Scribd

1
Scribd
Scribd
Type Private
Founded San Francisco, California, USA
(March 2007)
Headquarters San Francisco, California, USA
Keypeople Trip Adler (CEO, co-founder),
Jared Friedman (CTO, co-founder),
Tikhon Bernstam (COO, co-founder)
Services Social reading and publishing platform
Website
Scribd.com
[1]
Alexa rank
310 (April 2014[2])
Type of site Social Software
Available in English, Spanish, Portuguese
Current status Active
Scribd /skrbd/ is a digital library, featuring an ebook subscription service that includes New York Times bestsellers
and classics.
Launched in 2007 by Trip Adler and Jared Friedman, Scribd also features written works contributed by users around
the world and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Backed by Y Combinator, Charles River Ventures, and
Redpoint Ventures, Scribd is a major website with more than 80 million active readers coming to the site every
month.
Scribd's subscription service is available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets, as well as
the Kindle Fire, the Nook, and personal computers for a monthly fee of $8.99 ($3.99 with annual commitment), and
lets readers have unlimited access to more than 500,000 books from over 900 publishers, including Harper Collins,
Simon and Schuster, RosettaBooks, and Workman.
History
The idea for Scribd was originally inspired when Trip Adler was at Harvard and had a conversation with his father,
John R. Adler, about the difficulties of publishing academic papers. He teamed up with co-founders Jared Friedman
and Tikhon Bernstam and they attended Y Combinator in Cambridge in the summer of 2006. Scribd was launched
from a San Francisco apartment in March 2007 and quickly grew in traffic. In 2008, it ranked as one of the top 20
social media sites according to Comscore. In June 2009, Scribd launched Scribd Store, and shortly thereafter closed
a deal with Simon & Schuster to sell ebooks on Scribd. Over 900 publishers including HarperCollins, Workman,
RosettaBooks, Random House, Wiley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, Harvard University Press and Stanford
University Press are now associated with Scribd. ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in
December 2009.
In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies with The New York Times, Los Angeles
Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and MediaBistro. Over 100 media companies now use
Scribd
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Scribds branded reader to embed source material into their stories. In August 2010, news stories began to break and
documents and books began to go viral on Scribd including the overturned Prop 8 and HPs lawsuit against Mark
Hurds move to Oracle Corporation.
In October 2013, Scribd officially launched the first subscription service for digital books, often called the "Netflix
for ebooks", giving readers unlimited access to Scribd library. The company also announced a partnership with
major publishing company HarperCollins. The official statement revealed that the "majority" of the HarperCollins
US and HarperCollins Christian catalogs will be available in Scribd's subscription service. Chantal Restivo-Alessi,
chief digital officer at HarperCollins, explained to the media that the deal represents the first time that the publisher
has released such a large portion of its catalog.
As of December 2013, Adler is the CEO of Scribd, where he is responsible for the product and strategic direction of
the company. Adler was named in BusinessWeek's "Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010" list.
Timeline
In February 2010, Scribd unveiled its first mobile plans for e-readers and smartphones. In April 2010 Scribd
launched a new feature called "Readcast", which allows automatic sharing of documents on Facebook and Twitter.
Also in April 2010, Scribd announced its integration of Facebook social plug-ins at the Facebook f8 Developer
Conference.
Scribd rolled-out a redesign on September 13, 2010 to become, according to TechCrunch, "the social network for
reading".
In October 2013, Scribd launched its ebook subscription service, allowing readers to pay a flat monthly fee in
exchange for unlimited access to all of Scribd's book titles.
Financials
The company was initially funded with US$12,000 from Y Combinator, and received over US$3.7 million in June
2007 from Redpoint Ventures and The Kinsey Hills Group. In December 2008, the company raised US$9 million in
a second round of funding, led by Charles River Ventures with re-investment from Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey
Hills Group, and hired as president George Consagra, former Bebo COO and managing director of Organic Inc.
Consagra left Scribd and became CEO of Good Guide in August 2010.
