Reading subscription site Scribd announced today that more than 1 million people have signed up for the service, allowing them to access its vast content library of books, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers, and graphic novels. The company claims to have “the world’s largest library of digital content,” and it has grown paid subscriptions by over 40 percent since last year.
Originally founded in 2007 as a way to share documents, Scribd later shifted its focus to being a reading platform, introducing a subscription for users to access its library of ebooks, which it later expanded to include audiobooks and graphic novels. The company throttled the plan in 2016 (users could read three ebooks and an audiobook each month), but it ended up going back and reintroducing the unlimited plan last year. Subscribers pay $8.99 each month, and they can draw from the company’s entire library, although Scribd said that people who were borrowing too much would find themselves limited.
Competing with Amazon
As of a year ago, the site boasted more than 700,000 subscribers, and the company says that reintroducing the unlimited plan has worked. It grew its subscriber numbers by 40 percent in the last year, and Scribd says that it’s seen a 100 percent increase in the number of people listening to audiobooks.
The growth in subscribers is good news for Scribd, which is competing with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service. Its users pay $9.99 a month to consume unlimited ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines from its own massive library.