Scribd

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Scribd

Type

Private

Founded

San Francisco, California, USA

(March 2007)

Headquarters

San Francisco, California, USA

Key people

Trip Adler (CEO, co-founder),

Jared Friedman (CTO, co-founder),
Tikhon Bernstam (COO, co-founder)

Services

Social reading and publishing platform

Website

Scribd.com

Alexa rank

411 (February 2015)[1]

Type of site

Social Software

Available in

English, Spanish, Portuguese

Current status

Active

Scribd /skrbd/ is a digital library, featuring an ebook, audiobook and comic booksubscription
service that includes New York Times Best-Sellers and classics.

Launched in 2007 by Trip Adler and Jared Friedman, and headquartered in San Francisco, CA,
Scribd also features written works contributed by users around the world. Backed by Y
Combinator, Charles River Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures, Scribd serves more than 80 million
active readers coming to the site every month.[2]
Scribd's subscription service is available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phonesmartphones and
tablets, as well as the Kindle Fire, Nook, and personal computers for afee which lets readers have
unlimited access to more than 500,000 books from over 900 publishers, including Harper
Collins, Simon and Schuster, RosettaBooks, and Workman.[3]In November 2014, audiobooks were
added and in February 2015 comic books were added, both without an additional fee to the
subscription.[4][5]
Contents
[hide]

1 History

2 Timeline

3 Financials

4 Technology

5 Reception
o

5.1 Accusations of copyright infringement

5.2 Controversies

6 Supported file formats

7 See also

8 References

9 External links

History[edit]
The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler was at Harvard and had a conversation
with his father, John R. Adler, about the difficulties of publishing academic papers. He teamed up
with co-founders Jared Friedman and Tikhon Bernstamm and they attendedY
Combinator in Cambridge in the summer of 2006.[6] Scribd was launched from a San Francisco
apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20 social
media sites according to Comscore.[7] In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store[8] and shortly
thereafter closed a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd.[9] Over 900 publishers,

includingHarperCollins, Harvard University Press, Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, Wiley, Pearson, Random House, RosettaBooks, Stanford University Press, and Workman,
are now[when?] associated with Scribd.[citation needed] ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on
Scribd in December 2009.[citation needed]
In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies with The New York
Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and MediaBistro.
[10]
Over 100 media companies now use Scribds branded reader to embed source material into their
stories. In August 2010, news stories began to break and documents and books began to go viral on
Scribd including the overturned Prop 8 and HPs lawsuit against Mark Hurds move to Oracle
Corporation.[citation needed]
In October 2013, Scribd officially launched the first unlimited access subscription service for digital
books, often called the "Netflix for ebooks",[11] giving readers unlimited access to Scribd library.[12] The
company also announced a partnership with major publishing company HarperCollins. [2] The official
statement revealed that the "majority" of the HarperCollins US and HarperCollins Christian catalogs
will be available in Scribd's subscription service. Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at
HarperCollins, explained to the media that the deal represents the first time that the publisher has
released such a large portion of its catalog.[13]
As of December 2013, Adler is the CEO of Scribd, where he is responsible for the product and
strategic direction of the company. Adler was named in BusinessWeek's "Best Young Tech
Entrepreneurs 2010" list.[14]
In January 2015, the company raised $22 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures with
partner Keith Rabois joining the Scribd board of directors.[15]

Timeline[edit]
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones.[16] In April
2010 Scribd launched a new feature called "Readcast", [17] which allows automatic sharing of
documents on Facebook and Twitter.[18] Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of
Facebook social plug-ins at the Facebook f8 Developer Conference.[19]
Scribd rolled out a redesign on September 13, 2010 to become, according to TechCrunch, "the
social network for reading".[20]
In October 2013, Scribd launched its ebook subscription service, allowing readers to pay a flat
monthly fee in exchange for unlimited access to all of Scribd's book titles. [21]

Financials[edit]
The company was initially funded with US$120,000 from Y Combinator, and received over US$3.7
million in June 2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group.[22][23] In December 2008, the
company raised US$9 million in a second round of funding, led byCharles River Ventures with reinvestment from Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group, and hired as president George
Consagra, former Bebo COO and managing director of Organic Inc.[24] Consagra left Scribd and
became CEO of Good Guide in August 2010.
David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribds board of
directors in January 2010. In January 2011, Scribd raised its largest round, bringing in an additional
$13M. The latest round was led by MLC Investments of Australia and SVB Capital and included
several previous investors.[25]

Technology[edit]

In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF built for the web,
which allows users to embed documents into a web page. [26] iPaper was built with Adobe Flash,
allowing it to be viewed the same across different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux)
without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash installed (although Scribd has announced nonFlash support for the iPhone).[27] All major document types can be formatted into iPaper including
Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs,OpenDocument documents, OpenOffice.org
XML documents, and PostScript files.
All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be private
or open to the larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also embeddable in any
website or blog, making it simple to embed documents in their original layout regardless of file
format. Scribd iPaper required Flash cookies to be enabled, which is the default setting in Flash.[28]
On May 5, 2010, Scribd announced that they would be converting the entire site to HTML5 at
the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.[29] TechCrunch reported that Scribd is migrating away from
Flash to HTML5. "Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: 'We are
scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we
believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can
become a Web page.'"[30] In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a cover story on Scribd entitled
"Betting the House on HTML5."[31]
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications.[32]
Since 2010, Scribd has been available on mobile phones and e-readers, in addition to personal
computers. As of December 2013, Scribd is available through the various app stores on iOS and
Android smartphones and tablets, as well as the Kindle Fire and Nook tablets.

