Scribd: Is It Worth It?
By: Dora Cheng
Tags: Entertainment, Scribd, Ebooks Online, eBook, Novel

Image by bibliothekarin via flickr

Scribd has one of the largest ebook collections out there and not surprisingly, also offers documents, magazines, audiobooks, sheet music, court filings and more (I have no idea why anyone would want to read court filings BUT it’s there). If you are one of those people that read books like one drinks coffee then this ebook platform is for you!

What else? You get ‘unlimited’ access with the subscription which technically means you can read as many books as you like in the month you pay for (or does it? More on that later). Really, imagine my raving when I saw the exhaustive list of my old favorites.

Now you’re probably wondering, hey, are you getting paid by Scribd to write this? The simple answer is….No. As much as I want to get a few bucks, I’m actually giving my honest opinion here.

I subscribed to Scribd this year in March so it’s been around 10 months now. It costs 8.99USD per month and automatically bills from whichever payment method you had chosen. Plus, the first month is free.

I did consider the cost for a short while but was quickly convinced because it was the cheapest out of all the other options out there (Amazon Kindle Unlimited is 9.99 per month and I’ve tried it…I don’t get ‘unlimited’ access to books like I do for Scribd).

Books alone, not counting sheet music and documents, I’ve finished 105 in total, all in the mystery, drama, and romance categories. I downloaded their app on my phone so I take thousands of books wherever I go. It’s sort of like Netflix in a way, but for books. The whole layout of the app is user-friendly and the organization for the books is very intuitive. Yay to convenient entertainment, am I right?

But here comes the bad because after all, many things are not as they seem.

The main feature and selling point of Scribd is their claim that users can dive into their goldmine collection and never rear their heads as long as they pay. So why do I keep using quotation marks to encircle the word ‘unlimited’? Hah. There I did it again.

It’s because, in reality, the ‘unlimited’ access is a roundabout way of saying ‘hey you do get to read as much as you want, like we said, as long as you don’t go over this many books because then we’ll have to bar you and direct you to other books that are less popular’. It’s quite a mouthful but it sums it up.

There were a few times when I read over 4–5 books from the same author (Sabrina Jeffries!) and the app stopped me from reading more from that author. A message told me I could continue those books on a certain date, and of course, the date was one day after the subscription renewed itself. I was semi-angry but it didn’t stop me from reading another author’s work and drowning in it for a while.

Then the message showed up again!

That was when I searched on google to see if anyone else was saying the same thing. And lo and behold, many people had the same issue, and some claimed that it was because Scribd has to control how much royalties they have to pay the publishers/authors. I did feel a teensy bit cheated at that point but my ‘saved books’ list on Scribd was so long that it didn’t matter how many authors they bar me from since I always have a novel I want to start.

From Terry Pratchett to my childhood favorite Carolyn Keene, I have it all in the palm of my hand, so even after I found out about their dodgy strategy, I am still loyal to their platform. Give Scribd a try and hope you’ll find it just as fun as I do!