Scribd

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Scribd, Inc.

Type of Private

business

Available  English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, 

in Romanian, Russian, Spanish

Founded March 2007; 13 years ago

Headqua San Francisco, California, US

rters

Key peopl Trip Adler

e (co-founder and CEO)

Jared Friedman

(co-founder and CTO)

Tikhon Bernstam

(co-founder and COO)

Services Social reading and publishing platform

URL Scribd.com

Alexa ran  197 (As of 1 October 2019)[1]

Current s Active

tatus
 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

 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]
Founding (2007–2013)[edit]
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)[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.[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 with unused
credits rolling over to the next month.[31]
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[edit]
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[edit]
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[edit]
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[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.[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]
In 2019, Scribd raised $58 million in new funding led by growth firm Spectrum Equity. [53]

Technology[edit]
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. [54] 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). [55] 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. [56]
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.[57] 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.'" [58][59]
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications, [60] but is no longer
offering new API accounts.[61]
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 September 2009, American
author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the stolen copyrighted
works of innumerable authors".[62] 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. [63][64][65] The suit was dropped in
July 2010.[66][67]
In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices.[68]
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."[69]
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.[70][71][72]
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.
[73]

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.[74]
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.[75] 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. [76]
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. [77] This technology works by analyzing
documents for semantic data, meta data, images, and other elements and creates an
encoded "fingerprint" of the copyrighted work. [78]