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Online subscription service Scribd announced it is slashing its romance and erotica offer because readers are gorging themselves. According to Scribd the numbers of ebooks read by fans of these genres make costs unsustainable.
Scribd operates in a similar way to Spotify with music and Netflix with movies – subscribers pay a monthly fee, which enables them to read an unlimited amount of books, ebooks and comics.
That’s the theory, anyway. But Scribd appears to have slightly underestimated just how much can be consumed at their all-you-can-eat literary buffet – especially by fans of romance.
Because Scribd has to pay the authors of the books they make available on their site, it is now shelling out more money than it can make back in subscriptions, thanks to the voracious appetites of romance and erotica readers.
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In a letter to publishers and self-published authors on Tuesday, Scribd bosses said: “In starting Scribd, we bore the majority of the risk when establishing a business model that paid publishers the same amount as the retail model for each book read by a Scribd subscriber. Now, nearly two years later, the Scribd catalogue has grown from 100,000 titles to more than 1m. We’re proud of the service we’ve built and we’re constantly working to expand the selection across genres to give our readers the broadest possible list of books for $8.99 (1000 naira) per month.
“We’ve grown to a point where we are beginning to adjust the proportion of titles across genres to ensure that we can continue to expand the overall size and variety of our service. We will be making some adjustments, particularly to romance, and as a result some previously available titles may no longer be available.”
The news comes just days after Amazon announced that authors making their books available through the Kindle lending service will now get paid on a sliding scale depending on how much of a borrowed ebook the reader actually gets through.