An Incredible Resource, But Is It Legal?
Looking for a free copy of Ben Graham's classic The Intelligent Investor? Or free copies of other popular investment and business books, such as Porter's Competitive Strategy, Graham's Security Analysis, Soros's Alchemy of Finance, or Hagstrom's The Warren Buffett Way?
There's a website that apparently says, "No problem!" Take a look at the venture-backed startup Scribd.com and do some keyword searching. You'll be amazed at what you'll find. What's more, you won't have to read entire books on your screen -- the site lets you print and save documents in PDF and other formats.
To us, Scribd today feels like the early days of YouTube or Napster. While the site prohibits users from posting copyrighted material, there is apparently little in the way of proactive enforcement. Copyright owners can demand that certain content be removed from the site, but it appears most owners are way behind the curve in realizing that their content is even available without permission.
While it seems likely that Scribd will have to reign in some of the content on the site as owners wake up to the goings-on, this may be another example of traditional business models upended by disruptive technology.
Several years ago, Napster's free service was mostly shut down following legal action by the music industry, but music distribution and pricing models were changed forever. Similarly, while YouTube draws fewer infringement complaints from video content producers than in the past, owners now post much of their content on YouTube for free anyway -- to generate ad revenue, drive website traffic, or boost sales of higher-quality versions of the free videos.
For example, a YouTube search for "Michael Jackson Thriller" will take you to a free video posted by content owner Epic/Legacy Recordings and so far viewed more than 28 million times. A Charles Schwab ad was running at the bottom of the screen as we enjoyed another recent viewing of the video. Whether YouTube targeted the ad specifically to me based on our profile, or whether Thriller is popular with investors generally these days, we don't know.
The publishing industry simply does not seem to be getting a break. First, newspapers started losing classifieds revenue to sites like eBay. Then papers started losing readers to sites such as The Huffington Post and a sea of blogs, many written by individuals with the deadly combination of passion for a particular subject and little expectation of income from blogging. Now, sites such as Scribd may be on their way to pushing traditional book publishers into a new dilemma -- whether to try to put the genie of free electronic content back into the bottle, or to start preparing for new business models. We'll be watching.