If you’re a writer who likes to take the path off the beaten trail, you should check out docly, which claims to be the equivalent of Flickr for writing, mashed up with a bunch of other sites. Users are able to publish documents, and potentially sell them online, backed by numly, which provides digital rights management.

There are already other literature oriented websites out there, including bibli.ca (which also states that they’re like Flickr for textual works) and ublot (for textual collaboration). However, docly is on the first to allow users to sell their content.

docly has a rich editing environment which is not much different than Writely. You’re able to style, add lists, and do a whole multitude of other functions that we’ve come to expect from any rich online WYSIWYG editor. But alas, the interface doesn’t work in my favorite browser: Opera, which is almost a deal killer for me.

After finishing your masterpiece, you’re able to publish the document and share it with the world. docly has three account types: amateur, professional, and enterprise. If you have the free amateur account, you won’t be able to charge for your works. The professional account costs about $5 a month.

docly launched earlier this month, and there’s not much material written yet. Currently, there are less than 50 users who have published anything, and I haven’t seen any works that authors are charging for. The types of materials that are on docly range from song lyrics to poems to prose. However, it still remains to be seen which types of works will be the most profitable in this new publication model.

One weakness of docly is that the interface feels a unfinished. For example, you can rate publications, but there’s no obvious way to browse through all the publications by rating. Browsing is also heavily dependent on tags, which is not a perfect solution if what you really want to do is a linear browse. Also, you can browse the tagcloud, but tags listed for each publication are not linkified. You’re also confined to searching through tags, not the body of publications.

docly certainly has a lot of technical and design issues to work through before they can be branded the Flickr of publications. The interface just isn’t as robust as many of the content interfaces out there.

In the end, content will literally be king for docly. It will be interesting to check back once more serious publishers sign up and use it for their distribution. Will Publish 2.0 be a reality?

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