Reading on Scribd

By Tommy Leung on 07/08/2009 in Life

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve known of Scribd for a while as the Mises Institute has put a great deal of their collection online for free. Even though I have known of Scribd, I have not really read any book available on there in great depth–until now. I had read Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s Free and Seth Godin’s rebuttal to Gladwell’s review. I have my own opinions on the idea of Free so this was a topic that I am fairly interested in.

I really did not expect to read this book online for free as I didn’t really expect it to be available online for free. I own Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and loved that book. It is entirely possible that I will eventually buy Free just to have on my bookshelf as digital books just aren’t the same.

Having discovered Free was available for free I decided to read a few pages–perhaps a few chapters–to get a taste of the book. I generally do that at Barnes & Nobles anyway. I am now 205 pages into this 288 page book. In all likelihood, I will finish reading this book as I have less than a third to go and it is pretty damn interesting.

My intention isn’t really to review the book but, to talk about reading an entire book online on a computer monitor. I have done a lot of reading online but, I have never read a book on a digital screen. The experience so far as been satisfactory. It wasn’t as terrible as I had thought but, also not fantastic. I still prefer to have the physical item.

Scribd is great. When I started reading for the first time I wondered where the bookmark tool was. I didn’t find out until I returned to the book at a later time and discovered that Scribd knew where I had left off and suggested to me that I could start from there. Marvelous.

Their service is definitely something I’ll explore further.