Scribd Inc.

 /ˈskrɪbd/ is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that

includes one million titles.[1][2][3][4] Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing
platform.[5]
The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam,
and headquartered in San Francisco, California.[citation needed] Scribd's e-book subscription
service is available on Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, as well as the Kindle
Fire, Nook, and personal computers. Subscribers can access unlimited books a
month[6] from 1,000 publishers, including Bloomsbury, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, Lonely Planet, Macmillan, Perseus Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Wiley,
and Workman.[7][8]
Scribd has 80 million users, and has been referred to as "the Netflix for books".[9][10][11]

Contents

 1History
o 1.1Founding (2007–2013)
o 1.2Subscription service (2013–present)
o 1.3Audiobooks
o 1.4Comics
 2Timeline
 3Financials
 4Technology
 5Reception
o 5.1Accusations of copyright infringement
o 5.2Controversies
o 5.3BookID
 6Supported file formats
 7See also
 8References
 9External links

History[edit]

Previous logo

Founding (2007–2013)[edit]
Scribd began as a site to host and share documents.[10] While at Harvard, Trip Adler was
inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process required to publish
academic papers.[12] His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told it would take 18 months to
have his medical research published.[12] Adler wanted to create a simple way to publish and
share written content online.[13] He co-founded Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the
inaugural class of Y Combinator in the summer of 2006.[14] There, Scribd received its initial
$120,000 in seed funding and then launched in a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.
[5]

Scribd was called "the YouTube for documents", allowing anyone to self-publish on the site
using its document reader.[12] The document reader turns PDFs, Word documents,
and PowerPoints into Web documents that can be shared on any website that allows
embeds.[15] In its first year, Scribd grew rapidly to 23.5 million visitors as of November 2008.
[16]
 It also ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.[16]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell
digital copies of their work online.[17] That same month, the site partnered with Simon &
Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd.[18] 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.[19]
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.[15] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in
December 2009.[20] 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.[21][22]

Subscription service (2013–present)[edit]

Screenshots of Scribd's subscription service

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.
[9]
 The company also announced a partnership with HarperCollins which made the entire
backlist of HarperCollins' catalog available on the subscription service.[23] 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.[24] In March 2014, Scribd
announced a deal with Lonely Planet, offering the travel publisher's entire library on its
subscription service.[25]
In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles from Simon
& Schuster.[26] These titles included works from authors such as: Ray Bradbury, Doris
Kearns Goodwin, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Isaacson, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman,
and David McCullough.[27]
Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription service in November 2014 and comic books in
February 2015.[3][28]
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.[29]
The reporting 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"[30] for a monthly subscription fee of US$8.99.[31] 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."[32]
In October 2018, Scribd announced a joint subscription to Scribd and The New York Times
for $12.99 per month.
Audiobooks[edit]
In November 2014, Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription library.[33] 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."[34] In
April 2015, the company expanded its audiobook catalog in a deal with Penguin Random
House.[35] This added 9,000 audiobooks to its platform including titles from authors like Lena
Dunham, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, and George R.R. Martin.[36]

Comics[edit]
In February 2015, Scribd introduced comics to its subscription service.[37] The company
added 10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel, Archie, Boom!
Studios, Dynamite, IDW, and Valiant.[28] These included series such as Guardians of the
Galaxy, Daredevil, X-O Manowar, and The Avengers.[38][39] However, in December 2016,
comics were eliminated from the service due to low demand.

Timeline[edit]
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.[40] In
April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast",[41] which allows automatic
sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.[42] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its
integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the Facebook f8 Developer Conference.[43]
Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010, to become, according to TechCrunch,
"the social network for reading".[44]
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.[45]
In August 2020, Scribd announced its acquisition of the LinkedIn-owned SlideShare for an
undisclosed amount. [46]

Financials[edit]
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.[47] 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.[48] David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined
Scribd's board of directors in January 2010.[49]
In January 2011, Scribd raised an additional US$13 million in a round led by MLC
Investments of Australia and SVB Capital.[50] 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.[51]
In 2019, Scribd raised $58 million in new funding led by growth firm Spectrum Equity. [52]

Technology[edit]
In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF and built
for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page.[53] iPaper was built
with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems
(Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash
installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPhone).[54] All major
document types can be formatted into iPaper including Word
docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents, OpenOffice.org
XML documents, and PostScript files.
All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be
private or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also
embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed documents in their original
layout regardless of file format. Scribd iPaper required Flash cookies to be enabled, which
is the default setting in Flash.[55]
On May 5, 2010, Scribd announced that they would be converting the entire site
to HTML5 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.[56] TechCrunch reported that Scribd
is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer
Jared Friedman tells me: 'We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting
the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading
experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.'"[57][58]
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications,[59] but is no longer
offering new API accounts.[60]
Since 2010, Scribd has been available on mobile phones and e-readers, in addition to
personal computers. As of December 2013, Scribd became available on app stores and
various mobile devices.[citation needed]

