A document-sharing website has staked a claim to the growing e-book market by opening an internet store.

Hoping to do for the written word what iTunes has done for music, the Scribd store will allow writers to set their own price for their work and keep 80 per cent of the revenue, a much higher figure than for other e-book publishing methods, such as via Amazon's Kindle.

Authors can permit any document bought from the Scribd store to be read on different gadgets – a personal computer, an electronic book reader such as the Kindle, or a smartphone. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being freely copied.

It will be the first time that the two-year-old service has charged for the material posted on its popular site, which is visited by more than 60 million people a month. It claims to have amassed 35 billion words in books, essays, PowerPoint presentations, legal briefs and other documents. The free service is used by the courts, leading companies, educational institutions and websites.

The site has been hit by accusations of piracy as people have posted unlicensed copies of books and other material. Scribd says that it acts immediately when it is alerted to a problem.

Three previously published authors have banded together to sell their latest books for just $2 (£1.30) per copy on Scribd. At that price, Kemble Scott will collect $1.60 for each electronic copy of his latest book, The Sower, that sells on Scribd. That is more than the $1.13 he got from each sale of his first book, SoMa, which carried a $15 cover price.

Publishers already committed to Scribd's store include O'Reilly Media, which specialises in books on technology. Simon & Schuster, Random House and a handful of other publishers began testing the service earlier this year, offering books and excerpts of new novels to promote them.

Scribd's store will also allow publishers or authors to sell individual chapters from books, much like Apple's iTunes enables music labels to sell single tracks from albums. Lonely Planet, which publishes travel guides, plans to use Scribd to sell chapters about specific cities to people who might not want to read about an entire country.

The company plans to release an Apple iPhone application to allow users to search and read documents. The minimum price in Scribd's store will be $1.