I didn't like Scribd the first time I saw it, but it's starting to grow on me. The recommendation engine not only works but is brilliant, and I love the fact that I can download whole eBooks for free. My only gripe is the site design.

A quick look at the National Adult Literacy Survey shows the potential market is smaller than that of YouTube, but in some ways the stickiness of the eyeballs you do have is more important than the total eyeballs.

Also, I'm not sure how thrilled the seduction community and NLP community will be that all of their books are now online. I don't normally advocate piracy, but I think this is a really unique opportunity for grokking Net Natives circa 2007.

(Net Natives as used by Fred Wilson: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/06/net_natives.html)

update: When I say it's a unique opportunity for grokking net natives, I mean this in the same sense as when Paul Kedrosky blogged that the Amazon top 100 products list is more telling than the Ph.D. dissertation of the average would-be historian.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/12/27/top_sellers_at.html

Interesting. Just a point of reference:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4796

So, what was their financial business model again?