Reception[edit]
Scribd has been praised by several newspapers and magazines, including The New York
Times, Fast Company, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.[33] In 2013, the company was dubbed
the "Netflix for ebooks"[11] by Wired, and is a known pioneer of the "all-you-can-read" model for
ebooks.[34]
According to Scribd, more than 80 million readers from over 100 countries use the site on a monthly
basis. Their library includes more than 100,000 subscription books from 900+ publishers, and over
40 million documents and books have been uploaded to the site. Scribd readers have access to
books by famous authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Paolo Coelho, and Meg Cabot.
Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner,[35] former California gubernatorial
candidate Meg Whitman, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, All Things D
Reporter Kara Swisher, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission(FCC), Red
Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, The
World Bank, Ford Motor Company, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and the Hasmonean High
School Living Torah.

Accusations of copyright infringement[edit]

Scribd has often been accused of copyright infringement. In March 2009, Scribd launched a
"copyright management system" and has made upgrades to its system including the reported
addition of OCR. The New York Times reported in May 2009 that Scribd was hostingpirated works by
authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, J.K. Rowling, and Stephen King.[36]
In September 2009, American author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the
stolen copyrighted works of innumerable authors."[37] Her attorneys Joe Sibley and Kiwi
Camara sought class action status in their efforts to win damages from Scribd for allegedly
"egregious copyright infringement."[38][39] On May 11, 2009, Motoko Rich, writing in the New York

Times, reported on Scribd's hosting of pirated works. Sibley Camara filed a class action lawsuit
against Scribd, accusing it of calculated copyright infringement for profit. [40] The suit was dropped in
July 2010.[41][42]
In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) takedown notices.[43] The total number of DMCA notices that have been served to the
company is unknown, but, on 8 January 2013, a single author Steven Saylornotified Scribd of 17
unauthorized uploads of his copyrighted work.[44]

Controversies[edit]
In March 2009, the passwords of several Comcast customers were leaked on Scribd. The
passwords were later removed when the news was published by The New York Times.[45][46][47]
In July 2010, GigaOM reported that the script of The Social Network (2010) movie was uploaded and
leaked on Scribd; it was promptly taken down per Sonys DMCA request.[48]
Following a decision of the Istanbul 12th Criminal Court of Peace, dated 8 March 2013, access to
Scribd is blocked for Internet users inTurkey.[49]

Supported file formats[edit]

Supported formats include:[50]

Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)

Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx, .ppsx)

Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)

OpenDocument (.odt, .odp, .ods, .odf, .odg)

OpenOffice.org XML (.sxw, .sxi, .sxc, .sxd)

Plain text (.txt)

Portable Document Format (.pdf)

PostScript (.ps)

Rich text format (.rtf)

Tagged image file format (.tif, .tiff)

Document collaboration

See also[edit]

Wayback Machine

Webcite

References[edit]
1.

Jump up^ "Scribd.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-1202.

2.

^ Jump up to:a b Julie Bosman (October 1, 2013). "HarperCollins Joins

Scribd in E-Book Subscription Plan". Retrieved December 8, 2013.

3.

Jump up^ Holmes, David (2013-11-18). "What does achieving a big

milestone get you at Scribd? An equally big office perk.". Pando.com.
Retrieved 2013-12-30.

4.

Jump up^ Scribd adds unlimited audiobooks to its $8.99 subscription

ebook service. Retrieved 6 Nov 2014

5.

Jump up^ Read thousands of comic books with a Scribd

subscription.Engadget. Retrieved 11 Feb 2015.

6.

Jump up^ "Scribd". Crunchbase.com. Retrieved 2013-12-30.

7.

Jump up^ "Scribd had a blowout year and so did the web document".

8.

Jump up^ Brad Stone (17 May 2009). "Site Lets Writers Sell Digital
Copies". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 October 2010.

9.

Jump up^ Brad Stone (11 July 2009). "Simon & Schuster to Sell
Digital Books on Scribd.com". The New York Times. Retrieved11
October 2010.

10. Jump up^ "From The Desk Of Your News Outlet And Scribd".
Reuters. 2009-10-07. Retrieved 2009-10-07.
11. ^ Jump up to:a b Metz, Cade. "Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple
With 'Netflix for Books'". Wired. Retrieved 2013-12-30.

