And then, this past January, after inking deals with various publishing houses, it started offering subscribers access to a broader range of e-books - though this was never publicized. Scribd has long offered subscriptions to the rather eclectic array of stuff that winds up on the site, which spans about 40 million books and documents from 100 different countries, written in 80 different languages. But it evolved into a tool that let publishers and authors not only get articles and books in front of readers, but also collect money for these digital texts. In the beginning, the site was mainly a way for anyone to quickly and easily publish documents to the net, from research papers to legal docs to, well, just about anything else. Trip Adler was at Harvard alongside Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg - "I was in the class they made The Social Network about," he says - and soon after he graduated, he and another Harvard student, Jared Friedman, launched Scribd.
The idea is that this will not only generate revenue for publishers, but give readers broader access to online books - and encourage them to buy titles from other sources. Just as Spotify and Netflix used all-you-can-stream services to help carve out a viable online future for music and videos, Adler and company hope to find a subscription sweet-spot for e-books that satisfies online readers as well as publishers. It's inevitable that there's something to do here in the book space too' It's a place where you can browse and skim and read whatever strikes your fancy, which might end up as a few paragraphs of the Christie classic sandwiched in between a chapter of Elmore Leonard crime fiction and a cover-to-cover romp through your favorite Neil Gaiman novel. This isn't a place where you purchase your very own digital copy of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.
The 29-year-old entrepreneur and his six-year-old San Francisco startup just unveiled an online subscription service that gives you unlimited access to a large library of digital books for a flat monthly fee, including titles from big-name publishing house HarperCollins. And now, Trip Adler and Scribd are doing it for books.
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