Scribd has just unveiled digital magazines to their online subscription service. Readers will have access to ten magazines that include; TIME, Fortune, Money, People, Bloomberg Businessweek, Entrepreneur, Foreign Policy, New York Magazine, Newsweek and The Atlantic. Scribd editors will be curating individual news articles and a new recommendation engine will direct readers to similar audiobooks, e-books and documents.
If you subscribe to Scribd and pay your monthly fee you will be able to read all of the magazines you want and they do not count against your cap. The company has also rolled out a new content-agnostic discovery experience — grouping all of its content (books, audiobooks, primary source documents, and now articles) by interest. This is the first time that the walls between all of these content types have been broken down for readers — enabling them to quickly discover what’s trending and then seamlessly dive deep into the interests that matter to them – in any format.
I spoke to Scribd CEO Trip Adler about the launch of their digital magazine subscription service and asked him how they about how it will fare against more entrenched competition, such as Magzter and Zinio. “Magazines are one of the most requested types of content from our members. We feel that, by including them, we’re able to fully break down the walls between content types and offer our readers a content agnostic experience. What makes us unique is that all of our content is offered holistically, instead of by vertical. That means our members could read an article about President Obama, jump to an audiobook on modern legislation, and then end with an original transcript of one of the President’s speeches.The idea is that this experience will enable discovery.”
Scribd will be continuously adding new magazines in the coming months and will be signing deals with new publishers. They currently have agreements with Bloomberg, Entrepreneur Media, IBT Media, New York Media, Slate Group, LLC and Time Inc.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.