Scribd has modified its business model again and now readers are the ones who will suffer some of these changes. Since March, subscribers they will get credits that will allow them to read at least three ebooks and one audiobook every month from the library that Scribd owns, although they will still be able to read an unlimited number of books from Scribds Selects, a selection that rotates with all kinds of titles.
Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd, says that the company decided to make the change after studying the feedback received by the users of its service. They realized that the data indicates that 97 percent of your customers read fewer than three books per month, and that this change would not negatively affect the experience users get with your service.
The unlimited subscription format for ebooks not really a viable business model and some of the companies in the sector that participated have had to close their doors. Entitle and Oyster reached hundreds of millions of dollars in their business, but they were not able to make the business model really productive.
It is precisely the industry itself that has declared on numerous occasions that the current system is broken. Tom Weldon himself, CEO of Random House, said: «we have two problems with subscriptions. We are not convinced that this is what readers really want. There is no desire in the mind of the reader to "consume whatever is thrown at him." In music or movies you would like to have 10.000 songs, but I don't think you want 10.000 books.»
It is Scribd itself that has had to raise investment to $ 72 million more in previous years to keep the company afloat. They have to pay publishers even if readers consume 10 percent of what an ebook is, while Scribd has an open wound from which money is bleeding nonstop. So you can understand the limitation in the books that can be read monthly.
Scibd will shut down, as does anyone who blatantly takes advantage of people