Something Strange Happening at Scribd - Thanks to Smashwords

Ever hear the story of a blonde virgin on a NY subway - waiting, unsuspecting...

Scribd has been acting more strange than usual lately. Like a stalker in the bizarre NY Underworld. Well, maybe not that strange...

The strange behaviour of Scribd - auto publishing Smashword books underground.
(photocredit Ed Yourdon)
It's all some Victorian "underground" scene.

Scribd signed some deal with Smashwords to re-publish any author's books they had up. So now my two books which somehow made it through Smashwords "meatgrinder" are both auto-published via Scribd.

And any other version of these were auto-replaced with the Smashwords version.

Weirdest of all is that a book I hadn't published on Smashwords just "replaced" something I'd posted on Scribd (more than likely a blog post converted to a PDF.) But searching for that book on Smashwords proved that it's not there, either. (I'd never attempted to publish it there, since it was based on a public domain work.)

Scribd is already known for over-aggressive "copyright policing" (read: duplicate content filter) and I'd pretty much given up on using them as part of search engine marketing for that reason.

Now they are into this "replace with Smashwords" business.

Very underground.

At least they sent me an email.

More civilized than your traditional Underground Stalker...
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