If you're the type of person that just tears through comic books, I've got good news for you. Now there's an even easier way to read a ton of comic books every month without shelling out too much money.
Scribd just launched an online comics subscription service that uses the monthly flat rate model popularized by Netflix. The San Francisco startup expanded upon its e-book and audiobook offerings Tuesday with the addition of more than 10,000 comic books. For just $8.99 a month, subscribers can blast through an unlimited amount of titles from some of the biggest comic book publishers around, including Archie, Marvel and Valiant. Whether you want to keep up with Jughead and the gang, follow Daredevil as he takes down the bad guys or eat some spinach with Popeye, you can probably find a comic you will enjoy through Scribd's new service.
"We're really tailoring our service to die-hard voracious readers, and we're servicing publishers to bring them this audience that we have," Julie Haddon, Scribd's vice president of editorial and marketing, told WIRED.
Similarly to Netflix, there's also a "binge button" on Scribd, which lets you smoothly move from comic to comic within a series. The service also gives you some background info on the gazillion characters you might come across in the comics.
Of course, a subscription service for books isn't the newest invention ever. Oyster, a Netflix-like subscription service for books, launched in 2013. Last year, Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service. Scribd isn't even the first to try this sort of model out with comic books as Marvel offers its own digital comic books subscription, Marvel Unlimited, for $9.99 a month.
However, Scribd offers comic books from so many different publishers right alongside e-books and audiobooks, which makes all the difference. There are more than a million e-books, audiobooks and comic books on Scribd, which has more than 100 million subscribers worldwide, according to WIRED. Our economy is all about subscriptions now, so the addition of comic books to Scribd could be just what the company needs to make it stand out.