David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO and founder of Yammer and Geni, joined Scribds board of directors in January
2010. In January 2011, Scribd raised its largest round, bringing in an additional $13M. The latest round was led by
MLC Investments of Australia and SVB Capital and included several previous investors.
Technology
In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF built for the web, which allows users
to embed documents into a web page. iPaper was built with Adobe Flash, allowing it to be viewed the same across
different operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) without conversion, as long as the reader has Flash
installed (although Scribd has announced non-Flash support for the iPhone). All major document types can be
formatted into iPaper including Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, OpenDocument documents,
OpenOffice.org XML documents, and PostScript files.
All iPaper documents are hosted on Scribd. Scribd allows published documents to either be private or open to the
larger Scribd community. The iPaper document viewer is also embeddable in any website or blog, making it simple
to embed documents in their original layout regardless of file format. Scribd iPaper required Flash cookies to be
enabled, which is the default setting in Flash.
Scribd
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On May 5, 2010, Scribd announced that they would be converting the entire site to HTML5 at the Web 2.0
Conference in San Francisco. TechCrunch reported that Scribd is migrating away from Flash to HTML5. "Scribd
co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: 'We are scrapping three years of Flash
development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading
experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.'" In July 2010 Publishers Weekly wrote a cover
story on Scribd entitled "Betting the House on HTML5."
Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications.
Since 2010, Scribd has been available on mobile phones and e-readers, in addition to personal computers. As of
December 2013, Scribd is available through the app store on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, the Kindle
Fire, and the Nook.
Reception
Scribd has been praised by several newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Fast Company,
Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2013, the company was dubbed the "Netflix for ebooks" by Wired, and is a
known pioneer of the "all-you-can-read" model for ebooks.
According to Scribd, more than 80 million readers from over 100 countries use the site on a monthly basis. Their
library includes more than 100,000 subscription books from 900+ publishers, and over 40 million documents and
books have been uploaded to the site. Scribd readers have access to books by famous authors like Kurt Vonnegut,
Paolo Coelho, and Meg Cabot.
Notable users of Scribd include Virginia senator Mark Warner, former California gubernatorial candidate Meg
Whitman, New York Times DealBook reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, All Things D Reporter Kara Swisher, the U.S.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Red Cross, UNICEF, World Economic Forum, United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe, The World Bank, Ford Motor Company, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and the
Hasmonean High School Living Torah.
Accusations of copyright infringement
Scribd has often been accused of copyright infringement. In March 2009, Scribd launched a "copyright management
system" and has made upgrades to its system including the reported addition of OCR. The New York Times reported
in May 2009 that Scribd was hosting pirated works by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, J.K. Rowling, and Stephen
King.
In September 2009, American author Elaine Scott alleged that Scribd "shamelessly profits from the stolen
copyrighted works of innumerable authors." Her attorneys Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara sought class action status in
their efforts to win damages from Scribd for allegedly "egregious copyright infringement." On May 11, 2009,
Motoko Rich, writing in the New York Times, reported on Scribd's hosting of pirated works. Sibley Camara filed a
class action lawsuit against Scribd, accusing it of calculated copyright infringement for profit. The suit was dropped
in July 2010.
In 2007, one year after its inception, Scribd was served with 25 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
takedown notices. The total number of DMCA notices that have been served to the company is unknown, but, on 8
January 2013, a single author Steven Saylor notified Scribd of 17 unauthorized uploads of his copyrighted work.
Scribd
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Controversies
In March 2009, the passwords of several Comcast customers were leaked on Scribd. The passwords were later
removed when the news was published by The New York Times.
In July 2010, GigaOM reported that the script of The Social Network movie was uploaded and leaked on Scribd; it
was promptly taken down per Sonys DMCA request.
Following a decision of the Istanbul 12th Criminal Court of Peace, dated 8 March 2013, access to Scribd is blocked
for Internet users in Turkey.
