Scribd

History

Founding (2007–2013)

Scribd began as a site to host and share documents. While at Harvard, Trip Adler was inspired to start Scribd after learning about the lengthy process required to publish academic papers. His father, a doctor at Stanford, was told it would take 18 months to have his medical research published. Adler wanted to create a simple way to publish and share written content online. He co-founded Scribd with Jared Friedman and attended the inaugural class of Y Combinator in the summer of 2006. There, Scribd received its initial $120,000 in seed funding and then launched in a San Francisco apartment in March 2007.

Scribd was called "the YouTube for documents", allowing anyone to self-publish on the site using its document reader. The document reader turns PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoints into Web documents that can be shared on any website that allows embeds. In its first year, Scribd grew rapidly to 23.5 million visitors as of November 2008. It also ranked as one of the top 20 social media sites according to Comscore.

In June 2009, Scribd launched the Scribd Store, enabling writers to easily upload and sell digital copies of their work online. That same month, the site partnered with Simon & Schuster to sell e-books on Scribd. The deal made digital editions of 5,000 titles available for purchase on Scribd, including books from bestselling authors like Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Mary Higgins Clark.

In October 2009, Scribd launched its branded reader for media companies including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and MediaBistro. ProQuest began publishing dissertations and theses on Scribd in December 2009. In August 2010, many notable documents hosted on Scribd became viral phenomenons, including the California Proposition 8 ruling, which received over 100,000 views in about 24 minutes, and HP's lawsuit against Mark Hurd's move to Oracle.

Subscription service (2013–2023)

In October 2013, Scribd officially launched its unlimited subscription service for e-books. This gave users unlimited access to Scribd's library of digital books for a flat monthly fee. The company also announced a partnership with HarperCollins which made the entire backlist of HarperCollins' catalog available on the subscription service.

According to Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at HarperCollins, this marked the first time that the publisher has released such a large portion of its catalog.

In March 2014, Scribd announced a deal with Lonely Planet, offering the travel publisher's entire library on its subscription service.

In May 2014, Scribd further increased its subscription offering with 10,000 titles from Simon & Schuster. These titles included works from authors such as: Ray Bradbury, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ernest Hemingway, Walter Isaacson, Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and David McCullough. Scribd has been criticized for advertising a free 14 day trial for which payment is required before readers can trial the products. Readers discover this when they attempt to download material.

In July 2008, Scribd began using iPaper, a rich document format similar to PDF and 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.

On May 5, 2010 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Scribd announced that they would be converting the entire site to HTML5. 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.'"

Scribd has its own API to integrate external/third-party applications, but is no longer offering new API accounts.

Accusations of defrauding and stealing from users

Scribd has been accused of "[having] built its business on stealing from former customers" after numerous complaints of continuing to charge former subscribers on a monthly basis who had cancelled their subscriptions long prior to the charges.

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, the script of The Social Network (2010) movie was uploaded and leaked on Scribd; it was promptly taken down per Sony's DMCA request.

Following a decision of the Istanbul 12th Criminal Court of Peace, dated March 8, 2013, access to Scribd is blocked for Internet users in Turkey.

In July 2014, Scribd was sued by Disability Rights Advocates (represented by Haben Girma), on behalf of the National Federation of the Blind and a blind Vermont resident, for allegedly failing to provide access to blind readers, in violation of the Americans with Disability Act. Scribd moved to dismiss, arguing that the ADA only applied to physical locations. In March 2015, the U.S. District Court of Vermont ruled that the ADA covered online businesses as well. A settlement agreement was reached, with Scribd agreeing to provide content accessible to blind readers by the end of 2017.