Ebook Publishers available on Scribd

For a site with a trendy, minimal-vowel name, Scribd is a surprisingly solid platform, and easy to use. Check out the e-commerce options for Ebook Publishers to Watch by following this link.

Once you're there, you can buy Ebook Publishers to Watch, for $1.00. (That's the lowest price one can charge on Scribd. So it's a penny more than here.) You can also preview it, in Scribd's online reader.

But after you're bored with Ebook Publishers to Watch, bang around the Scribd neighborhood a bit.

These guys are energetic in that proactive, social-network kind of way: they've got all sorts of frenetic things you can do, other than just read, which I bet the Scribd people feel is just too simple, too basic, to propel the company into the corporate orbit they are aspiring to.

So register, and you'll enter a social event where the organizers are aggressively trying to get the party started. If you're in a sociable mood, you can create a profile, upload a picture of yourself, send Twitter-style messages ("Scribbles"), automatically route those messages to Twitter ("and soon Facebook"), subscribe to other members, join groups of like-minded Scribd members...

Maybe Scribd has to do this: to stay ahead of the social media curve and to keep the VCs interested. But all socializing aside, Scribd does have an impressive number of books, documents, term papers, etc. It could use some curating, but if you know what you're looking for, it's worth exploring.