UPDATED: My email from Scribd regarding today’s purge of several thousand romance titles

Allison C. (Support Desk)
Jun 30, 8:43 PM

Hi Michele,

I can certainly understand your confusion and any frustration this may be causing. You’re right, we didn’t do a very good job communicating this to readers who would be affected, and I am incredibly sorry for that. By now you’ve seen the blog post from our CEO, Trip, in which he explains some of the reasons why we have made this decision.

For the moment, the blog post offers a list of some of the publishers we will always carry. More importantly, we’ve heard your feedback and are working to make it more obvious from your Library which titles are expiring, without needing to open each book to find out.

We are still, and always will be, committed to our Romance fans and the Romance genre. We will continue to have a fantastic selection – thousands and thousands of titles – of Romance. Books and authors you love, and new material that will soon become favorites. We will never stop carrying Romance, and are still working hard to grow this category in a way that is viable for us and our customers.

We are focusing on growing Scribd across all genres – not just Romance – and this requires us to put our focus on other areas at times, so that we can offer a robust Sci-Fi collection to Sci-Fi fans, a robust History collection to History fans, and all the comic books and audiobooks that you could possibly imagine. In order to do this, we need to first even out the playing field.

And much like Netflix and Hulu before us, we’re always going to be rotating our selection, making sure that great independent content gets as fair of a shot as major bestselling titles.

I hope that this helps to ease your concerns. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can assist you with. Thanks again for writing in, and have a great day!

Best regards,
Allison C. – Scribd Support Manager
Scribd, Inc.

UPDATED 7/1/2015

After I heard back from Allison again with a question about my collections vs. my library, I asked her this question:

“There are dozens of romance titles in my library right now that are no longer coming up when I check the authors’ listings. They aren’t labeled as expiring, although I do have more than a few of those as well. Is there any indication of how long I’ll have before the ones not marked as expiring will still be available for me to read?”

And here was her response:

“We’re actually working on the expiration banner right now. Our engineers are putting one together that will let readers know how long they have (30 days, in this case), along with a link to Trip’s message to explain why this is happening. We hope it will clear things up, but if you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see, please let me know.

We should have this up hopefully within the next 24-48 hours. I’m working closely with them and with my own boss to get this pushed through.

The books aren’t going to show under the authors’ accounts right now because they’re essentially hidden until they expire in 30 days. We’re also working on making this a little more seamless so as to avoid the confusion of seeing “5 books” under the author’s title page, and then that number linking to nothing.”

I would like to thank Allison here, as I already have via email. for being so good about responding to these concerns that so many subscribers have right now. If I hear anything else from her, I’ll post it as another update to this post.

In the meantime, I strongly suggest if you are a Scribd subscriber with titles in your library that are now no longer available via search that you start reading those books as soon as possible, as it appears they will probably not be around 30 days from now. I know that’s what I’ll be doing.

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