What kind of site is scribd

We use both data and intuition to tackle tough challenges and balance priorities, we grow through our mistakes, and often learn by doing. Ownership and accountability: We are all owners. We hold ourselves and each other accountable, engage in open dialogue, and we push one another to do our best work every day.

Sustainability: We are dedicated to our mission. We are strategic and take deliberate steps to build a sustainable business that will stand the test of time.

Community: We care deeply about our customers. Our community is the soul of the product and we work hard to understand and meet their needs. Love of reading: We believe in the importance of reading and use our product to make it a meaningful part of our lives. We launched as a simple way to publish any kind of written content on the web.

Now, Scribd is keeping reading alive in the 21st century. The leader in advanced document management software DMS , eFileCabinet puts all your data right at your fingert SlideShare is a slide hosting service that was developed by LinkedIn in It allows users to create slide presentations from PowerPoint slides, PDF documents, and other open-source slide platfo Magforest is an online digital magazines distribution platform for magazine publishers and readers.

An innovative digital magazine newsstand featuring hundreds of magazines. Missing a software in the list? We are always happy if you help us making our site even better. Overall Opinion: This company is a scam, they tend to overcharge people who use a credit card.

Cons: Just google the reviews for Scribd on reputable review sites like pissedconsumer. The company has very bad ratings.

Overall Opinion: Scribd has changed its model and anything you have saved but not read they will pull your access until the end of the month to those titles and half the time will extend it out further.

It is wrong for them to advertising the "unlimited benefits". I am not renewing my membership. Overall Opinion: Scribd has evolved a great deal since it was launched in It was originally designed for individuals to upload and share documents. The founder of the platform thought it would be a good alternative to traditional methods of publishing academic papers. Scribd made it possible to get documents published in a shorter period of time.

Flash forward to and Scribd has become a digital library that rivals Audible and other subscription services. It now is a repository for millions of documents, e-books, and audiobook files. Users can gain access to the collection by paying a modest subscription fee.

They are then given credits which can be used during the month. Once a user has exhausted their credits, no more downloads are permitted for that month. A basic subscription fee will allow an individual to choose three e-books per month for reading. One audiobook is allowed, and users can have unlimited access to other documents.

There are even sheet music files to download. The drawback is that the limited number of credits allotted each month is somewhat restrictive. Without any promotion or marketing, we saw the reading activity on their books quickly spike. We even saw one subscriber in New Zealand spend over 50 hours in one week reading books from these two publishers!

That was when we realized we were on to something. We knew that as soon as we signed more publishers and added more books, it would take off quickly. We have a team of 60 people, most of which are engineers or designers, so we have the bandwidth to build for many platforms. It's actually key to our value proposition that you can use the product on any platform, because we're making books available to you wherever and whenever you like. Kindle Fire is a key platform for us, because we're targeting book readers, and lots of book readers own Kindle Fires.

Probably the most difficult roadblock for us was getting publishers on board, particularly the big ones. The subscription model is very new for the publishing industry, as it switches the business model from an ownership model to an access model, and it's taken a while to get the big publishers comfortable with such a radical shift. We were able to get this done simply by taking time to talk through all the benefits and risks of the model, and demonstrating results through data.

We're able to drive a lot of revenue and distribution for publishers, particularly books that don't get read quite as much through the traditional retail model, and publishers are happy with this. We soft launched our book subscription service in January , and then publicly announced it with the participation of HarperCollins in October The big launch went exceptionally well, because our product was well built out and had already been live and tested by users for months.

Because we already had the subscriber base growing exponentially for the nine months leading up to the launch, the addition of the new books and the publicity were like rocket fuel to a growth curve that was already hockey-sticking.

Growth has remained excellent since launch too. User criticism and requests are extremely valuable feedback. I searched for them and nothing came up. Soon I realised that all but two of the books I had wanted to listen to were unavailable.

Conveniently for Scribd, the books would only come available a day after the trial would end. I was annoyed. I ended up listening to Hunted by Meagan Spooner in Scribd, although I had that title available through my library as well. Earlier I had received an email from Scribd stating that my next month would be free of charge because I had referred someone to the service.

