Scribd Ebook Subscription Plan Expands With 1,000 Premium Magazines

Scribd, the company best known as a platform for hosting documents, is also home to an ebook subscription service that provides access to a large library of fiction and non-fiction digital books. Though the service revolves around ebooks, Scribd has dabbled with other types of content in the past — it offered digital comic books for a while, for example, before removing them. The latest arrival are digital magazines.

Scribd already offered a select number of digital magazines to its subscribers. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has expanded that library with more than 1,000 'premium' magazine offerings from around the globe. With this expansion, Scribd joins a handful of companies offering extensive access to worldwide magazine titles.

The new magazine offerings come from more than 25 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Mexico, Spain, Singapore, and others. Scribd subscribers are given full access to these magazines, including the most recent issue and the articles. The subscription price will remain at $9.99/month, however.

In addition to ebooks and the new magazines, Scribd also offers various audiobooks on its platform. The company says that the amount of time spent listening to these audiobooks and reading ebooks on its platform increased by 50-percent over the past year, underscoring the popular transition from physical books to digital media.

Commenting about the new offering is Scribd CEO Trip Adler, who said:

Scribd introduced the first 30 magazine publications onto the platform in 2017 to appeal to a wide audience of readers while driving incremental revenue back to publishers. Over the last two years, we have seen the number of hours spent reading magazine articles increase by more than 50%. Now that we're adding hundreds of new titles and expanding our catalog to appeal to a more global audience, we anticipate seeing reading activity grow even more.