The publishers of bestselling authors JK Rowling, Aravind Adiga and Ken Follett have been shocked by the news that their authors' latest books are available to read for free on a US website. Internet users can not only read free copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, The White Tiger and World Without End at Scribd.com, but also download the text onto their computers to edit as they see fit.

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The San Francisco-headquartered company was set up in March 2007 and claims to have more than 50 million readers a month, with more than 50,000 new documents uploaded by users every day. The Obama campaign used it to publish policy documents, and the site has recently signed a deal with some US publishers to post books and extracts with permission.

Tammy Nam, Scribd vice president for marketing, said that its policy was to "immediately remove copyrighted material when we receive notices from copyright holders", but that it had received no take down notice from Rowling's lawyers. "Our community is generally very good at policing itself and let us know when they come across copyrighted works or other inappropriate material," she added, saying that Scribd also has a copyright management system which contains "tens of thousands of works that have been entered or flagged as copyrighted - so that if anyone tried to upload anything in that system, they're immediately denied".

Rowling's novels aren't the only ones to be available from Scribd. A quick search throws up novels from Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Archer, Ken Follett, Philippa Gregory, and JRR Tolkien. "We are monitoring this and are concerned about it," said Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors. "Internet piracy is increasing," he continued, advising authors to monitor sites such as Scribd.