Press Release: Scribd Re-imagines the Ebook Browsing Experience
Scribd, the leading e-book subscription service, featuring more than 500,000 titles including bestsellers and award-winners in every genre, today announced a reimagined way to digitally browse and discover books. Scribd's new browse experience brings the familiar elements of browsing a neighborhood bookstore into the digital realm, from personalized staff picks, to shelves for every category and special interest niche imaginable.
"Our goal with the new browse experience was to retain the same human touch that we have come to love about personal recommendations from a trusted friend, but use the power of technology to extend it to our catalog of over 500,000 books," said Jared Friedman, co-founder and CTO of Scribd. "The result is as if we've built every reader their own personalized bookstore, with the human touch readers love, that they are now able to carry around in their back pocket."
The foundation of the new browse experience is a proprietary category structure that allows readers to browse both at a high level, like Fiction & Literature, and a very niche level, like Biographies of Outlaws. Instead of using BISAC, a dated cataloging system, Scribd's category tree was designed from the ground up to best facilitate book discovery.
To take organization to the next level, Scribd's in-house editorial team curated tens of thousands of detailed tags about books, identifying their subjects, locations, time periods, and aesthetic qualities. Using this rich dataset, Scribd created unique collections of books tailored to specific tastes, such as "Arthurian Legends" or "Private Eye Mysteries Set In LA". These niche collections are then served up to readers based on their interests and reading activity. For example, if a reader has read a mystery thriller and a travel book about Scandinavia, Scribd might suggest the collection "Nordic Noir", a curated list of 21 Scandinavian crime novels.
