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taosaur · 04-06-2015, 01:04 PM

About halfway through a 3-month Scribd trial, I'm still on the fence about signing up. Their subscription service now offers comics (or graphic novels, if you must), audiobooks and ebooks. The quality of the selection will depend on your tastes, but I'm finding it solid for comics, pretty good for audiobooks, and not worth bothering with (for my tastes) for ebooks.

Unfortunately, the apps for accessing that content are glitchy and feature-poor, though under active development. On my Android tablet, the app not only fails to load content, hangs, and crashes, but frequently it causes the whole system to reboot. When it does work, the way it handles comics is slow, limited, and poorly thought out.

The app is more stable (but not completely) on my newer, more common model Android phone, where it's mainly used for audiobooks. The audiobook player is reasonably feature-complete, except that it only keeps my place in an audiobook if I leave the app running in the background and sitting paused in my notifications all day long. I've also found syncing between devices (tablet, phone, and web interface on PC) wildly unpredictable.

Ebooks, based on my limited testing, fall somewhere in the middle: a better experience than comics, but less stable and feature complete than audiobooks. Regardless, I can get a better selection delivered to my KPW for free via my library, so I don't foresee using Scribd much for text.

If I can get an audiobook or two and a collection or two of comics out of it every month, it's probably worth the price of admission. For now, the best bet for comics is the web viewer on my nice, IPS PC monitor. I've managed some comics reading on my tablet, but there's always the chance that the next page turn or orientation switch will fling me an unpredictable number of pages ahead, and if I finish a book, odds are at best 50/50 that I'll be able to find and load another one without a crash. Page turns, even when working as intended, don't take you to the top of the next page, either, which means either squinting at full pages or lots of fidgety scrolling.

Anyone else have impressions on the service, selection, or apps? For me, the main competition out there is public libraries with Overdrive. For a while there I was spending quite a bit on Amazon/Audible "add narration" packages, too. It's super convenient, but go through more than 1-2 of those per month at $10-15 each ($3-9 for the ebook and $2-6 for audio) and it adds up quickly.

04-06-2015, 01:04 PM	#1
taosaur intelligent posterior Posts: 1,562 Karma: 21295618 Join Date: Mar 2009 Location: Ohiopolis Device: Kindle Paperwhite 2, Samsung S8, Lenovo Tab 3 Pro	How are we liking "new" Scribd? About halfway through a 3-month Scribd trial, I'm still on the fence about signing up. Their subscription service now offers comics (or graphic novels, if you must), audiobooks and ebooks. The quality of the selection will depend on your tastes, but I'm finding it solid for comics, pretty good for audiobooks, and not worth bothering with (for my tastes) for ebooks. Unfortunately, the apps for accessing that content are glitchy and feature-poor, though under active development. On my Android tablet, the app not only fails to load content, hangs, and crashes, but frequently it causes the whole system to reboot. When it does work, the way it handles comics is slow, limited, and poorly thought out. The app is more stable (but not completely) on my newer, more common model Android phone, where it's mainly used for audiobooks. The audiobook player is reasonably feature-complete, except that it only keeps my place in an audiobook if I leave the app running in the background and sitting paused in my notifications all day long. I've also found syncing between devices (tablet, phone, and web interface on PC) wildly unpredictable. Ebooks, based on my limited testing, fall somewhere in the middle: a better experience than comics, but less stable and feature complete than audiobooks. Regardless, I can get a better selection delivered to my KPW for free via my library, so I don't foresee using Scribd much for text. If I can get an audiobook or two and a collection or two of comics out of it every month, it's probably worth the price of admission. For now, the best bet for comics is the web viewer on my nice, IPS PC monitor. I've managed some comics reading on my tablet, but there's always the chance that the next page turn or orientation switch will fling me an unpredictable number of pages ahead, and if I finish a book, odds are at best 50/50 that I'll be able to find and load another one without a crash. Page turns, even when working as intended, don't take you to the top of the next page, either, which means either squinting at full pages or lots of fidgety scrolling. Anyone else have impressions on the service, selection, or apps? For me, the main competition out there is public libraries with Overdrive. For a while there I was spending quite a bit on Amazon/Audible "add narration" packages, too. It's super convenient, but go through more than 1-2 of those per month at $10-15 each ($3-9 for the ebook and $2-6 for audio) and it adds up quickly.