scribd
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Transcend VR sues investor Mike Rothenberg for fraud and breach of contract
Mike Rothenberg has been in a heap of trouble over a series of purportedly fraudulent transactions within his investment firm Rothenberg Ventures and his virtual reality startup River Studios. Now Transcend VR, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal, is suing the venture capitalist on allegations of fraud, breach of contract and deceptive diversion of funds. Read More
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Scribd Adds Sheet Music And Sesame Street To Its Subscription E-Book Service
Scribd continues to expand its selection — it’s adding sheet music for the first time, and also announcing deals to bring in Sesame Street children’s books and grow its selection of textbooks. Scribd already offers unlimited access to a library of e-books and other content for $8.99 a month. Even though the company has been moving into areas like audiobooks and comics… Read More
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TuneIn Launches TuneIn Premium With Ad-Free Radio, Audiobooks, MLB Games
Popular radio service and app TuneIn just launched a new subscription service. For $7.99 per month, TuneIn Premium subscribers get a bunch of new premium content as well as a nifty ad-free feature. Read More
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Scribd Adds Comics From Marvel, IDW, And Others To Its Subscription E-Book Service
In case getting unlimited access to an enormous library of e-books and audiobooks for $8.99 a month wasn’t enough for you, Scribd is announcing today that it’s expanding into comic books. Specifically, Scribd is adding more than 10,000 comics and graphic novels from publishers including Marvel, Archie, Boom! Studios, Dynamite, IDW/Top Shelf, and Valiant. Read More
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Scribd Raises $22M For Its Subscription E-Book Service
Scribd, a startup offering unlimited access to half a million e-books for $8.99 a month, is announcing that it has Raised $22 million in additional funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with Khosla partner Keith Rabois (previously an executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square) joining the company’s board as an observer. In an email, Rabois compared Scribd’s… Read More
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Scribd Expands Its Subscription E-Book Service With 30K Audiobooks
It was just over a year ago that Scribd officially unveiled a Netflix-style subscription e-book service. As of today, subscribers will have access to 30,000 audiobooks, too. Co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said that this isn’t just about attracting audiobook fans to Scribd, but also introducing readers who aren’t audiobook fans to the format. After all, he noted that the… Read More
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Crunch Network
How To Save Books
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was a time of triumph, it was a time of disaster, it was the publishing industry in 2014, just after mighty Amazon fired a new salvo in its war on traditional publishing by announcing its $10/month Kindle Unlimited book subscription service. At first glance this might seem useless and ridiculous: Read More
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TC Cribs 50th Episode: We’re Back At Scribd, The San Francisco Startup Where It All Began
Much like Leon Russell and Donny Hathaway, TechCrunch TV’s Cribs series has been so many places in its life and times. For its 50th episode airing today, we thought we’d bring it back to the place where it all began: Scribd, the San Francisco startup that veteran TechCruncher Jason Kincaid toured in the very first Cribs episode back in January 2011. Scribd today is still in its… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Scribd’s Subscription E-Book Service Moves Into Travel With The Full Lonely Planet Library
Subscription e-book startup Scribd is announcing a deal with famed travel publisher Lonely Planet. Scribd started out as a service where users could share different types of written content (writers at TechCrunch still use it to share documents that we want to embed in our posts), but last year the company announced its intentions to become a Netflix-style style subscription service, where… Read More
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With HarperCollins Deal, Scribd Unveils Its Bid To Become The Netflix For Books
The latest company making a bid to bring the subscription model to the book world is one that may already be familiar to TechCrunch readers — social publishing service Scribd. Scribd first launched in 2007, offering users a platform for users to share documents and other written content. We use it ourselves as a way to upload and embed documents that are relevant to our stories. For… Read More
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Scribd Has 100M Users And A Mobile App It Needs To Rethink (After Yahoo Walked Away From A Deal)
Started originally as a ridesharing service, then pivoting to become a document uploading and reading service, Scribd now has 100 million registered users, with 90 million monthly active users. That makes it probably the biggest effort of its kind, but leveraging that size hasn’t always been easy. Scribd, TechCrunch has learned, is at a crossroads in mobile — a crossroads that… Read More
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With Float, Scribd Hopes To Become The Netflix Of Reading
It’s a big day for online document sharing and social reading site Scribd. Today at Fortune’s Brianstorm conference, CEO Trip Adler will be revealing a major initiate that introduces a suite of new products and an entirely new brand: meet Float. Float is Scribd’s first iPhone application. It’s also an entirely new web app, and there will be additional mobile… Read More
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Scribd's HTML5-Based Document Viewer Is Now Portable, Retroactively Upgrades 20M+ Embeds
Last May, document sharing hub Scribd launched one of its biggest features yet: a document reader based entirely in HTML5. Up until then Scribd had presented its documents using a Flash-based viewer called Flash Paper, which worked well but had a few shortcomings — namely that it didn’t work on mobile devices like the iPhone. Scribd’s solution was to use optical… Read More
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Why Starting Justin.tv Was A Really Bad Idea, But I'm Glad We Did It Anyway
Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . . Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some… Read More -
TC Cribs: Take A Doc On The Wild Side At Scribd (With Bonus Go Karts!)
It’s funny. When I tell my ‘normal’ friends that I’ve just come from Facebook’s office or need to head down to Google’s campus in Mountain View, they often give me a strange look, as if I’ve just told them I’m about to make a house call to the Easter Bunny. These companies aren’t places inhabited by actual people — they’re… Read More
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Scribd Raises Another $13 Million, Aims To Bring Social Reading To Every Device
Scribd, the document sharing hub that launched as a ‘YouTube For Documents’ and has since added other key features, including an online bookstore and a publisher analytics platform, has raised another big round of funding: it’s just closed a $13 million Series C round led by MLC Investments and SVB Capital, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures… Read More
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Scribd Stats: A 'Google Analytics For Documents'
Document sharing hub Scribd has just announced a new feature that will allow publishers on the site to more accurately measure how their content is performing. Dubbed Scribd Stats, they’re likening it to a ‘Google Analytics for Documents’, and it’s an apt description — the product looks quite similar to Google’s popular web analytics product, but… Read More
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Scribd Partners With Apture To Include Rich Media Contextual Browsing Within Content
We wrote about Apture Highlights, a new plug-in that brings instantaneous search to content on the web, a few months ago. Today, Apture has scored a pretty significant deal with document-sharing site Scribd to allow users to use Apture Highlights on the tens of millions of public documents on the content platform. As we wrote in August, ‘Apture Highlights’ plugs the… Read More
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Scribd Posts A Public Apology To Vocal Critic, Then Takes It Back
A few days ago Law professor Eric Goldman wrote a vehement blog post entitled, “Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist” denouncing the recently enacted paywalls around documents older than two months on the popular document sharing site. “[Scribd’s] value proposition always has been open access to the documents–freely shared… Read More
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