Scribd Adds Sheet Music And Sesame Street To Its Subscription E-Book Service

Scribd continues to expand its selection — it’s adding sheet music for the first time, and also announcing deals to bring in Sesame Street children’s books and expand its selection of textbooks.

Scribd already offers unlimited access to a library of e-books and other content for $8.99 a month. Even though the company has been expanding into areas like audiobooks and comics, sheet music might not seem like an obvious addition. However, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said sheet music is already “a really highly searched-for term on Scribd.”

“We want to be broader than just books,” Adler added. “We started with documents, we did comics, we see ourselves as being the library of the future.”

The company’s first sheet music deal is with publisher Hal Leonard, adding 2,600 digital song books to the Scribd library. It covers a range of instruments (Adler’s a saxophone player himself), difficulty levels and genres.

The company also said it’s adding thousands of textbooks from Elsevier, and will be introducing Sesame Street titles in the first quarter of next year.

It’s been a few months since Oyster (which was Scribd’s highest profile startup competitor) shut down, with many of its team members joining Google Play Books, raising questions about the viability of “Netflix for books”-style model.

As for content licensing (which can be a big challenge for online media services), Adler acknowledged that they represent Scribd’s biggest cost, but he doesn’t see that as a bad thing.Adler said that at Scribd, “Everything is going according to plan.” He argued that the company has a unique advantage, since it started out as a document-sharing service reaching a large audience (currently 80 million unique monthly visitors) and convinces a “fraction” of those users to sign up for the paid plan every month.

“We’ve been able to negotiate a lot of really great deals,” he said. “We’ve been making it work pretty well… Our goal is to make money for publishers and authors, and think we’ve been doing that really successfully.”

Comments

Workato Chat Bot Brings Enterprise Workflow Into Slack

As we head into 2016, enterprise chat applications like Slack are suddenly a hot commodity, and if you’re inside chat a good portion of the day the argument goes, you should be able to access other work without leaving the chat client. This is exactly what Workato’s newly announced chat bot, Workbot, is designed to do. Chat bots are small programs that integrate with a chat platform and provide some advanced type of functionality in a fairly easy fashion. The new Workbot-chat bot enables users to access and control over 100 enterprise applications such as a Salesforce CRM record, Quickbooks accounting information or Zendesk customer service interactions directly inside of Slack. One of the primary issues with early Enterprise 2.0 tools was that they were just another application busy employees needed to pay attention to. The idea here is to give users customer information directly in the context of the discussion they may be having...

Best Web Design Company in Pondicherry

#Technology has two faces. We all feel it, but sometimes can’t find words to describe it. #Ebooks are the best example to show the 0-1 nature of emotions the #technology evokes. #itwhere provide a #Best #solutions to #Growyourbusiness feel free to drop a #Mail info@itwheretech.co.in www.itwheretech.co.in

Montana-based mapping startup onXmaps raises a round of funding fit for Big Sky Country

A mapping startup based in Missoula, Mont., which allows users to download sophisticated offline topographic maps outlining public and private lands and a number of other features geared towards hunting, fishing and camping, has pulled in its first major outside funding. onXmaps has closed a $20.3 million Series A round led by Summit Partners. Bessemer Venture Partners, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Next Frontier Capital and NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke also participated in the round. The company is calling the fundraise one of the biggest ever among startups based in Montana. onX Hunt app This is impressively the first bout of outside funding that the 70-person startup has ever taken since being founded in 2009. The company’s founder and CEO Eric Siegfried, an avid outdoorsman himself, had created a more basic program to integrate these maps with his own Garmin GPS. After finding his friends were interested in having a product like this too, he put down $27k of his...

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop

Google Android may have been developed as a smartphone operating system (and later ported to tablets, TVs, watches, and other platforms), but over the past few years we’ve seen a number of attempts to turn it into a desktop operating system. One of the most successful has been Remix OS , which gives Android a taskbar, start menu, and an excellent window management system. The Remix OS team has also generated a lot of buzz over the past year, and this week the operating system gained a lot of new alpha testers thanks to a downloadable version of Remix OS that you can run on many recent desktop or notebook computers. But Remix OS isn’t the only game in town. Phoenix OS is another Android-as-desktop operating system, and while it’s still pretty rough around the edges, there are a few features that could make it a better option for some testers. Some background I first discovered Phoenix OS from a post in the Remix OS Google Group , altho...

Visa confirms Coinbase wasn’t at fault for overcharging users

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions. While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for cryptocurrencies, Coinbase said. While you can read my post yesterday for an in-depth description of what happened, the basic gist is that Visa refunded and recharged (under a different merchant category) a month of old transactions. Many users saw the recharge come through before the refund processed, making it look like they were double charged. Honestly, the issue was likely exacerbated by existing payment rails — it’s normal for refunds to take multiple days to show up on credit and debit statements. But here’s where it gets weird — this morning Visa issued a statement to some publications shifting the blam...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog