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Scribd
Scribd /ˈskrɪbd/ is an American e-book and audiobook
subscription service that includes one million titles.[2][3][4][5]
Scribd, Inc.
Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing
platform.[6]

Founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Type of Private
Bernstam, and headquartered in San Francisco, California, the business
company is backed by Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Charles Available in English, French,
River Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.[7] Scribd's e-book German,
subscription service is available on Android and iOS Indonesian, Italian,
smartphones and tablets, as well as the Kindle Fire, Nook, and Portuguese,
personal computers. Subscribers can access unlimited books a
Romanian,
month[8] from 1,000 publishers, including Bloomsbury,
Russian, Spanish
Harlequin, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Lonely
Planet, Macmillan, Perseus Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Founded March 2007
Wiley, and Workman.[9][10] Headquarters San Francisco,
California, US
Scribd has 80 million users, and has been referred to as "the
Netflix for books".[11][12][13] Key people Trip Adler
(co-founder and
CEO)
Jared Friedman
Contents (co-founder and
History CTO)
Founding (2007–2013) Tikhon Bernstam
Subscription service (2013–present) (co-founder and
Audiobooks COO)
Comics Services Social reading and
Timeline publishing platform

Financials URL Scribd.com (http

s://www.scribd.co
Technology
m/)
Reception
Alexa rank 197 (As of
Accusations of copyright infringement
1 October 2019)[1]
Controversies
BookID Current status Active

Supported file formats

See also
References
External links

History

Founding (2007–2013)
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Scribd began as a site to host and share documents.[12] While at Harvard, Trip Adler was inspired to
start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process required to publish academic papers.[14] His
father, a doctor at Stanford, was told it would take 18 months to have his medical research
published.[14] Adler wanted to create a simple way to publish and share written content online.[15] He
co-founded Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the inaugural class of Y Combinator in the
summer of 2006.[16] There, Scribd received its initial $120,000 in seed funding and then launched in
a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.[6]

Scribd was called "the YouTube for documents", allowing anyone to self-publish on the site using its
document reader.[14] The document reader turns PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoints into Web
documents that can be shared on any website that allows embeds.[17] In its first year, Scribd grew
rapidly to 23.5 million visitors as of November 2008.[18] It also ranked as one of the top 20 social
media sites according to Comscore.[18]

In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell digital
copies of their work online.[19] That same month, the site partnered with Simon & Schuster to sell e-
books on Scribd.[20] The deal made digital editions of 5,000 titles available for purchase on Scribd,
including books from bestselling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Mary Higgins Clark.[21]

In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies including The New York
Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and MediaBistro.[17]
ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009.[22] In August 2010,
many notable documents hosted on Scribd began to go viral, including the California Proposition 8
ruling, which received over 100,000 views in about 24 minutes, and HP's lawsuit against Mark
Hurd's move to Oracle.[23][24]

Subscription service (2013–present)

In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited

subscription service for e-books. This gave users unlimited access
to Scribd's library of digital books for a flat monthly fee.[11] The
company also announced a partnership with HarperCollins
which made the entire backlist of HarperCollins' catalog available
on the subscription service.[25] According to Chantal Restivo-
Alessi, chief digital officer at HarperCollins, this marked the first
time that the publisher has released such a large portion of its
catalog.[26] In March 2014, Scribd announced a deal with Lonely Screenshots of Scribd's subscription
Planet, offering the travel publisher's entire library on its service
subscription service.[27]

In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles from Simon &
Schuster.[28] These titles included works from authors such as: Ray Bradbury, Doris Kearns
Goodwin, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Isaacson, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and David
McCullough.[29]

Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription service in November 2014 and comic books in February
2015.[4][30]

In February 2016, it was announced that only titles from a rotating selection of the library would be
available for unlimited reading, and subscribers would have credits to read three books and one
audiobook per month from the entire library with unused credits rolling over to the next month.[31]

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The credits system was discontinued on February 6, 2018, in favor of a system of "constantly rotating
catalogs of ebooks and audiobooks" that provided "an unlimited number of books and audiobooks,
alongside unlimited access to news, magazines, documents, and sheet music"[32] for a monthly
subscription fee of US$8.99.[33] However, under this unlimited service, Scribd would occasionally
"limit the titles that you’re able to access within a specific content library in a 30-day period."[34]

In October 2018, Scribd announced a joint subscription to Scribd and The New York Times for
$12.99 per month.

Audiobooks

In November 2014, Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription library.[35] Wired noted that this was
the first subscription service to offer unlimited access to audiobooks, and "it represents a much larger
shift in the way digital content is consumed over the net."[36] In April 2015, the company expanded
its audiobook catalog in a deal with Penguin Random House.[37] This added 9,000 audiobooks to its
platform including titles from authors like Lena Dunham, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, and George
R.R. Martin.[38]

Comics

In February 2015, Scribd introduced comics to its subscription service.[39] The company added
10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel, Archie, Boom! Studios,
Dynamite, IDW, and Valiant.[30] These included series such as Guardians of the Galaxy, Daredevil,
X-O Manowar, and The Avengers.[40][41] However, in December 2016, comics were eliminated from
the service due to low demand.

Timeline
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.[42] In April
2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast",[43] which allows automatic sharing of
documents on Facebook and Twitter.[44] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of
Facebook social plug-ins at the Facebook f8 Developer Conference.[45]

Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010 to become, according to TechCrunch, "the social
network for reading".[46]

In October 2013, Scribd launched its e-book subscription service, allowing readers to pay a flat
monthly fee in exchange for unlimited access to all of Scribd's book titles.[47]

Financials
The company was initially funded with US$120,000 from Y Combinator in 2006, and received over
US$3.7 million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group.[48][7] In
December 2008, the company raised US$9 million in a second round of funding led by Charles River
Ventures with re-investment from Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.[49] David O. Sacks,
former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribd's board of directors in January
2010.[50]

In January 2011, Scribd raised an additional US$13 million in a round led by MLC Investments of
Australia and SVB Capital.[51] In January 2015, the company raised US$22 million in new funding
from Khosla Ventures with partner Keith Rabois joining the Scribd board of directors.[52]
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