How To Lose Money and Annoy Romance Fans: A Story of Scribd.
About a year ago, I tried the free trial offered by eBook subscription service Scribd. The number and variety of titles were astonishing, and there were books from both major publishers and indie publishers. Big publishers that refused to make books lendable on Amazon or to add their books to Amazon’s Prime Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited joined Scribd. The books waiting in my library ranged from Cycle of Lies: The Fall of Lance Armstrong (still in hardback then) to new adult titles to lots of recent young adult titles to a textbook on homicide by Robert Ressler, and more. And the romances? Everything from major romance authors such as Julia Quinn to Julie Garwood to Jude Deveraux and Johanna Lindsey. Avon titles! Pride and Prejudice continuations! Carla Kelly books! I couldn’t wait to dive in.
Then I found out that I hated reading in the Scribd app, and I wasn’t crazy about reading on their website. Yup. With the advances in eBook readers, if I wanted to read all those great books, I’d have to read using an app. Not on my Kindle or Nook. Whoops. I hard a hard time fitting my tablet in my purse. It was like one of those terrible dreams where I’m in a great bookstore but can’t find my purse. So I canceled my Scribd subscription. Scribd probably loved me. While on the program, I read a couple of chapters from a young adult romance I’d been interested (only to get bored with it), and some of the Lance Armstrong book. Even with the free months, they still made money from me because I decided to keep my subscription going for a little longer.
I tried Kindle Unlimited and stayed there for a little longer simply because I could read the books on my Kindle. Sure, they had fewer books from big publishers, but I could read them on my Kindle. In the end, I eventually quit KU because I could never find time to read the novels I downloaded — the novels I bought came first. I ended up using KU to read shorter works, such as tiny books about reference topics that I didn’t want to pay $4.99 and up to read. Only to learn that anybody can pretend to be an expert, and one company was even “publishing” mental health pamphlets put out for free by the Australian government. Oh, well. At least those articles were accurate and well-researched. Also, KU isn’t without controversy because of the lower pay scale for authors. Authors have learned they make more money from shorter works, and less money from shorter ones, which is why many authors have turned to serializing longer books. Amazon is also quick to change payment terms. For example, Amazon recently announced that they would now pay authors by pages read rather than books read. This might mean that longer books will become more profitable than shorter works for KU authors.
With so many big name authors avoiding Kindle Unlimited, many romance fans prefer Scribd, however. After I left, Scribd added even more books, particularly romance. More Johanna Lindsey, and lots and lots of Harlequin titles. Scribd also added indie romance titles, particularly Smashwords titles — those can range from new romances and erotica, to previously published books put back in print by their authors. These fans joined because Scribd had no many authors. (You think they joined to read Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives? No, me neither.)
However, this week, fans noticed that some romance titles were disappearing. Some? Estimates say the 30,000 romance titles on Scribd could have dropped to 8,000! At first, fans thought only indie titles (such as titles from Smashwords and Draft2digital) were being removed. So while many fans were upset, others thought this would help make titles from large publishers easier to find. Then again, what about those Harlequin books some fans could no longer find? A temporary glitch? Or something else? I learned something was wrong with Scribd on Twitter before I learned anything from Scribd. Fans and writers alike were tweeting about the romance purge, and readers were already vowing to leave Scribd. Romance readers hate feeling unloved.
Blog posts came, too. On Tuesday, Mark Coker, founder of the Smashwords publishing service, announced that Scribd had yanked a huge number of SmashWords romance and erotica titles from the catalog. Coker estimated that as much as 80-90% of the Smashwords romance and erotica books were culled from Scribd’s library. He also realized that the most popular titles would be cut because they were costing Scribd more. According to Coker, “Bottom line, romance readers – readers we love dearly at Smashwords – are reading Scribd out of house and home. Scribd’s business model, as it’s set up now, simply can’t sustain the high readership of romance readers. They’re not facing the same problem with readers of other genres.”
Author Bob Mayer also got a similar notice because some of his Draft2digital titles are on Scribd. Mayer sees it as a sign that subscription services might be in trouble. If a genre gets “too many borrows for the subscription price,” the service still has to pay those authors. So what is the solution? Removing titles? Paying authors less? These solutions will not make anyone happy. As Mayer, says, “Bottom line: romance readers are not particularly welcome at Scribd. You read too much. Aint that a hell of thing to say?” The Digital Reader blog put it succinctly as well: Scribd is Culling Romance Titles From Its Catalog Because You’re Reading Too Damn Much. On Thursday, the Digital Reader blog also confirmed that the purge wasn’t affecting just indie titles. As some readers feared, Harlequin titles were being pulled as well.