12. Jump up^ "Scribd Launches First Global, Multi-Platform Digital Book
Subscription Service" (Press release). Scribd. 2013-10-01.
Retrieved 2013-12-30.
13. Jump up^ Anthony Ha (1 October 2013). "With HarperCollins Deal,
Scribd Unveils Its Bid To Become The Netflix For Books". TechCrunch.
AOL Inc. Retrieved 1 October 2013.
14. Jump up^ "Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010". Business Week.
Retrieved 2010.
15. Jump up^ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/02/scribd-khosla-funding/
16. Jump up^ Fowler, Geoffrey A. (2010-02-10). "Scribd Plans Mobile
Application". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2010-02-10.
17. Jump up^ "Scribd gets 'Readcasting': Autosharing made easy". CNet.
Retrieved 2010-04-21.
18. Jump up^ "Scribd launches readcast". Marketwire. Retrieved 201004-15.
19. Jump up^ "Scribd's bet on the Facebook Effect". CNN. 2010-04-21.
Retrieved 2010-04-21.
20. Jump up^ "Scribd Redesign Is An Attempt To Become A "Social
Network For Reading"". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
21. Jump up^ Carr, Austin (2013-10-01). "Scribd, HarperCollins Launch
$8.99 Subscription Book Service". Fast Company. Retrieved2013-1230.
22. Jump up^ "Scribd Banks $3.5 Million from Redpoint".
23. Jump up^ "Scribd CrunchBase Company Profile".
24. Jump up^ "Scribd raises $9 million, hires new president for social
publishing".

25. Jump up^ "Scribd Raises $13 Million To Support Mobile Moves,
Product Expansion". paidContent.org. 19 Jan 2011. Retrieved22
November 2012.
26. Jump up^ "iPaper: a Simple Way to View and Share Documents on
the Web". Wired. 2008-02-20. Retrieved 2014-08-28.
27. Jump up^ "Scribd on your iPhone".
28. Jump up^ "Global Storage Settings panel". Macromedia.com.
Retrieved2009-02-01.
29. Jump up^ "HTML5 and The Future of Publishing". Web 2.0 Expo.
Retrieved 2010-05-06.
30. Jump up^ Erick Schonfeld (May 5, 2010). "Scribd CTO: We Are
Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5".
RetrievedOctober 11, 2010.
31. Jump up^ "Betting the House on HTML 5". Publishers Weekly.
Retrieved2010-07-26.
32. Jump up^ "Scribd SAP Largest API Integration Press Release".
Scribd. 2009-03-10. Retrieved 22 September 2010.
33. Jump up^ "Press". Scribd. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
34. Jump up^ Schnuer, Jenna (2013-11-08). "We Test It: Scribd's All-YouCan Read Digital Buffet". Entrepreneur.com. Retrieved 2013-12-31.
35. Jump up^ "Mark Warner". scribd.com. 29 March 2009. Retrieved1
January 2010.
36. Jump up^ Motoko Rich (2009-05-11). "Print Books Are Target of
Pirates on the Web". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
37. Jump up^ Johnson, Bobbie (2009-09-21). "Book sharing site Scribd
rejects claims of copyright infringement". The Guardian (London).

38. Jump up^ Greg Sandoval (September 19, 2009). "Jammie Thomas
lawyers file suit against Scribd". Retrieved October 11, 2010.
39. Jump up^ Motoko Rich (2009-09-19). "Jammie Thomas lawyers file
suit against Scribd". CNET News.com. Retrieved 2009-09-19.
40. Jump up^ "Class Action Copyright Suit Filed Against Scribd... By
Jammie Thomas' Lawyers?". TechDirt. 2009-09-21. Retrieved2009-0921.
41. Jump up^ "Lawsuit Saying Scribd's Copyright-Protection Filters
Infringe On Copyrights Has Been Dumped". Scribd. TechDirt. 19 July
2010. Retrieved 24 September 2010.
42. Jump up^ Kravets, David (2010-07-19). "Lawsuit Dropped; Claimed
That Copyright-Filtering Violates Copyright". Wired. Retrieved2013-0221.
43. Jump up^ "Scribd looks like a winner". Scribd. TechCrunch. 29 March
2009. Retrieved 1 January 2010.
44. Jump up^ Steven Saylor (8 January 2013). "Archive Page". Steven
Saylor. Steven Saylor. Retrieved 15 December 2013.
45. Jump up^ Stone, Brad (29 March 2009). "passwords of comcast
customers exposed". nytimes.com. Retrieved 1 January 2010.
46. Jump up^ "Comcast passwords leaked onto the web". cnet.com. 29
March 2009. Retrieved 1 January 2010.
47. Jump up^ "Comcast passwords exposed". hothardware.com. 29
March 2009. Retrieved 1 January 2010.
48. Jump up^ Gannes, Liz. "Leaked Facebook Movie Script Paints
Zuckerberg as Vindictive and Naive". Gigaom.
49. Jump up^ "Freedom on the Net Turkey 2013". Freedom House.
Retrieved October 3, 2013.

50. Jump up^ Jason (February 26, 2009). "Info, FAQs, and Forums/FAQ:
Writing, Uploading and Managing Documents". RetrievedOctober
11, 2010.

External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Scribd.

Official website

Video: 'YouTube' for writers

[show]

Digital distribution platforms

[show]

Presentation software

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Companies based in San Francisco, California

Privately held companies in the United States

American companies established in 2007

Internet properties established in 2007

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Y Combinator companies

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This page was last modified on 20 February 2015, at 07:31.

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