The ebook subscription service Scribd has just expanded its catalog offerings with a mountain of audiobooks—30,000, if you’re counting. This is a small fraction of the existing Scribd ebook catalog, which now surpasses 500,000 titles, but it represents a milestone in the growing popularity of audiobooks and also includes a feature—pioneered by Amazon with its Whispersync for Voice technology—that allows readers and listeners to jump back and forth between reading an ebook and listening to the same title as an audiobook, keeping place across multiple devices.
Quoted in a Digital Book World article, Scribd co-found Jared Friedman commented:
Being able to switch between an audiobook of an ebook version of the same title has been one of subscribers’ “top feature requests” since the service’s launch, says Friedman. For a while, it was difficult to deliver. For one thing, the publisher that owns the audio rights to a given title is often different than the one that publishes the ebook. But Scribd has taken steps to obscure that messy reality for users wherever possible, matching up every audiobook with a corresponding ebook whenever both versions of a given title are available in its catalog.
Scribd’s catalog also got a boost last May that included 15,000 titles in a perennially popular genre, romance novels. Through a partnership with publisher HarperCollins, which acquired Harlequin in May 2014, romantically inclined readers have unlimited access to a steady stream of steamy stories for a basic monthly fee of $8.99/month, which includes access to all of the titles in the audiobook library, as well (as well as everything else Scribd has on tap).
Audiobooks have gradually earned their place in the epublishing world, benefitting from faster Internet speeds, inexpensive digital storage media, and mobile device technology advances. The addition of audiobooks to Scribd’s catalog—and the smooth integration between ebooks and audio playback—is one more sign that the technology has come of age.
