Scribd

Scribd /skrbd/ is a digital library and 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 three 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]

History[edit]
Founding (20072013)[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 $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.[14] The document reader turns PDFs, Worddocuments, 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.[19]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell digital
copies of their work online.[20] That same month, the site partnered with Simon & Schuster to sell e-
books on Scribd.[21] 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.[22]
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.[23] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses 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, which received over 100,000 views in about 24 minutes, and HPs
lawsuit against Mark Hurds move to Oracle.[25] [26]

Subscription service (2013present)[edit]

Screenshots of Scribd's subscription service

In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited subscription service for e-books.[27] This gave
users unlimited access to Scribds library of digital books for a flat monthly fee.[28] The company also
announced a partnership with HarperCollins 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 released such a large portion of its
catalog.[30] In March 2014, Scribd announced a deal with Lonely Planet, offering the travel publishers
entire library on its subscription service.[31]
In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles 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 books 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 have credits to read three books and one
audiobook per month from the entire library; unused credits roll over to the next month.[36]

Audiobooks[edit]
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 is 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, Gillian
Flynn, and George R.R. Martin.[40]

Comics[edit]
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, subscribers 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 pulled from the service due to low demand.

Timeline[edit]
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.[44] In April
2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast",[45] which 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 f8Developer Conference.[47]
Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010 to become, according to TechCrunch, "the
social network for reading".[48]
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.[49]

Financials[edit]
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.[50][51] 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.[52] David O. Sacks,
former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribds 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 raised US$22 million in new funding
from Khosla Ventures with partner Keith Rabois joining the Scribd board of directors.[55]

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.[56] 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).[57] 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.[58]
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.[59] 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.'"[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 is no longer offering new
API accounts.[63]
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[edit]
Scribd has been praised by several newspapers and magazines, including The New York
Times, Fast Company, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.[64] The company has 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 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. [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 app
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 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[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".[72] 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.[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 Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) takedown notices.[78]

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.[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 Sonys DMCArequest.[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]
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.[84] 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.[85]

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. [86] 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. [87] BookID is available for free for authors and publishers whether or not they choose to make
their content available through the Scribd platform. [88]