Maybe, like many other companies, Scribd underestimated romance readers. Maybe they told themselves “They won’t notice the missing titles…” Whoops again. Maybe Scribd thinks they joined to read true crime, or that they joined to read romance but will stay to read The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith or The Color of Her Panties by Piers Anthony. Like me, some will read “all of the above.” But most romance fans won’t be happy with fewer romance titles. For a company often called “Netflix for Books,” it seems Scribd doesn’t know much about readers, particularly romance fans. Or maybe they didn’t pay attention when people told them “Romance fans are voracious readers.” Didn’t they research the romance field before marketing to them? Then again, maybe not. Some of the books Scribd categorizes as romance… simply aren’t. When you check out the Romance category on Scribd, one of the featured titles is a Sidney Sheldon book. Uhm, what? That book comes under the Cheaters category. Yeah, we all know how popular that category is with romance fans. When you view all romances, the first two books that come up are a Joanna Trollope novel and even a children’s book (The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman). Vying for space with authors such as Christine Feehan and Lisa Kleypas are “romance” authors Alexandre Dumas, Mercedes Lackey, the Marquis de Sade, Henning Mankell, and Virginia Woolf. Right. Whenever I want a pick-me-up, I pick up a Wallender mystery. Or Virginia Woolf. Not to mention Damage by Josephine Hart. So maybe the people running Scribd don’t know romance at all.
That’s no surprise to me. They might not know books, either, Last year, Scribd kept sending me DMCA takedown notices for public domain books I was hosting on their site. Is it so hard to figure out that a Charles Dickens novel is no longer copyrighted? Once, trying to clear up a possible “copyright violation,” they asked me if I was the author of The Kama Sutra by Vātsyāyana. I wish! I felt like replying, “Yes! I am over 1800 years old, and boy do you ever owe me some back royalties!”
If Scribd knows as much about romance as they do about public domain works, and the Kama Sutra, then both Scribd and romance fans and authors who depend on it are in trouble. Let’s hope they have learned better. The CEO of Scribd did respond to the concerns. They updated their blog on Tuesday to reassure romance fans that Scribd still loves romance and still has lots of romance books on the site. They are looking into other solutions, such as rotating the romance titles, and possibly even negotiating new terms with publishers. Of course, one solution might have involved, you know, telling the customers what was going to happen before pulling the titles. Maybe learning more about the romance community before adding that many titles. Doing the math first.
So what can Scribd do, besides learning that Virginia Woolf is not a romance writer, and figuring out that romance fans deserve a company that won’t take their money and then change the rules suddenly. Lots of ideas have been coming out. Change the amount publishers and authors are being paid. Offer more than one subscription plan, so that people who read a lot have to pay more. Keep romance titles (and other popular genres) in rotation, so that some titles are removed for a while. Not all of these ideas are popular, of course. Changing fees will drive off readers, and changing pay rates will drive off publishers and authors. Still, there must be something that can work.
I’m willing to offer some more ideas to Scribd and I won’t charge a monthly subscription fee. Learn what romance is, and what it isn’t, so that your search results don’t annoy potential customers.. Find out what categories fans like. (Cheaters? Really?) Visit sites like All About Romance, talk to romance readers, ask them what they think of your site. For Pete’s sake, remember that romance readers are your customers, not voracious creatures devouring books like a bookworm version of Sharknado.
Anne Marble
certainly like your website but you need to check the spelling on several of your posts. Several of them are rife with spelling issues and I find it very troublesome to tell the truth nevertheless I will surely come back again.
I’ve been watching the romance book sites blow up about this issue recently. I myself do not subscribe to a subscription service at all. I already have 6 books from the library on my counter and over 200 books in my TBR (digital & tactile) pile already. I think I’m set for awhile! I just read a great article about this by Carolyn Jewel on the Dear Author website. It was really informative so check it out at: http://dearauthor.com/features/industry-news/scribd-ku-and-what-those-changes-mean-via-carolyn-jewel/
Very interesting and informative from Carolyn Jewel. I enjoyed reading it!
In Scribd’s defense, at least where using on an e-reader is concerned, it’s probably as much the publishers and the device makers as it is Scribd. Publishers want their content locked down, which for users means making it very hard to get it outside of Scribd where it might be, er, liberated. And the device makers just don’t want you to use Scribd! Amazon/B&N have no reason to make it easy for users to go another vendor for content, especially when the competition is offering a service that users cannot get through their own sites.
