In the company's largest publisher deal since its inception, Scribd has teamed up with ProQuestUMI to sell over 14,000 graduate dissertations and theses on the site.

Described by some as a "YouTube for books," Scribd collects thousands of documents, from scholarly abstracts to newspaper stories. The partnership will carry work from 14 universities including Princeton, University of Arizona, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bringing a fraction of ProQuestUMI's 2 million doctoral dissertations to Scribd. The site currently has more than 48,000 monthly readers, and so far they have picked an odd mix of texts.

Priced at $49 apiece, the most popular theses are: "Single-name and multi-name credit derivatives: Pricing and calibration using multiscale asymptotic methods;" "Parents' vicarious shame and guilt responses to children's wrong-doings;" and the 591-page philosophy work, "Resolved to fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits & the miracle of portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World."