Simon & Schuster to sell books on Scribd.com

A friend with experience in the publishing industry forwarded me this article from Friday's NYT Business section:

TECHNOLOGY / INTERNET| June 12, 2009
Simon & Schuster to Sell Digital Books on Scribd.com
By BRAD STONE
The publisher said it would make about 5,000 titles available for
purchase as the book industry sought alternatives to Amazon's Kindle
store.

Recall that I posted this about Scribd back in April, linking to a Publisher's Weekly article that reported that such a deal was in the works. (I also posted this later the same day, so that you can read an entire book by Keynes via Scribd.)

My friend had this to say about this development, since we have been talking over the past year about the merits of the Sony and Amazon e-book readers: "This is big news. You might want to wait a while before buying a Kindle...
if the other major publishers follow suit and join Scribd, which I
think they will, the Kindle format is going to be in trouble (a la Beta
vs. VHS)."