In a move the company said will enhance the discoverability of all its content, Scribd, the online reading subscription service, is expanding to include magazines. Scribd will add access to eight magazines, among them Time, Fortune, Money and New York magazine, for the same subscription fee of $9.99 a month.
Scribd is linking access to all the content it offers--books, audiobooks, digital documents, and now magazines--via a new system of discovery that is organized under nearly 16,000 topics of interest. Each topic of interest, which could range from, say, Russian Hacking to the Presidential Election, is collected on a page that includes all pertinent content about the topic.
A subscriber reading a magazine article will now see links at the bottom of the article to other related content that could take the reader to a book or audiobook or other magazine article. The article page will also include topical links to the aforementioned interest pages.
Other magazines included in the launch of the category are Bloomberg Businessweek, Entrepreneur, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. Subscribers will have access to the full content of each magazine.
Scribd CEO Trip Adler described the system as a way to “organize and cross promote” the company's content. “By connecting books, audiobooks, documents, and now articles, around areas of interest, our members are free to skim what’s trending or dive deep into any subject.”
Adler said for book publishers, linking book content to topics of interest “will drive new readers to books. All our research says that people discover books via other kinds of content like documents and magazine articles.” Adler said, “book publishers love it. Readers look at an interest page and their books are there, promoted to the readers.”
Adler said that Scribd continues to show “solid growth” in subscribers and that the service is profitable. He said the company will continue to add new content, including new book publishers and additional magazine content.
“We’ve always envisioned Scribd to be the reading destination that connects readers to the best written work, and magazine articles have been one of our most requested features,” Adler said.
