English academic, Rory Ridley-Duff, reaches publishing milestone

Sept. 5, 2009 - PRLog -- English academic Dr Rory Ridley-Duff has reached a milestone in electronic publishing by achieving more than 10,000 downloads from the US-based document repository Scribd.  In the same month, he surpassed 1,000 downloads for his academic papers from SHURA, the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive.  

Two of Rory's books have become particularly popular at Scribd.  The first book is Rory's novel Friends or Lovers, a story that brings to life issues raised by his academic research (http://www.scribd.com/doc/16592473/).  This has been featured by the site editors, and downloaded over 2,000 times since being uploaded in June 2009.  His most popular download, however, continues to be Emotion, Seduction and Intimacy, a scholarly work that explores the intersection of gender and emotion in the workplace (http://www.scribd.com/doc/16393568/).  The first and second editions of Emotion, Seduction and Intimacy have been downloaded over 4,000 times.  Both books develop themes that first appeared in Rory's PhD thesis, completed in 2005.  Surprisingly, even his PhD has been downloaded more than 500 times, indicating that Scribd attracts a diverse audience.

The author commented that "this is a significant milestone for an academic author because we're so used to publishing articles and books that very few people read.  Scribd offers a new way for the academic community to reach millions of potential readers.  In this way, work funded by taxpayers can actually reach the public rather than a closed academic community."

The US-based site http://www.scribd.com was established in 2007.  It now houses millions of documents and receives more than 60 million visitors each month.  With the goal of putting the process of publishing back into the hands of ordinary people, Scribd has already built one of the largest collections of electronic documents in the world.

Rory's next book Understanding Social Enterprise: Theory and Practice is due for publication by Sage in 2011.

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