Last November Scribd added audiobooks to their ebook subscription plan, which costs $8.99 per month to get unlimited access to Scribd’s library of several hundred thousand ebooks.
Since then audiobooks have been apart of the unlimited monthly plan, but now that’s going to change. Starting September 20th, Scribd will be switching to an audiobook credit system instead.
That means the unlimited audiobooks library will be changing. But it’s not going away completely. More like shrinking.
Instead of offering all of their audiobooks with the monthly subscription plan, Scribd is going to be offering a rotating catalog of “thousands” of audiobooks for unlimited listening.
Then for audiobooks outside of the “unlimited” library, you get one credit per month to apply toward any audiobook in the catalog. To get additional audio titles you have to purchase more audiobook credits for $8.99 each (seems pretty expensive for something you’re renting and don’t even own).
One good thing is the audiobook credits roll over to the next month if you don’t use them, but the rollover is capped at six total if you don’t use them up.
Publishers are probably starting to make the unlimited thing a problem, so Scribd is creating a workaround. But once again it’s not at all to the benefit of the customer. Scribd also started removing a number of romance titles from their catalog earlier this year because people were reading too many of them. They even took away ebooks that people were in the middle of reading. Now they are taking away access to a large number of audiobooks too. Current customers aren’t going to be very pleased…
Checkout this Scribd FAQ for more information.
The way they went about this says a lot about the company. They announce it late on Friday to bury it. There is no discussion or real explanation. What books, how many will be unlimited. The company has an issue with treating customers like they don’t matter. They have already started culling audiobooks. I got an email today that two nonfiction audiobooks would expire and that I would have 30 days to finish. Nope, they were removed and no longer available. Again, scribd can not cash the checks its writing. 8.99 to RENT a book for 30 days? I can buy them for a dollar or two more (or in sale with audible) fife half that. Back yo the library and my audible subscription. We closed our account.
I won’t stay with Scribd with this new plan, unless the unlimited audio books have enough to interest me. Pay $8.99 to rent one audio book a month? Absolutely not. I rarely read an ebook in their app, but I use Scribd for audio books all the time. I will wait out the month and see what is available before I decide whether to cancel, or not.
I don’t even use the audiobooks on Scribd, but I agree with the other comments here and with Nathan that this is incredibly anti-customer. It makes me reconsider my subscription even without much caring about the audiobook selection — I hate the practice prevalent in so many industries of “shrinking to greater profitability”.
Just my opinion since I’m not a customer but it was suggested that the changes are because of publisher demands. I would love to rent audiobooks to play from my LG cell phone on the car radio. What would I need to do this?
It all depends on your car stereo. It needs either Bluetooth or an aux connector. Or you could use something like Audible.com that lets you burn CDs.
I don’t any benefit of their service. You are better off with using the public library. I have a LosAngeles city library card & uall of their online services. Hoopla,OneClick Digital & Overdrive. Ususally don’t have to wait for a book I want & If I found something I want to keep I buy with my Audible credits.. Paying $8.99 to rent an audiobook is outrageous specially when they limit the titles.
Today I noticed they have marked books in the upper left corner. The mark denotes which books will require a credit. In the categories I enjoy listening to, 99% of them are marked. All I can think is, “Are they crazy?” Unless they add more non-credit audio books by the end of next month, they will lose my account.
Greed strikes again!! The only reason I started my account was because I left audible.com the second I found an app that I was looking for 8.99 for unlimited audio books. Now they want to do the same thing audible does and charge 8.99 per credit per book. Well guess it’s back to the public library for me unlimited audio books FOR FREE!! Well I hope this move is worth it for the company
It appears that they could not resist the old bait and switch. I dropped my subscription today and will continue with Audible. At least with Audible I own my book and the audio quality is much better. It appears SCRIBD did not count the cost before they made customer commitments. SCRIBD also never asked for customer suggestions to help.
Being visually impaired, I am a great fan of audiobooks. I have access to the audio catalog from the National Library Service for the blind and physically handicapped . When I found out about Scribd, I immediately subscribed because of the ease of use and large selection. Not to mention that my temptation to users torrent sites like audiobookbay.co to pretty much dissappear. I much prefer having an unlimited service that I can afford and subscribe to while not having a guilty conscience. So come next month I will be canceling my subscription with Scribd and using other alternatives….Netflix made a success – though I disliked the splitting of their service, it’s too bad Scribd is not following suite any longer. Thank God their are many legal alternative’s to Scribd.
I contacted Scribd about the upcomming change and asked if the unlimitted audio books would be professionly narrated or volenteers. I also asked for a list of the unlimmited audio books. I was told that scribd only used professionaly narrated books. I pointed out to the staffer audio books where the cover had volentter speaker. I have not gotten a list or a responce about the narration issue.
This change highly upset me. I subscribed to this service over amazon because of the audio book. I may read 5-10 e-books a month but listen to 10-20. I have 200 e-books saved in my library and all of them are going to require a credit.
Over the past few months I have been getting frustrated as they have been suddenly deleting many titles already (at one time having only 3 paranormal fiction and under 10 romance available). I contacted them and asked them if this was a permanent thing, removing all of these authors, and there response was that their filters for choosing what would be best for you based on your reads was under construction. They purposely miss understood my question in hopes I wouldn’t leave.
I first joined because I was getting sick of having to wait weeks to months in line for the audio books online at my library, but I guess I will be going back to that (as I have already been supplementing that as scribd is always missing at least one book in a series or suddenly drops authors).
As soon as September 20 comes I will definitely by canceling my subscription.
I have already been very frustrated with the way scribd has been operating the last few months (sometimes I’ll find that if I saved a book to my library I can still access it, though it is no longer found anywhere else on the site by searching-so I have to add any book I am remotely interested in so I can access it again.) with the deletions, limited availabilities of authors and genres, and now with their latest move in the audio books category.
Back to the library for me as well. Greed sucks. The only reason I have this service is for the unlimited listening. I’m going to drop them.