Scribd API timeout

Querying Scribd's API for an issue thumbnail is routinely taking up to 60 seconds, causing Pingdom to think the website's crashed (and our users to leave). I've verified this using CI's output_profiler and benchmark points. Until I find a way to either make our call to them asynchronous (move it into JS?) or send them some kind of auth to stop them from throttling our API requests, I'm capping the max time we'll wait on them to 3sec.