Scribd
First, Scribd applied the Netflix model to books, offering unlimited access to an online library of popular titles for a flat monthly fee. Then it did the same for audio books. And now it’s moving into another all-important sector of the publishing world: comics.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco startup expanded its existing ebook-and-audiobook subscription service to include unlimited access to more than 10,000 comic books from some of the industry’s biggest publishers, including Marvel, Archie, and Valiant. As part of their standard $8.99 monthly fee, Scribd subscribers can now gorge on everything from classic comics like Spider-Man and My Little Pony to acclaimed graphic novels from Alan Moore and George R.R. Martin.
“We’re really tailoring our service to die-hard voracious readers, and we’re servicing publishers to bring them this audience that we have,” says Julie Haddon, Scribd’s vice president of editorial and marketing.
The service’s latest expansion is another step forward for what you might called The Subscription Economy. We still buy discrete digital stuff on the net—individual songs and movies and books—but more and more, we’re opting for subscription services instead. Why pay to download Spider-Man when you can pay a flat monthly feee to get online access to Spider-Man and myriad other comics?
Some publishers, including Valiant and Marvel, have offered their own comics services on other digital platforms in the past. But Scribd says it’s the first subscription service to offer a broad range of titles from multiple publishers, alongside an ebook and audiobook service.
Scribd
For hardcore comic book fans, the company has also beefed up its mobile app with a “binge button,” which lets you readily move from comic to comic in a particular series. And as you hunt for titles, it offers background info on big comic characters, including the Hulk.
About a year and a half after its initial launch, Scribd is offering a library of over a million ebooks, audiobooks, and comics. It’s serving more than a 100 million subscribers around the world. And it’s not the only one feeding this burgeoning market. Oyster’s $9.95-a-month service offers over a million books to its subscribers, from a majority of the so-called Big Five publishers. And last summer, Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service giving users access to over 600,000 titles for $9.99 a month.
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