribd-Amazon partnership or not. He just said, "I can tell you that we talk to Amazon a lot."

Will Scribd-To-Kindle be a threat to Amazon?

For now, Scribd's store is no threat to Amazon. It's a smaller selection more heavily favoring obscure documents Amazon doesn't sell. Down the road, it represents a possible threat.

That's because Scribd is quietly developing a strong e-book storefront to match its hoard of user generated content.

This week Scribd announced that John Wiley and Sons would be selling books through Scribd's store.That gives Scribd access to the "For Dummies" series, as well as "Frommer's" travel guides. It already had Simon and Schuster on board, along with other prominent publishers.

If Scribd can put its books on the Kindle, this number should only grow, especially since it offers publishers a better business deal than Amazon.

Amazon reportedly offers a 50/50 sales split. Scribd only keeps 20% and allows publishers to set their own price.

Is this a Hail Mary for Scribd?

No. Regardless of what happens, Scribd will keep chugging along. It plans on rolling out mobile applications next year for the iPhone and Android.

Adler declined to give us a revenue number, but he said the company was profitable in the second quarter this year, but decided to hire more employees to focus on growth. It has about 40 employees.

Our back of the envelop calculations put revenue in the range of $7 to $10 million. Adler says revenue is growing 10-12% month over month.

image: Flickr/Jamesjyu



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