That also explains your difficulty with Overdrive checkouts on Nook, @Anne. Amazon was wise enough to get on board with Overdrive early on. They recognized it for basically free advertisement every time a user sees that Kindle option on an OD page, and knew that by drawing users into their site to get the content, they were bound to get some business. B&N, for reasons I have yet to understand, further willed themselves toward oblivion by refusing to play nice with OD. As @SuperWendy said, if it’s hard for readers, they just won’t do it. That was a huge mistake for B&N.
And while it may seem that Scribd is contemptuous of romance readers, I doubt that the kind of hardcore reading that most romance lovers engage in was ever part of Scribd’s business model. I’d guess that by concentrating their efforts on the growing number of readers who use phones or tablets to do their reading/listening, they are going after an entirely different demographic: the casual reader who wants something to read on the train, on the plane, while waiting at the dentist. We romance readers are a voracious and very special audience — ask the librarians who love us!
As a fun aside: in its earliest incarnation, Scribd was more for sharing documents than renting books. About two years ago, there were tons of OOP books (literally thousands of very very vintage romances) available as documents shared by users. As Scribd began to evolve and seek major publishers, these disappeared, not coincidentally — that, @Anne, is what accounts for your valiant attempts to share the Kama Sutra in the face of DCMA take downs ;)
Yeah, publishers do get nervous about any lending program that involves putting a copy on an ereader. I guess in their minds, if there’s another copy, that means there’s more of a chance for someone to break the encryption. But that’s such a pain I’d rather just buy my own copy (if I like the price) or wait for the price to go down. Besides, why can’t they use something like the system used for public library lending, where the copy expires? (sigh)
I remember when Scribd was more like the Wild West of sharing. (But with that icky interface and horrid search, I wonder how many people bothered downloading stuff?…) There was even a controversy when the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) sent repeated take down notices about books on the site. Unfortunately, when Scribd finally took the books down, they also took down legit items like Creative Commons books placed there by the authors, an SF bibliography a teacher created for his own class, personal essays users had posted, etc. Whoops. That backfired and made SFWA look bad as well as Scribd.
I am almost at the end of my free one-month trial at Scribd. I had planned to sign up for the discounted year subscription, but now, with the reduction in romances, I am going to go month-to-month for a couple months before making a decision whether to keep or drop the service. I’ve been able to read Scribd titles on my Kindle Fire HD 6 using the Scribd app, and it syncs fairly reliably with the app on my iPhone. (The Scribd site has instructions on how to bypass the Kindle Fire’s app restrictions. You get a lot of warnings from Amazon about doing this, though.)
I was drawn to Scribd becaues it had so many hard to find out of print romances especially Harlequins. I joined for a bit but bailed to join kindle unlimited which I’m liking a lot because research has helped me find romances I want to read.
How unfortunate scribd seeks to disrespect romance readers this way. If it wasn’t for us the publishing industry would be dead!
I can relate. Borrowing Kindle eBooks out of the library has been really easy. Borrowing Nook books? The local B&N used to pass out photocopied sheets of instructions. If you have to do that, it’s not working. Also, the so-called search feature on Overdrive is horrible. If I’m looking for an author whose name is Jane Smith, I do not want to see Jane Eyre and Jane Doe and Bob Smith show up in the results. Let alone books on blacksmiths. Do they not understand how searches are supposed to work? (And advanced searches… aren’t.)
SuperWendy
As for KU, like you I loved the fact that I could read on my Kindle but then I actually took a look at the content.Granted, I don’t read a lot of self-published romance (a mere smattering compared to a lot of readers), but in this case it was “It doesn’t matter how easy it is to use, if you don’t have content I want I don’t rightly care that you exist.”
I read some self-published romance. But how long is it going to take me to read a seven-volume boxed set? Those sets often go on sale for 99 cents anyway, so I might as well buy it instead. So I wound up reading books on topics like “”How to write scary stories”” and “”How to write dialogue tags”” (many of which turned out to be very generic, of course). Or reading books on teen depression and such for a story I was working on. I read scads of them over one weekend. Amazon must have hated me. After reading them, I hated some of the proofreaders. ;)
I didn’t use Scribd much at all during the 3-month trial, but around the time I had to make a decision to continue or cancel, I discovered audiobooks and feel like I’ve been getting my money’s worth just for that alone. Although I prefer reading on my Kindle, I use my iPhone and my iPad-mini for Scribd and it has worked fine with those devices. I did notice that most of the romance books I was interested in have disappeared (e.g., backlists from Jo Goodman and Liz Carlyle). If they start culling the audio selections, I may have rethink my subscription, but for now I’m taking a wait-and-see attitude. I also read enough outside of romance to make it worth my while.
