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

million titles.[2][3][4][5] Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform.[6]

Founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam, and headquartered in
San Francisco, California, the company is backed by Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator,
Charles River Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.[7] 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[8] from 1,000
publishers, including Bloomsbury, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
Lonely Planet, Macmillan, Perseus Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Wiley, and
Workman.[9][10]

Scribd has 80 million users, and has been referred to as "the Netflix for books".[11][12][13]

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

History
Founding (2007–2013)

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)

Screenshots of Scribd's subscription service

In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited subscription service for e-books.[11]
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 Planet, offering the travel publisher's entire library on its
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; unused credits roll over to the
next month.[31]

Scribd's unlimited service launched on February 6, 2018, and includes access to 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 will "occasionally [...] limit the titles that [members are]
able to access within a specific content library in a 30-day period."[34] The previous credit
system for books and audiobooks was removed.[32]

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]

Technology
In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF 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
Accusations of copyright infringement

Scribd has been accused of copyright infringement. In September 2009, American author
Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted works of
innumerable authors".[61] 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.[62][63][64] The suit was dropped in July 2010.[65][66]
In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA) takedown notices.[67]

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 JRR Tolkien."[68]

Controversies

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 8 March 2013,
access to Scribd is blocked for Internet users in Turkey.[73]

In July 2014, Scribd was sued by Disability Rights Advocates, 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

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,
meta data, images, and other elements and creates an encoded "fingerprint" of the
copyrighted work.[77] BookID allows authors and publishers protect their content on the
Scribd platform.[78][better source needed]

Supported file formats

Supported formats include:[79]

 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
 Amazon Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited
 Document collaboration
 Oyster (company)
 Wayback Machine
 Webcite

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