Scribd

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Scribd, Inc.

Type of Private

business

Available  English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, 

in Romanian, Russian, Spanish

Founded March 2007; 13 years ago

Headqua San Francisco, California, US

rters

Founder( Trip Adler

s) Jared Friedman

Tikhon Bernstam

Key peopl Trip Adler

e (co-founder and CEO)

Jared Friedman

(co-founder and CTO)

Tikhon Bernstam

(co-founder and COO)

Services Social reading and publishing platform

URL www.scribd.com

Current s Active

tatus
Scribd Inc. /ˈskrɪbd/ is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that
includes one million titles.[1][2][3][4] Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open
publishing platform.[5]
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.[6] 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[7] from 1,000 publishers,
including Bloomsbury, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Lonely
Planet, Macmillan, Perseus Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Wiley, and Workman.[8][9]
Scribd has 80 million users, and has been referred to as "the Netflix for books".[10][11][12]

Contents

 1History
o 1.1Founding (2007–2013)
o 1.2Subscription service (2013–present)
o 1.3Audiobooks
o 1.4Comics
 2Timeline
 3Financials
 4Technology
 5Reception
o 5.1Accusations of copyright infringement
o 5.2Controversies
o 5.3BookID
 6Supported file formats
 7See also
 8References
 9External links

History[edit]

Previous logo

Founding (2007–2013)[edit]
Scribd began as a site to host and share documents. [11] While at Harvard, Trip
Adler was inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process required to
publish academic papers.[13] His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told it would take 18
months to have his medical research published.[13] Adler wanted to create a simple
way to publish and share written content online. [14] He co-founded Scribd with Jared
Friedman and attended the inaugural class of Y Combinator in the summer of 2006.
[15]
 There, Scribd received its initial $120,000 in seed funding and then launched in a
San Francisco apartment in March 2007.[5]
Scribd was called "the YouTube for documents", allowing anyone to self-publish on
the site using its document reader.[13] The document reader
turns PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoints into Web documents that can be
shared on any website that allows embeds.[16] In its first year, Scribd grew rapidly to
23.5 million visitors as of November 2008.[17] It also ranked as one of the top 20 social
media sites according to Comscore.[17]
In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload
and sell digital copies of their work online.[18] That same month, the site partnered
with Simon & Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd.[19] 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.[20]
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.[16] ProQuest began publishing
dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009. [21] 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.[22][23]
Subscription service (2013–present)[edit]

Screenshots of Scribd's subscription service

In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited subscription service for e-
books. This gave users unlimited access to Scribd's library of digital books for a flat
monthly fee.[10] The company also announced a partnership with HarperCollins which
made the entire backlist of HarperCollins' catalog available on the subscription
service.[24] 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.[25] In March 2014, Scribd announced a deal with Lonely Planet, offering the
travel publisher's entire library on its subscription service. [26]
In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles
from Simon & Schuster.[27] These titles included works from authors such as: Ray
Bradbury, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Isaacson, Stephen
King, Chuck Klosterman, and David McCullough.[28]
Scribd added audiobooks to its subscription service in November 2014 and co