Do We Need Three Million Books a Year?

By Jason Boog 

According to JaredFriedman23.jpgScribd CTO Jared Friedman (pictured), the solution to a healthier publishing industry is simple: increase the amount of books available from 300,000 to 3 million.

Over at our sibling blog BayNewser interviewed Friedman, getting his unconventional thoughts about the future of publishing. Scribd has been nicknamed YouTube for books, an online repository of millions of texts–one of the companies included in mediabistro.com’s eBook Summit. The interview covered everything from Harry Potter to e-readers.

What do you think? Here’s an excerpt: “Our thesis is that the limiting factor in the number of books that are published per year is not the amount of content that people are able to write and it’s not the amount of content that people are able to read. Rather it’s a structural limitation of the publishing industry itself…. We think that if we can cast off the artificial limitations that are imposed by the way the economics of the publishing industry currently work, we could potentially dramatically increase the amount of work that is published.”