Are you the next Stephen King? There's no way to tell, unless you write a page-turner. But writing that book can be difficult. So, you might be looking for some help publishing it, or you just might want some advice. In either case, the Web is a great place to find some help.
Write that book
DoXtop DoXtop allows you to upload documents (including books) that can be embedded into sites across the Web.
Uploading content to DoXtop is quick and easy. Simply pick the file you want to upload, choose your desired format, and you're all set. What I like most about DoXtop is its many community features. You can discuss your content with readers, ask them to rate your book, or respond to surveys. It builds a readership around your content. It also helps you determine what readers are looking for. If you're trying to deliver your manuscript to readers without printing a book, DoXtop is a fine solution.
doXtop lets you publish your content for all to see.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)iUniverse iUniverse is a self-publishing platform that goes one step further than simply allowing you to see your book in print. Unlike some competitors, it's a supported self-publishing service, which means that you can have your manuscript edited, ask iUniverse to acquire an ISBN for you, and more.
iUniverse offers a variety of plans for you to pick. You can get the basic plan, which costs $599. That gives you access to the service's one-on-one author support. You'll also get a custom cover, but you won't be able to receive all the extras you'll find in its Premier package ($2,099).
That plan includes the ability to choose a hardcover and the option to have your book previewed by buyers. It's a hefty price to pay, but it might be worth it, if you're serious about selling your book. iUniverse even gives you the option of publishing your book in Amazon.com Kindle or Sony Reader versions. It's a neat service.
iUniverse boasts several options for you.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Online document host Docstoc on Wednesday is opening up an online store for publishers to sell their wares. The company is acting both as the host and the payment platform, as well as providing the viewing technology for the documents.
As part of the deal, publishers get "a majority" of the revenue, although actual figures are based on a sliding scale and depend on who they are and how Docstoc is promoting them.
In order to avoid serving up two versions of a paid document, such as a preview and full version, Docstoc has updated its Adobe Flash-based viewer to limit viewing to several pages of a document. This lets potential buyers take a look before they buy, just as Amazon and competitor Scribd do.
Browsing documents for sale is just like browsing Docstoc's free, hosted documents, except that you can only view a preview until you pay for a content license.
(Credit: Docstoc)As for payments, Docstoc is letting users pay via PayPal, Google Checkout, or with a credit card. There's also a money-back guarantee policy that lets users get a refund if they're dissatisfied. The policy gives users a week to make a return, with up to five returns a year. To keep any abuse from happening, the company is also tracking users' IP addresses, to make sure they're not just opening up new accounts and making returns beyond the five-time limit, although Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar told me he doesn't anticipate too heavy a return rate, since the new viewer shows a multipage preview.
Documents purchased through Docstoc can be viewed on the Web or on portable devices like the Kindle and the iPhone. Rather than selling books, Docstoc is specializing in ready-made forms, presentations, and technical documents--what the company is calling "professional utility documents." However, there are some publishers in Docstoc's store, like WriteMyEssay.com, that cover topics outside of business. Nazar says that the store may continue to expand into other areas, but that it will keep "selectively picking the best, high-quality partners" from those that apply to be included in the store.
Competitor Scribd launched a similar offering back in May with a guaranteed 80 percent revenue share to publishers and pricing limits up to $5,000 per title. Docstoc is launching with its aforementioned sliding scale of revenue sharing, which I'm told has no limit on maximum pricing. It will also continue to offer its advertising service, which places Google Adsense ads next to documents that are offered for free.
Docuter is a free online document host that launched in early January. Like Scribd, Docstoc (which is currently down), and others, it lets you upload documents from your hard drive or a URL. These can be viewed on the site or embedded in Web pages like what I've done below.
Docuter's claim to fame is that it supports "over 200" different types of documents (here's a list). This includes image files, and soon it will include audio and video files. Like Scribd, it lets you upload files of any size, which is nice for uncompressed, image-heavy PDFs, compared to Docstoc's 50MB limit.
The technology is built on top of the Ajax Document Viewer, a service companies can install on their own servers for hosting documents internally or with clients. Coming soon will be support for adding annotations and redactions on top of the document. These will be stored on Docuter's servers and will be separate from the source document. Users will also soon be able to lock down a document to keep users from saving and printing.
If you're looking for a social document-sharing experience, Docuter may not be for you. It does not have a catalog of publicly published documents, or a way to search through anything Docuter members have made public. It's wickedly fast though, both for uploading and processing. The two PDFs I uploaded were ready to view (and share) immediately, which is handy in a pinch.