Supported file formats
Supported formats include:
Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, .pptx, .ppsx)
Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
OpenDocument (.odt, .odp, .ods, .odf, .odg)
OpenOffice.org XML (.sxw, .sxi, .sxc, .sxd)
Plain text (.txt)
Portable Document Format (.pdf)
PostScript (.ps)
Rich text format (.rtf)
Tagged image file format (.tif, .tiff)
References
[1] http:/ / www. scribd. com/
[2] http:/ / en. wikipedia. org/ w/ index. php?title=Scribd& action=edit
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Scribd.
Official website (http:/ / www. scribd. com/ )
Video: 'YouTube' for writers (http:/ / money. cnn. com/ video/ ft/ #/ video/ fortune/ 2009/ 01/ 26/ fortune.
disruptors. scribd. fortune)
Article Sources and Contributors
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Article Sources and Contributors
Scribd Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=623259169 Contributors: 3dh3m, 3en, Aakash.goenka, Adoniscik, Agent007bond, Agentq314, Aidar24, Ajnnadeau, Alan Liefting,
Alejandrocaro35, Andosmith, Andrewnpeters, AndyAgr, AndyTheGrump, Anna Roy, Apoc2400, ArnoldReinhold, Attys, Badmachine, Balabiot, Batmandk, BeccaCory, Beland, Bgwhite,
Billposer, Bjorn.wastvedt, Bluelight999, BullRangifer, Cappert, CartesianAngst, Chris the speller, ChrisSquire99, Coercorash, Colfer2, DMacks, Dale Arnett, Deflective, Donner60, Dougweller,
DreamGuy, Dskrvk, Edcolins, ErkDemon, Fadesga, Falcon8765, Feministo, Fritzpoll, Frmorrison, Froid, Fuddle, Gary, Gavia immer, Geo Swan, Gobonobo, GoingBatty, Ground Zero, Gyrobo,
HaeB, Halo, Ida Shaw, Ineedspeed2007, InverseHypercube, JimDustyRhodes, Jimbo Wales, Jm3, KuduIO, Kxmsf, L Kensington, Lambiam, Leecolinharvey, LeoFrank, Lfh, LimeHat,
LittleWink, Lotje, MER-C, Mack2, Madmike111, MainFrame, Mananshah15, Manojranaweera, MarB4, Masrudin, Mathematrucker, Mcld, Meco, Melab-1, Metaed, Michael herr, Mike Rosoft,
Mike Schwartz, Mjb, Mogism, Motyka, Mreasons, Nightscream, Novonium, Ottawahitech, Paulmnguyen, Pbeltranl, Perohanych, Ph.eyes, Philafrenzy, Philip Trueman, Prairieplant,
Prasidpathak1, Proxyma, Psychonaut, QuipQuotch, R. S. Shaw, RISCfuture, Rcasati, Reach Out to the Truth, Rezonansowy, Riffic, Rjwilmsi, Rob Burbidge, Rojomoke, Rudymoman, Scarpy,
Sgpsaros, SimonRM, Slipslide, Snori, Soulparadox, Spoon!, Stoffelsz, SummerWithMorons, Sylye, Tastiles, Thesupermat, Theyann PentaGram, Thnidu, Thumperward, Timneu22, Tinyrock,
Treyharris1, Trivialist, Tslancaster, Tubeyak, Ugog Nizdast, Urbanrenewal, Usmanaslam30, Ute in DC, Vecto Rerso, VernoWhitney, WWB, Wesalius, Wikiedit555, WilliamJE, Xrt6L,
YUL89YYZ, Yama, Youngblood20, Zaixar, , 138 anonymous edits
Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors
Image:Scribd logo.svg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Scribd_logo.svg License: Public Domain Contributors: Rezonansowy
File:Decrease Positive.svg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Decrease_Positive.svg License: Public Domain Contributors: Decrease2.svg: Sarang derivative work:
Dodoste (talk)
Image:Commons-logo.svg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Commons-logo.svg License: logo Contributors: Anomie
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/