IT MIGHT be a book lover's dream, but it could prove a nightmare for the publishing industry: a "YouTube for documents" where you can download, among other things, free copies of the Harry Potter novels and the Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger.

More than 50,000 new documents a day are uploaded to the Californian website Scribd.com, which has 50 million users keen to share an eclectic mix of material: recipes, manuals, how-to guides, puzzles and novels. From the contemporary (Ken Follett and Jeffrey Archer), to the classic (Austen and Dostoevsky), if you want to read it, you'll probably find it on Scribd.com.

Much of what's on the site is legitimate: Barack Obama's presidential campaign used it to publish policy documents, and some US publishers have offered excerpts and free access to build publicity. But there is also a fair amount of content illegally uploaded, which is not news to the lawyer for J. K. Rowling, Neil Blair from the Christopher Little Literary Agency.

"There's two lots of things: one is J. K. Rowling books that people have just uploaded, and those are unauthorised and unlawful," he says. "But people also write their own stories - fan fiction. As long as these are appropriate - i.e. not pornographic - and they put their name next to it, we don't take any action."

Next to downloads of Rowling's novels was twilightdemi123's Harry Potter The New World ("This is just a story i made up at 1 o'clock soz if any spelling mistakes").

Scribd's vice-president for marketing, Tammy Nam, says its policy is to "immediately remove copyrighted material when we receive notices from copyright-holders". If any inappropriate material makes it in, "we're doing everything we can to prevent this".

Guardian News & Media