Scribd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scribd

Type

Private
San Francisco, California, USA
Founded
(March 2007)
Headquarters San Francisco, California, USA
Trip Adler (CEO, co-founder),
Key people Jared Friedman (CTO, co-founder),
Tikhon Bernstam (COO, co-founder)
Social reading and publishing
Services
platform
Website
Scribd.com
Alexa rank
411 (February 2015)[1]
Available in English, Spanish, Portuguese
Current status Active
Scribd /skrbd/ is a digital library and e-book, audiobook and comic book subscription
service that includes one million titles.[2][3][4][5] In addition, 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 from 1,000 publishers, including
HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Harlequin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Macmillan,
Bloomsbury, Workman, Lonely Planet, Perseus Book Group and Wiley.[8][9]
Scribd added audiobooks to their subscription service in November 2014 and comic books in
February 2015.[10][11] Scribd has 80 million users, and has been referred to as "the Netflix for
books."[12][13][14]

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.[13] While at Harvard, Trip Adler was
inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process required to publish academic
papers.[15] His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told it would take 18 months to have his
medical research published.[15] Adler wanted to create a simple way to publish and share
written content online.[16] He co-founded Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the
inaugural class of Y Combinator in the summer of 2006.[17] There, Scribd received its initial
$12,000 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.[15] The document reader turns PDFs, Word documents, and
PowerPoints into Web documents that can be shared on any website that allows embeds.[18] In
its first year, Scribd grew 218 percent with 23.5 million visitors as of November 2008.[19] It
also ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.[20]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell
digital copies of their work online.[21] That same month, the site partnered with Simon &
Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd.[22] 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.[23]

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.[24] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December
2009.[25] In August 2010, many notable documents hosted on Scribd began to go viral,
including the California Proposition 8 ruling, which received 6,000 views per second, and
HPs lawsuit against Mark Hurds move to Oracle.[26] [27]

Subscription service (2013-present)

In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited subscription service for e-books.[28]
This gave users unlimited access to Scribds library of digital books for a flat monthly fee.[29]
The company also announced a partnership with HarperCollins which made the entire
backlist of HarperCollins catalog available on the subscription service.[30] 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.[31] In March 2014, Scribd
announced a deal with Lonely Planet, offering the travel publishers entire library on its
subscription service.[32]
In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles from Simon
& Schuster.[33] These titles included works from authors such as: Stephen King, Doris Kearns
Goodwin, Ray Bradbury, Mary Higgins Clark, Walter Isaacson, Chuck Klosterman, David
McCullough, and Ernest Hemingway.[34]
In February 2016, it was announced that only titles from a rotating selection of the library
would be available for unlimited reading, and in addition a subscriber will have a credits to
read three books and one audiobook per month from the entire library; unused credits roll
over to the next month.[35]

Audiobooks
In November 2014, Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription library.[36] 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." [37] In
April 2015, the company expanded its audiobook catalog in a deal with Penguin Random
House.[38] This added 9,000 audiobooks to its platform including titles from authors like Lena
Dunham, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn, and George R.R. Martin.[39]

Comics
In February 2015, Scribd introduced comics to its subscription service.[40] The company
added 10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel, Archie, Boom!
Studios, Dynamite, IDW, and Valiant.[11] Through the service, subscribers now had access to
series such as Guardians of the Galaxy, Daredevil, X-O Manowar, and The Avengers.[41][42]

Timeline
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.[43] In
April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast",[44] which allows automatic
sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.[45] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its
integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the Facebook f8 Developer Conference.[46]
Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010 to become, according to TechCrunch,
"the social network for reading".[47]
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.[48]

Financials
The company was initially funded with US$12,000 from Y Combinator in 2006, and received
over US$3.7 million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group.[49][50]
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.
[51]
David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribds
board of directors in January 2010.[52]
In January 2011, Scribd raised an additional US$13 million in a round led by MLC
Investments of Australia and SVB Capital.[53] 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.[54]

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.[55] 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).[56] 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.[57]
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.[58] 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.'"[59] In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a
cover story on Scribd entitled "Betting the House on HTML5."[60]
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications,[61] but is no longer
offering new API accounts.[62]
Since 2010, Scribd has been available on mobile phones and e-readers, in addition to personal
computers. As of December 2013, Scribd is available through the various app stores on iOS
and Android smartphones and tablets, as well as the Kindle Fire and Nook tablets.

Reception
Scribd has been praised by several newspapers and magazines, including The New York
Times, Fast Company, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.[63] The company has been dubbed
the "Netflix for e-books"[28] by Wired, and is a known pioneer of the "all-you-can-read" model
for e-books.[64] Its founders, Trip Adler and Jared Friedman, have been named to Forbes 30
Under 30 and Inc. 35 Under 35.[65][66]
In April 2015, Los Angeles favorably reviewed Scribds subscription service by saying,
Subscribing to Scribd is sort of like shopping at Trader Joes: you may not find every product
you want, but it sure as hell is convenient, inexpensive, and downright delectable. [67] Scribd
has grown to more than 100 million users in 75 countries who use the site on a monthly basis.
[68]
As of June 2015, the Scribd app has been downloaded 5.7 million times on Android and
3.3 million times on iOS.[69]
Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner,[70] former California
gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew Ross
Sorkin, All Things D Reporter Kara Swisher, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), Red Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe, The World Bank, Ford Motor Company, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung
and the Hasmonean High School Living Torah.

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".[71] 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.[72][73][74] The suit was dropped in July 2010.[75][76]

In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA) takedown notices.[77]

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.[78][79][80]
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 Sonys DMCA request.[81]
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.[82]

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. [83] This proprietary technology works by analyzing documents for
semantic data, meta data, images, and other elements and creates an encoded fingerprint of
the copyrighted work. [84] BookID is available for free for authors and publishers whether or
not they choose to make their content available through the Scribd platform. [85]

Supported file formats

Supported formats include:[86]

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

References
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 Brad Stone (17 May 2009). "Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies". The New York
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 Gannes, Liz. "Leaked Facebook Movie Script Paints Zuckerberg as Vindictive and
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Uploading and Managing Documents". Retrieved October 11, 2010.

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