Never Mind, Scribd is Terrible Now

Shortly after I posted my glowing, enthusiastic review of Scribd’s service (especially the audiobook selection), they decided to blow up their entire business model and the app went swiftly downhill.

The two things aren’t necessarily connected, but together they were enough to get me to cancel my subscription and delete the app out of sheer frustration.

So, what exactly happened? Scribd decided that they were going to change their business model, but only for audiobooks. Instead of being able to listen to any book in their (at the time) extensive library, your $8.99 would get you 1 credit for an audiobook, which brings them in line with other digital audiobook services like Audible or Downpour.

It makes sense that they had to make this change, because endless audiobooks are probably not a sustainable business model, but it’s still disappointing. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only thing that changed, and Scribd seriously dropped the ball when it came to communicating the changes.

First, I received an email telling me that some of the titles in my library were going to expire soon. The email didn’t explain anything about their new business model; it just let me know that I’d be seeing expiration dates on some of the titles I’d saved. When I checked, it turned out that all the expiring titles were from Penguin Random House, which meant that almost all the audiobooks I’d added to my list were going to expire from the service. Naturally, I’d barely dented my list of books.

I don’t remember how I found out that their business model was changing to credits-only, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t through an email. In fact, I think I started seeing little flags for “credit required” on audiobooks I’d saved before I read anything about the changes. I did finally get an explanation when I went to the Scribd website, but I’m sure there were plenty of people who only use the app and had no clue what was going on.

As part of Scribd’s explanation of the changes, they claimed that some audiobooks would be available under their unlimited plan, but I could never find them. I have no idea what these “thousands” of unlimited audiobooks might be, because everything in my list was either expiring or required a credit.

If it was just a matter of the service’s value changing, I might have continued paying for my membership… but then the app turned into a buggy mess, and that was more than I could take. I was trying to finish Armada before it expired, but the Scribd app started doing this infuriating thing where the beginning of the next section of book would start playing before the current section finished, so I’d have dueling Wil Wheatons and no way to fix it while driving. It didn’t help that I’d already had to delete and re-install Scribd several times because of changes to the service and unstable app updates.

Once it became clear that the Scribd app was a complete shit-show, I deleted it and submitted a cancellation request. It’s entirely possible that they’ve fixed some of the bugs in the month since I cancelled my service, but when I weighed what Scribd was offering – inconsistency and instability – versus my long-term experiences with Audible, it was no contest.

The Audible app and service are both far better than anything Scribd now offers in the audiobook space, so it wasn’t long before I’d restarted my full Audible membership and picked up a copy of John Scalzi’s new space politics adventure story.