Scribd /'skr?

bd/ is a digital library and e-book and audiobook subscription serv

ice that includes one million titles.[2][3][4][5] In addition, Scribd hosts 60 m
illion documents on its open publishing platform.[6]
Founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam, and headquar
tered in San Francisco, California, the company is backed by Khosla Ventures, Y
Combinator, Charles River Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.[7] Scribd's e-book su
bscription service is available on Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, as w
ell as the Kindle Fire, Nook, and personal computers. Subscribers can access thr
ee books a month[8] from 1,000 publishers, including Bloomsbury, Harlequin, Harp
erCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Lonely Planet, Macmillan, Perseus Book Gro
up, 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
1.1 Founding (2007 2013)
1.2 Subscription service (2013 present)
1.3 Audiobooks
1.4 Comics
2 Timeline
3 Financials
4 Technology
5 Reception
5.1 Accusations of copyright infringement
5.2 Controversies
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 A
dler was inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process requi
red to publish academic papers.[14] His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told i
t 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-fo
unded Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the inaugural class of Y Combinato
r in the summer of 2006.[16] 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 o
n the site using its document reader.[14] The document reader turns PDFs, Word d
ocuments, and PowerPoints into Web documents that can be shared on any website t
hat allows embeds.[17] In its first year, Scribd grew 218 percent with 23.5 mill
ion visitors as of November 2008.[18] It also ranked as one of the top 20 social
media sites according to Comscore.[19]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily uploa
d and sell digital copies of their work online.[20] That same month, the site pa
rtnered with Simon & Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd.[21] The deal made digit
al editions of 5,000 titles available for purchase on Scribd, including books fr
om bestselling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Mary Higgins Clark.[22]
In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies includin
g The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, T
echCrunch, and MediaBistro.[23] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and thes
es on Scribd in December 2009.[24] In August 2010, many notable documents hosted
on Scribd began to go viral, including the California Proposition 8 ruling, whi
ch received 6,000 views per second, and HP s lawsuit against Mark Hurd s move to Ora
cle.[25] [26]
Subscription service (2013 present)
Screenshots of Scribd's subscription service
In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited subscription service f
or e-books.[27] This gave users unlimited access to Scribd s library of digital bo
oks for a flat monthly fee.[28] The company also announced a partnership with Ha
rperCollins which made the entire backlist of HarperCollins catalog available on
the subscription service.[29] According to Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital
officer at HarperCollins, this marked the first time that the publisher has rel
eased such a large portion of its catalog.[30] In March 2014, Scribd announced a
deal with Lonely Planet, offering the travel publisher s entire library on its su
bscription service.[31]
In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titl
es from Simon & Schuster.[32] These titles included works from authors such as:
Ray Bradbury, Mary Higgins Clark, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ernest Hemingway, Walter
Isaacson, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and David McCullough.[33]
Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription service in November 2014 and comic b
ooks in February 2015.[34][35]
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 hav
e credits to read three books and one audiobook per month from the entire librar
y; unused credits roll over to the next month.[36]
Audiobooks
In November 2014, Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription library.[37] 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 i
s consumed over the net." [38] In April 2015, the company expanded its audiobook
catalog in a deal with Penguin Random House.[39] This added 9,000 audiobooks to
its platform including titles from authors like Lena Dunham, John Grisham, Gill
ian Flynn, and George R.R. Martin.[40]
Comics
In February 2015, Scribd introduced comics to its subscription service.[41] The
company added 10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel,
Archie, Boom! Studios, Dynamite, IDW, and Valiant.[35] Through the service, sub
scribers now had access to series such as Guardians of the Galaxy, Daredevil, X-
O Manowar, and The Avengers.[42][43] However, in December 2016, comics were pull
ed from the service due to low demand.
Timeline
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smart
phones.[44] In April 2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast",[45] w
hich allows automatic sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.[46] Also in
April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the
Facebook f8 Developer Conference.[47]
Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010 to become, according to TechC
runch, "the social network for reading".[48]
In October 2013, Scribd launched its e-book subscription service, allowing reade
rs to pay a flat monthly fee in exchange for unlimited access to all of Scribd's
book titles.[49]
Financials
The company was initially funded with US$12,000 from Y Combinator in 2006, and r
eceived over US$3.7 million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey H
ills Group.[50][51] In December 2008, the company raised US$9 million in a secon
d round of funding led by Charles River Ventures with re-investment from Redpoin
t Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.[52] David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and fou
nder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribd s board of directors in January 2010.[53]
In January 2011, Scribd raised an additional US$13 million in a round led by MLC
Investments of Australia and SVB Capital.[54] In January 2015, the company rais
ed US$22 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures with partner Keith Rabois j
oining the Scribd board of directors.[55]
Technology
In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF b
uilt for the web, which allows users to embed documents into a web page.[56] iPa
per was built with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across differe
nt 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).[57] All major document types can be formatted into iPaper incl
uding Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents, OpenOff
ice.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 vi
ewer is also embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple to embed docume
nts in their original layout regardless of file format. Scribd iPaper required F
lash cookies to be enabled, which is the default setting in Flash.[58]
On May 5, 2010, Scribd announced that they would be converting the entire site t
o HTML5 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.[59] TechCrunch reported that
Scribd is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief tech
nology officer Jared Friedman tells me: 'We are scrapping three years of Flash d
evelopment and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramat
ically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web p
age.'"[60] In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a cover story on Scribd entitled
"Betting the House on HTML5."[61]
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications,[62] but i
s no longer offering new API accounts.[63]
Since 2010, Scribd has been available on mobile phones and e-readers, in additio
n to personal computers. As of December 2013, Scribd is available through the va
rious app stores on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, as well as the Kind
le Fire and Nook tablets.
Reception
Scribd has been praised by several newspapers and magazines, including The New Y
ork Times, Fast Company, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.[64] The company ha
s been dubbed the "Netflix for e-books"[27] by Wired, and is a known pioneer of
the "all-you-can-read" model for e-books.[65] Its founders, Trip Adler and Jared
Friedman, have been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and Inc. 35 Under 35.[66][67]
In April 2015, Los Angeles favorably reviewed Scribd s subscription service by say
ing, Subscribing to Scribd is sort of like shopping at Trader Joes: you may not f
ind every product you want, but it sure as %%%% is convenient, inexpensive, and
downright delectable. [68] Scribd has grown to more than 100 million users in 75
countries who use the site on a monthly basis.[69] As of June 2015, the Scribd a
pp has been downloaded 5.7 million times on Android and 3.3 million times on iOS
.[70]
Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner,[71] former Califor
nia gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew
Ross Sorkin, All Things D Reporter Kara Swisher, the U.S. Federal Communication
s Commission (FCC), Red Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, United Nations Econ
omic 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 a
uthor Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the stolen copy
righted works of innumerable authors".[72] Her attorneys sought class action sta
tus in their efforts to win damages from Scribd for allegedly "egregious copyrig
ht infringement" and accused it of calculated copyright infringement for profit.
[73][74][75] The suit was dropped in July 2010.[76][77]
In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millenn
ium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices.[78]
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 Ti
mes.[79][80][81]
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 req
uest.[82]
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.[83]
BookID
To counteract the uploading of unauthorized content, Scribd created BookID, an a
utomated copyright protection system that helps authors and publishers identify
unauthorized use of their works on Scribd. [84] This proprietary technology work
s by analyzing documents for semantic data, meta data, images, and other element
s and creates an encoded fingerprint of the copyrighted work. [85] BookID is avail
able for free for authors and publishers whether or not they choose to make thei
r content available through the Scribd platform. [86]
Supported file formats
Supported formats include:[87]
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)