Document-sharing service Scribd has pulled in $9 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Friday. The round was led by Charles River Ventures with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.
With the new cash, Scribd plans to speed up its product development and hire new employees.
And the first of those hires was announced in conjunction with the funding announcement: George Consagra, who most recently served as chief operating officer of AOL's Bebo, has been hired as president. (Co-founder Trip Adler has the CEO post.)
Scribd's monthly user count is now at around 50 million, the company said.
Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services is that Pixily is focused less on receipts and finances, and more on day-to-day papers like insurance claims, long cell phone bills (with call lists on them) and little things like birthday cards.
Everything that's scanned goes through optical character recognition (OCR), so you can search for it in the built-in search tool. It also lets you tag, and make notations to documents for the sake of sorting. If you've got digital documents, you can upload them into the mix as well.
Like Netflix, Pixily works through the mail with similar pre-paid envelopes that you can stuff with as much paper as allows. Each paid plan has a higher number of envelopes you can send in each month, along with limits on how much scanned content the service will host for you. After it's scanned, it's sent back in the same mailer, which can be chucked in with your paper recycling--envelope and all.
It's worth noting that for things like school papers and general writing, Scribd.com has a free program called Paper-to-iPaper that lets you send in all sorts of paper items by mail (at your postal expense) complete with OCR. One thing to note, however is that you have to get the content pre-approved, and things like bills and notes scribbled on paper are not welcome.
Pixily plans start at a free level (which requires you sending in documents on your own dime), all the way up to a $60/month plan that serves up four envelopes a month for you to stuff.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
Pixily requires using the mail to get your documents online, although if you've got PDFs lying around, you can send those digitally to go alongside your scanned docs.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
File host Docstoc is releasing a solution on Wednesday for sending large attachments to friends, family, and co-workers. Called OneClick (download), the small application must be installed on your machine to enable right-click contextual menus that let you simply click any file on your hard drive and send it either publicly or securely to others.
Once the file's been transferred, you'll get a link to the Docstoc-hosted document inserted into a new e-mail message that your recipient can open and read without needing to install anything.
Like Scribd's solution, which launched last week, OneClick has been designed to entice business and casual users to start simply uploading their documents instead of e-mailing them for the sake of compatibility and size.
Not everyone has Gmail or Office 2007, which offer popular file compatibility. Nor have all users implemented the small software tweak on older versions of Office that will let you read those .Docx files with ease. Instead, solutions like Scribd and Docstoc are taking office software out of the equation entirely.
It's also a pretty simple way to get users uploading more of their documents from a local machine. Instead of having to go through Docstoc's Web uploader (which is simple and easy to use), you can get them uploaded with just two clicks whenever you come across something you'd like to upload.
The small application is PC-only for now, but I'm told a Mac version will be on its way soon. To see a video of the tool in action, click the link below.
Right-click on documents to upload them to Docstoc directly, then pop them conveniently into e-mails.
(Credit: Docstoc )... Read more
Document host Scribd has a new service for people afraid of opening attachments. It's simply an e-mail address (iPaper@Scribd.com) you add as a CC recipient on your e-mails. If there are any documents attached, they'll be uploaded to Scribd and hosted for you. Less than a minute later the service sends a second e-mail with a link to that document or documents on Scribd, all of which have been set to private--regardless of whether you or the people who are getting the e-mail have Scridb accounts.
Last week I sat down with Scribd co-founder Trip Adler to chat about this new service and Scribd in general. The last time I wrote about them it was for the dubious Paper-to-iPaper program, which lets people send off their paper documents to be scanned and hosted. I gave it a try and it actually works as advertised--they even send it back free of charge. The whole process took about three weeks, which Alder says will be shortened as the program progresses.
Scribd founder Trip Alder
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)WW: What are users uploading the most of?
Alder: We get a lot of academic papers, school work, study notes, things like that. We get a lot of eBooks and presentations for work and legal documents. We get a lot of slideshows of photos.
WW: What's the average size of what people are uploading?
Alder: It ranges. We have a lot of really long documents that go over 1,000 pages, and a lot of really short ones too. The long stuff tends to be more interesting, it gets a lot more traffic too.
WW: Have you thought about spinning off versions for niche sites, like adult content or something document heavy like the Smoking Gun?
Alder: We've thought it, but we're working with educational institutions and big enterprises, and people can find that stuff somewhere else.
WW: Speaking of which, how is the push to get school to use your service?
