Scribd

An American 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 unlimited 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"
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 $120,000 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, Word documents,
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.[18]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell digital
copies of their work online.[19] That same month, the site partnered with Simon & Schuster to sell
e-books on Scribd.[20] 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.[21]
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.[17] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December
2009.[22] 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 HP's lawsuit against Mark Hurd's move to Oracle.[23][24]