New E-Book Lending Service Aims To Be Netflix For Books
Movie lovers have Netflix, music lovers have Spotify — and book lovers (whether they read literary fiction or best-selling potboilers) now have Scribd. The document sharing website has been around since 2007, but this week it launched a subscription service for e-book lending.
Though Scribd now has the backing of Big Five publisher HarperCollins, it began as a self-publishing site. CEO and co-founder Trip Adler says his father, a doctor, wanted to publish a medical paper. "We wanted build a site that would let him more easily just get his paper up there on the Web and distribute it, and we quickly expanded that to other kinds of content like books, school papers, essays, creative writing."
Scribd now has 80 million monthly users, and the new subscription service will allow them access to unlimited e-books on any digital device for a fee of $8.99 a month. That will include most of the books on the HarperCollins backlist.
"We thought this through on both the reader side and on the publisher's side," Adler says. "So on the readers' side we want a simple value proposition where they pay a flat monthly fee and they can read whatever they want. On the publisher's side ... we made it fit their traditional models where they get paid every single time someone reads a book, so it's almost as if they're selling books through this service."
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