Alder: There are institutions using it, we haven't been pushing that hard because it takes forever to contact universities. We talked to Harvard for example, where I went to school, and it's so hard to get the entire organization to use a single tool because it's so segmented into different areas. MIT OpenCourseWare is uploading all their documents. They created an account just to test it out--they don't have that much yet. They're going to upload about 100,000 documents. As we get bigger and get more resources we'll definitely try to get out and talk to more universities and get them to upload content.
WW: Do you have any users who are uploading an outrageous amount of stuff?
Alder: Yeah we have some power users. We had one guy who was uploading 40,000 documents or something. We ended up hiring him and now he's our community manager.
WW: What type of content was it?
... Read more
Calameo is a new service for publishing documents from your computer to the Web. Like Scribd, it's dead simple to use, and will slurp up all sorts of documents of up to 100MB in size. What makes the service noteworthy is that you can take documents online and offline with a click of a button, without removing them entirely--which could be useful to business or education users who want to upload many items, then make them public at a later date.
Of course, the strong suit with any of these document-hosting services is the viewer. Calameo's iteration is not nearly as fast as Scribd's iPaper at the highest quality settings, but it does a fantastic job rendering intricate details on PDFs. Power users can dial down the quality on a sliding scale of 1-100, with the lower numbers loading faster, and being suited for simple text documents. Users navigate the pages with simple page turns, which pop up in the corner of each page. There are also simple arrows on each side of the screen, as well as a table of contents to jump around--fairly standard stuff for a Flash-based document reader, but it works nicely.
What I like about Calameo though, is that it follows your mouse around, and has a beautiful full screen presentation mode that makes documents a highly interactive experience without detracting from the content. Users can add video or audio clips to these documents as long as they have a direct URL to a FLV or MP3 file that's hosted elsewhere. This is partially where the service breaks down a bit in its ease of use. You'll have to venture off elsewhere to find that content and get it hosted. It's really not hard if you use services such as Box.net or DivShare to host your files, but I think Calameo is missing out on a great opportunity to roll the storage for those files in the same place when it's already hosting your files in the first place.
I've embedded a sample Calameo document below. Be sure to check it out in the full screen viewer to get the whole experience.
See also: Scribd, Issuu (review), Yudu Freedom (review)
Thanks Fastjack!
Yudu Freedom is a new entrant to the world of online document publishing. Like Scribd, it lets you take PDF files from your hard drive and host them online for free. The files can be viewed a little faster than with Adobe's Acrobat reader, and it runs entirely in Flash with that neat page turning effect you might have seen in other document hosting services such as Issuu and Idio.
Yudu promises that any document you upload will be search engine optimized, making it show up in Google, and so on. There's also a built in search tool, and a simple way to skip ahead to the page you're looking for using a thumbnail viewer. My favorite feature, however, is that you don't need to sign up to use the service. You can simply dump the files and leave your e-mail address and it will send you a link when it's done processing. In my test, it processed my six page PDF and sent me the link in less than a minute.
What Yudu is seriously lacking is support for other document formats and the capability to embed PDFs on third party sites. In comparison, Scribd lets you upload nearly any kind of file on it, then share it anywhere with its iPaper service which launched in February. Between the two I'd rather use Scribd simply because of this.
Yudu's document viewer is simple and fast, although you can't embed it on third party sites like you can with competitors. To view it in action simply click on the image above.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Update (10:06 AM): The submission process differs from the original plan. If you have the address, please don't send anything there. Please check the updated instructions below. And yes--this is real. Post has been amended from the original to reflect these changes.
We know it's April 1st, but this is 100 percent real. I made James Yu, Senior Product Developer at Scribd swear on his unborn first child that this isn't an April fool's gag. Starting today the document hosting company will take any of your real documents and scan them for you to be hosted on Scribd.
The company has a strict process to make sure you're not just going to send them truck loads full of documents. You must follow these explicit instructions:
To participate, just send a brief description of the type and quantity of your documents to paper@scribd.com. A Scribd representative will reply shortly with further instructions for how and where to mail the documents. Scribd will have the content scanned and published on Scribd.com to be easily shared with anyone. Include your Scribd username along with your paper so that your content will be published in your account. If you are not a Scribd user, include your email address, and Scribd will email you a link to your published content.
The most amazing part in all of this is that this service is completely free. Comparable commercial services range in price, but some I found were up to $.80 a sheet. There also appears to be no size limit, meaning you could literally send several boxes of old papers you have laying around. I can see this being huge with college students who have those final papers that are marked up by their professors or teaching assistants with all the edits and notes that aren't on the final drafts on their computers.
Also worth noting is that documents are shredded after scanning, although if you're worried about privacy you should realize they're going on the Internet.