Inability to use Scribd on an e-ink device was the only thing that saved me from getting sucked in.
I’ve got to agree through, this was a complete failure to research the market.
I wasn’t impressed with the list of authors on Kindle Unlimited and have this thing called “”I want to own my books”” so I wasn’t going to do Scribd either…don’t know how they got my email but I was never interested in the idea of having to use an app….they must also not have researched the problems that Netflix ran into with their system and why they have changed to an almost all streaming business.
Companies often don’t understand it at all — or at least the marketing people and executives who make certain decisions don’t. This is no different than companies slapping the “”Romance”” category onto something where one of the main characters dies because they want to reach the market, but don’t know what the readers want. Or they’ve been told but they don’t listen.
I think I was afraid i might look out my door and see a line of Scribd employees who wanted advice. :) (Spiritual advice, of course!)
I unfortunately just purchased a year subscription to Scribd in May (47.99 at one time as opposed to 8.99 a month), after my three month trial. The app can be annoying but I found so many books I wanted to read that I felt it was worth keeping the service. I haven’t noticed many of my books disappearing from my library yet but several of them I can only find by going to my library and not searching the site for them. Typically this means they’re about to expire so I’m trying to read as much as possible in case some of my books disappear. If I had went with a month subscription, I would be canceling but since I did a year I’ll make the best of it.
I don’t see why you can’t ask for a refund if the service you signed up for is not the service you’re now getting.
They won’t issue a refund unless you purchased within the last 60 days. I too bought a year subscription. At least I read almost 8 books so far that would have cost me $80 to buy, so I got my money’s worth. But I read Christian romance from Baker Publishing and they are almost all gone. Some of the books expiring were just published June 30th. I was so happy to find all of these books on Scribd, because I could read all of these books that normally cost $10/book for $4.99/month at the year subscription rate. I should have known that it was too good to be true.
It’s a very interesting issue about subscription services.
They sound like a gym -their business is precisely all the people that pay a fee but don’t go on a daily routine.
That’s where the money is for them -people paying for something they do not use.
And of course we romance readers do read a lot, therefore we are not a good customer for them.
I have to recognize that I haven’t tried any subscription service. I considered KU and Scribd for a while, but then, I decided not to subscribe to any of them.
First, Kindle Unlimited did not have the books I wanted to read. I don’t read anything romantic but just certain authors, and they are not usually in KU.
Second, although Scribd looked more interesting to me, I decided not to subscribe because I didn’t find the way to read those books on my kindle. I thought it was my problem, that there had to be a way to read those books in your e-book but that I didn’t understand the instructions. Now I see that that’s the way it is -an app or your computer, and there’s no way I’m going to read a book on one of those screens. I’m relieved to know I’m not just digitally-challenged.
I was just having a conversation last week with a colleague about a new digital service someone wants the library to hop into bed with. My exact words were, “”All the great content in the world means nothing if it’s not easy for our customers to use.”” Which is why I never even bothered when Scribd was offering those free 3-month trials. Believe me, being a major Harlequin ho, I was tempted. But if I can’t get the books on my dedicated reader (I’m a slave to e-ink – they’ll pry it out of my cold dead hands) and am forced to read on an app (which in my case means my phone since I’m a dinosaur and don’t own a tablet….), then thanks but no thanks. But ::sob:: all that category romance! Now with the latest news I’m glad I didn’t hop on board that train.
As for KU, like you I loved the fact that I could read on my Kindle but then I actually took a look at the content. Granted, I don’t read a lot of self-published romance (a mere smattering compared to a lot of readers), but in this case it was “”It doesn’t matter how easy it is to use, if you don’t have content I want I don’t rightly care that you exist.””
So subscription services just don’t seem to be for me – at this moment anyway. An easy decision to make since my TBR is so ginormous I’ll never get everything in it read in my lifetime (maybe three lifetimes?) – plus I take advantage of my employer (uh, the library) quite a bit. Audiobooks, hard cover fiction, ebooks, even the occasional mass market paperback. But when I think about all those Harlequins – although apparently not so many anymore….
I don’t use a subscription service for reading. I tried Kindle Unlimited for a month free, but extra cost didn’t appeal to me and I opted out. I had never heard of Scribd, and when I opened one of your links mentioned in your article I can see it’s not for me. The blogger bottomed line it for me when he wrote;””Scribd needs readers who only read one book a month….well who does that?!?!
The Scribd people really did not think through the romance reader profile at all, did they?
I really, really wish you had said Yes! about the Kama Sutra…just to see read the story of what happened next
Very interesting blog Anne. And funny about being the author of the Kama Sutra. LOL!