Reception[edit]
Accusations of copyright infringement[edit]
Scribd has been accused of copyright infringement. In 2007, one year after its inception,
Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices.[61] In
March 2009, The Guardian writes, "Harry Potter author [J.K. Rowling] is among writers
shocked to discover their books available as free downloads. Neil Blair, Rowling’s lawyer,
said the Harry Potter downloads were 'unauthorised and unlawful'...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 J.R.R.
Tolkien."[62] In September 2009, American author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd
"shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors".[63] Her
attorneys sought class action status in their efforts to win damages from Scribd for
allegedly "egregious copyright infringement" and accused it of calculated copyright
infringement for profit.[64][65][66] The suit was dropped in July 2010.[67][68]

Controversies[edit]
In March 2009, the passwords of several Comcast customers were leaked on Scribd. The
passwords were later removed when the news was published by The New York Times.[69][70]
[71]

In July 2010, Gigaom reported that the script of The Social Network (2010) movie was
uploaded and leaked on Scribd; it was promptly taken down per Sony's DMCA request.[72]
Following a decision of the Istanbul 12th Criminal Court of Peace, dated March 8, 2013,
access to Scribd is blocked for Internet users in Turkey.[73]
In July 2014, Scribd was sued by Disability Rights Advocates (represented by Haben
Girma), on behalf of the National Federation of the Blind and a blind Vermont resident, for
allegedly failing to provide access to blind readers, in violation of the Americans with
Disability Act.[74] Scribd moved to dismiss, arguing that the ADA only applied to physical
locations. In March 2015, the U.S. District Court of Vermont ruled that the ADA covered
online businesses as well. A settlement agreement was reached, with Scribd agreeing to
provide content accessible to blind readers by the end of 2017.[75]

BookID[edit]
To counteract the uploading of unauthorized content, Scribd created BookID, an automated
copyright protection system that helps authors and publishers identify unauthorized use of
their works on Scribd.[76] This technology works by analyzing documents for semantic data,
metadata, images, and other elements and creates an encoded "fingerprint" of the
copyrighted work.[77]

Supported file formats[edit]

Supported formats include:[78]

 Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
 Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx, .ppsx)
 Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
 OpenDocument (.odt, .odp, .ods, .odf, .odg)
 OpenOffice.org XML (.sxw, .sxi, .sxc, .sxd)
 Plain text (.txt)
 Portable Document Format (.pdf)
 PostScript (.ps)
 Rich text format (.rtf)
 Tagged image file format (.tif, .tiff)

See also[edit]
 Slideshare
 Amazon Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited
 Document collaboration
 Oyster (company)
 Wayback Machine
 Webcite
Scribd Inc. /ˈskrɪbd/ is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that
includes one million titles.[1][2][3][4] Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing
platform.[5]
The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam,
and headquartered in San Francisco, California.[citation needed] Scribd's e-book subscription
service is available on Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, as well as the Kindle
Fire, Nook, and personal computers. Subscribers can access unlimited books a
month[6] from 1,000 publishers, including Bloomsbury, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, Lonely Planet, Macmillan, Perseus Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Wiley,
and Workman.[7][8]
Scribd has 80 million users, and has been referred to as "the Netflix for books".[9][10][11]

Contents

 1History
o 1.1Founding (2007–2013)
o 1.2Subscription service (2013–present)
o 1.3Audiobooks
o 1.4Comics
 2Timeline
 3Financials
 4Technology
 5Reception
 o 5.1Accusations of copyright infringement
o 5.2Controversies
o 5.3BookID
 6Supported file formats
 7See also
 8References
 9External links

History[edit]

Previous logo

Founding (2007–2013)[edit]
Scribd began as a site to host and share documents.[10] While at Harvard, Trip Adler was
inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process required to publish
academic papers.[12] His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told it would take 18 months to
have his medical research published.[12] Adler wanted to create a simple way to publish and
share written content online.[13] He co-founded Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the
inaugural class of Y Combinator in the summer of 2006.[14] There, Scribd received its initial
$120,000 in seed funding and then launched in a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.
[5]

Scribd was called "the YouTube for documents", allowing anyone to self-publish on the site
using its document reader.[12] The document reader turns PDFs, Word documents,
and PowerPoints into Web documents that can be shared on any website that allows
embeds.[15] In its first year, Scribd grew rapidly to 23.5 million visitors as of November 2008.
[16]
 It also ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.[16]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell
digital copies of their work online.[17] That same month, the site partnered with Simon &
Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd.[18] 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.[19]
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.[15] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in
December 2009.[20] 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.[21][22]

Subscription service (2013–present)[edit]

Screenshots of Scribd's subscription service

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.
[9]
 The company also announced a partnership with HarperCollins which made the entire
backlist of HarperCollins' catalog available on the subscription service.[23] 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.[24] In March 2014, Scribd
announced a deal with Lonely Planet, offering the travel publisher's entire library on its
subscription service.[25]
In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles from Simon
& Schuster.[26] These titles included works from authors such as: Ray Bradbury, Doris
Kearns Goodwin, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Isaacson, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman,
and David McCullough.[27]
Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription service in November 2014 and comic books in
February 2015.[3][28]
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.[29]
The reporting 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"[30] for a monthly subscription fee of US$8.99.[31] 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."[32]
In October 2018, Scribd announced a joint subscription to Scribd and The New York Times
for $12.99 per month.