Disclaimer : Again, I basically abused the referral system by referring my husband. I resumed my own Scribd subscription as I was supposed to get a month free of charge. While I listened to the last chapter of Last Magician, I was browsing my saved list to decide on what to listen to next.

Then the minute I finished The Last Magician, every single audiobook in my saved list became unavailable. How convenient for Scribd. I took screenshots of all the unavailable titles in my list on 31st of August, here they are in all their unavailable glory:. So how can Scribd say that their service is unlimited when they make all popular titles unavailable after you have listened to one or two of their books? Well I wanted to find out so I emailed Scribd.

I promise that I was much nicer in the following conversations with Scribd. Sounds completely fine but I felt that this is not the case in reality. If publisher contracts are driving the availability of books in Scribd, then books only from a certain publisher should become unavailable after finishing a novel.

If popularity, however, drives the availibity of books, then the most popular of the books should become unavailable after I finish a book. Both of these conditions are unrelated to the fact that I have a book in my saved list. Some of them would be bound to stay available if the availability was controlled by either publisher contracts or popularity or both! I reckoned that if Scribd was being honest and clear about everything, then all of the books should stay unavailable for me until the stated date.

The fact that I want to read that book the book being in my saved list should have nothing to do with contracts. Interestingly, a day after deleting everything from my saved list, this lil friend pops up available:. This means that the unavailibity of titles is indeed somehow related to whether the user wants to listen to that book.

I emailed Scribd again, patiently explaining the results of my little investigation and asking them to explain exactly how Scribd works behind the scenes. The books are selected by author, genre, publishers and probably also popularity and your interest towards that book.

That something might be the bible or a random classic in Spanish. After all of the above, I noticed that Scribd had billed me on the month that was supposed to be free of charge. Scribd answered by refunding the month and closing my account entirely, 3 weeks before the supposed end of my free month. I was actually relieved after all the emotional turmoil I had gone through with Scribd, now it was over.

Nevertheless, I was confident that I wanted to share the entire journey because I constantly saw everyone, everywhere recommending Scribd without discussing the bad aspects to it. I shared my experience in the comments and discussed with others how Scribd is basically scamming us by saying that their service is unlimited. If you've been considering signing up for Scribd, don't bother. Their business model has gone to hell. I've been waiting a month on a long list of audiobooks to come available today.

Hey Pauliina— We're so sorry for the trouble! We want to make this right for you and have reopened your case. Please check your email for more from our support team. I received another email from Scribd soon after, filled with apologies. They told me that they would give me a three month free access to Scribd, and right after I received an email from Scribd that my account has been reactivated.

Is Scribd really the Netflix for books? Netflix allows you an unlimited access to all of their movies, tv-series, documenteries and so on. The only limitation is your area; the same content is not available in the US and the UK. But no matter how many series you binge-watch, Netflix will never make any of the series unavailable.

Scribd works kind of like Netflix in the way that it also has area limitations and not all of the same titles are available in all countries. But as detailed above, Scribd has another, major limitation. After a certain number of reads, you will no longer have access to any of the popular content in Scribd. So the Good Place is suddenly off-limits and your Saturday binge-watching marathon is absolutely ruined.

Because as emotional beings, humans get unbelievably upset when they are promised something nice only to have that nice thing made unavailable. I have deduced that in Scribd the availability of ebooks is not affected by your audiobook listening and vice versa. I included the first 6 books and also books I find it hard to believe that it would make the top of the Scribd list. All the others on the list are very random as well, and most of them are very religious.

I included the books because Binti by Nnedi Okorafor is 12 in my list. Because I have already listened to it in Scribd. Now if we compare the left side to the right side, we can clearly see that the incognito list of bestsellers are actually bestsellers.

If you read ebooks on your tablet, laptop, computer or mobile and you listen to one or at maximum two audiobooks a month, Scribd could perfect for you. Scribd is cheaper than most audiobook services and you get the access to ebooks too which is not included in services like Audible.

I also listen to about 4 audiobooks a month.