Scribd Challenges Amazon and Apple With ‘Netflix for Books’

This is in a class of things I'm worried about. The good institutions & traditions that we built over decades (or in this case, millennia) becoming obsolete, dying and taking all the side benefits with them. Many lost their primary purpose, but they had so many important auxiliary purposes that I'm worried about losing them. For millennia, libraries stored knowledge and people went there to access it. All sorts of things naturally grew around this resource. Universities and their predecessors are one example but there are also small informal institutions. A group of friends meeting in a library because it is a a safe and quite place to do homework is an institution of sorts. A couple of homeless people using it as a safe place to hang out, read books and feel part of society is another example, especially if their interaction with others there is special in some way (it is).

There are lots of things like this. Churches. How do we do churches without gods? How do we allow young people to spend a few years focusing on their minds without universities. Can we have universities after going to lectures becomes obsolete?

Technology is eating a lot of things. It's eating them faster than we can replace them.

They just turned those former pirates into a revenue stream. It's a good business move. Either spend tons of money litigating pirates to just have them go somewhere else, or at least make some money off of the inevitable.

Finally Scribd found a business model. I never understood what their value proposition was.

I saw an article about a similar company recently and, like this one, I was still left with an important unanswered question.

How is this service better than a library card?

I've spent some time with this. NB This is my experience on the Android app and the website.

In the app, searching is abysmal. There's no way to specify the type of keyword you're searching for, so if it's an author, you'll probably have to wade through a sea of wildly irrelevant results to find that maybe they don't even have anything from that author.

I grabbed two different versions of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, both of which the website proudly stated were included in my subscription. Neither was a truely optimized ebook. More like PDF images, so the text or pages didn't scale.

The reading experience on the app is sub par. No options for font type, size, or color; no background options; or margin options. No "night mode" or similar.

There's also often not an indication that a book is just a preview on the website. I added Cormac McCarthy's Child of God to my library, and the app told me that it wasn't available in my country (US), but I could read it on the website, but I discovered it was a preview only.

Related to that, when searching on the website, it seems to prioritize purchase-only books over subscription books. I understand the why, but it's really frustrating to have to start scrolling to get to what most people will be looking for.

Then there's the trouble with having to wade through the sea of user-uploaded content. It seems like there should either be a separate app for the subscription portion, or at least a way to search ONLY that.

All in all, I really wish this was something I could see myself paying for, but right now, I think it's kind of a mess.