Audiobooks[edit]
In November 2014, Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription library.[33] 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."[34] In
April 2015, the company expanded its audiobook catalog in a deal with Penguin Random
House.[35] This added 9,000 audiobooks to its platform including titles from authors like Lena
Dunham, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, and George R.R. Martin.[36]

Comics[edit]
In February 2015, Scribd introduced comics to its subscription service.[37] The company
added 10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel, Archie, Boom!
Studios, Dynamite, IDW, and Valiant.[28] These included series such as Guardians of the
Galaxy, Daredevil, X-O Manowar, and The Avengers.[38][39] However, in December 2016,
comics were eliminated from the service due to low demand.

Timeline[edit]
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.[40] In
April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast",[41] which allows automatic
sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.[42] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its
integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the Facebook f8 Developer Conference.[43]
Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010, to become, according to TechCrunch,
"the social network for reading".[44]
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.[45]
In August 2020, Scribd announced its acquisition of the LinkedIn-owned SlideShare for an
undisclosed amount. [46]

Financials[edit]
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.[47] 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.[48] David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined
Scribd's board of directors in January 2010.[49]
In January 2011, Scribd raised an additional US$13 million in a round led by MLC
Investments of Australia and SVB Capital.[50] 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.[51]
In 2019, Scribd raised $58 million in new funding led by growth firm Spectrum Equity. [52]

Technology[edit]
In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF and built
for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page.[53] iPaper was built
with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems
(Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash
installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPhone).[54] All major
document types can be formatted into iPaper including Word
docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents, OpenOffice.org
XML documents, and PostScript files.
All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be
private or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also
embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed documents in their original
layout regardless of file format. Scribd iPaper required Flash cookies to be enabled, which
is the default setting in Flash.[55]
On May 5, 2010, Scribd announced that they would be converting the entire site
to HTML5 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.[56] TechCrunch reported that Scribd
is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer
Jared Friedman tells me: 'We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting
the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading
experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.'"[57][58]
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications,[59] but is no longer
offering new API accounts.[60]
Since 2010, Scribd has been available on mobile phones and e-readers, in addition to
personal computers. As of December 2013, Scribd became available on app stores and
various mobile devices.[citation needed]

Reception[edit]
Accusations of copyright infringement[edit]
Scribd has been accused of copyright infringement. In 2007, one year after its inception,
Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices.[61] In
March 2009, The Guardian writes, "Harry Potter author [J.K. Rowling] is among writers
shocked to discover their books available as free downloads. Neil Blair, Rowling’s lawyer,
said the Harry Potter downloads were 'unauthorised and unlawful'...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 J.R.R.
Tolkien."[62] In September 2009, American author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd
"shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors".[63] Her
attorneys sought class action status in their efforts to win damages from Scribd for
allegedly "egregious copyright infringement" and accused it of calculated copyright
infringement for profit.[64][65][66] The suit was dropped in July 2010.[67][68]

Controversies[edit]
In March 2009, the passwords of several Comcast customers were leaked on Scribd. The
passwords were later removed when the news was published by The New York Times.[69][70]
[71]

In July 2010, Gigaom reported that the script of The Social Network (2010) movie was
uploaded and leaked on Scribd; it was promptly taken down per Sony's DMCA request.[72]
Following a decision of the Istanbul 12th Criminal Court of Peace, dated March 8, 2013,
access to Scribd is blocked for Internet users in Turkey.[73]
In July 2014, Scribd was sued by Disability Rights Advocates (represented by Haben
Girma), on behalf of the National Federation of the Blind and a blind Vermont resident, for
allegedly failing to provide access to blind readers, in violation of the Americans with
Disability Act.[74] Scribd moved to dismiss, arguing that the ADA only applied to physical
locations. In March 2015, the U.S. District Court of Vermont ruled that the ADA covered
online businesses as well. A settlement agreement was reached, with Scribd agreeing to
provide content accessible to blind readers by the end of 2017.[75]

BookID[edit]
To counteract the uploading of unauthorized content, Scribd created BookID, an automated
copyright protection system that helps authors and publishers identify unauthorized use of
their works on Scribd.[76] This technology works by analyzing documents for semantic data,
metadata, images, and other elements and creates an encoded "fingerprint" of the
copyrighted work.[77]

Supported file formats[edit]

Supported formats include:[78]

 Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
 Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx, .ppsx)
 Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
 OpenDocument (.odt, .odp, .ods, .odf, .odg)
 OpenOffice.org XML (.sxw, .sxi, .sxc, .sxd)
 Plain text (.txt)
 Portable Document Format (.pdf)
 PostScript (.ps)
 Rich text format (.rtf)
 Tagged image file format (.tif, .tiff)

See also[edit]
 Slideshare
 Amazon Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited
 Document collaboration
 Oyster (company)
 Wayback Machine
 Webcite