The new audiobooks come to Scribd through a new deal with Penguin Random House Audio, and these titles bring its audiobook library up to more than 45,000. Popular titles like The Girl on the Train, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Wild, The Help, The Blind Side, and many others are now included. Also, many of the books are narrated by superstars like Bill Clinton (he didn’t do Fifty Shades of Grey), Christopher Plummer, Diane Keaton, Barbara Walters, Kate Winslet, and more.
In addition to these more popular titles, Scribd added great children’s books such as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle; The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman; The Maze Runner by James Dasher, and more. For the politically inclined, Scribd threw a few presidential memoirs in there, too. Scribd has seen growth ever since it added audiobooks, the company reveals.
“Penguin Random House Audio is one of the world’s most admired publishers, and we are excited to work with them to expand the potential audience for audiobooks by putting thousands of their amazing titles at readers’ fingertips,” Trip Adler, the co-founder and CEO of Scribd said in a statement. “Since we launched audiobooks last fall, reading time on Scribd has doubled. This is great news for Scribd and for our publishing partners.”
All of those audiobooks, plus the 1 million-plus ebooks on Scribd, are available to subscribers for just $9 a month. Considering how expensive audiobooks are to buy, as are comparable subscriptions from the likes of Audible and others, Scribd’s price is appealing. And it’s lower than its main competitor, Oyster, which doesn’t offer audiobooks at all.
