Whether in person or on the blog, whenever the topic of books comes up—and, yes, sometimes it will be me bringing up the topic—there are some decent odds that I have segued into talking about how much of a bang for your buck having a Scribd subscription is.

For those unfamiliar, the basic pitch is that you get unlimited access to their audiobook library AND unlimited access to their ebook library for a low monthly fee of less than a tenner a month (and you also get access to a magazines, podcasts and documents library, although I’ve never really used that portion of the site, except for when I was checking out the Unabomber Manifesto after watching a docu-series on him and hearing some talking heads say, “you know, he actually makes some pretty accurate points in that manifesto…”).

Originally, I was all in on the audiobook portion of the site alone, as I had been a sometimes subscriber to Audible over the years—which was not only more expensive each month than Scribd, but you also only got 1 audiobook a month on Audible and choosing that 1 audiobook would often lead to feelings of disappointment when you picked a dud (and that’s if you even remembered to actually get an audiobook each month). The beauty of having access to unlimited audiobooks on Scribd is that now when you pick a title that turns out to be not as good as what you were hoping for, you can just stop listening to it and go try something else rather than feeling like you flushed another monthly Audible credit down the drain.

Also, Jeff Bezos is a shitty narcissist who we all should be giving less and less of our money to whenever possible.

Now, the selection of audiobooks on Scribd is not as good as the selection of audiobooks on Audible, especially when it comes to brand new releases, but you will quickly get over Scribd not having that specific title you are looking for once you realize that there are 100s of other titles you have also not listened to before. Trust me, you will have no trouble finding stuff to listen to on Scribd, and with unlimited listening unlocked, you’ll be knocking out more than one audiobook a month, if audiobooks are your jam.

And if audiobooks are not your jam, or if you prefer some peanut butter to go with your jam, the kicker with Scribd is that you also get access to unlimited ebooks with your subscription. This is a part of the package that I only recently started taking advantage of, as I didn’t have an ipad or ebook reader and found that I don’t like trying to read books on my iPhone (it works fine enough, just not a fan of the reading experience on such a small device). But I recently dusted off an old ASUS tablet that we stopped using ages ago because of its garbage battery life, and it turns out that old electronic brick is the perfect size for repurposing as a dedicated ebook reader. And now that I’ve got into the habit of reading for at least 20 minutes EVERY DAY, and now that I’ve started knocking off more and more titles off my physical used book shelf, I’m really starting to experience just how great a deal also having access to Scribd’s unlimited ebook library is. Now my issue is that I have too many books to want to read, which is not the world’s worse problem, especially in the middle of global pandemic.

On top of the unlimited audiobook listening & ebook reading (and the magzine/podcast/document sections I haven’t even got around to exploring yet), a more recent perk of having a Scribd subscription—which just takes the overall value even further thru the roof—is they recently launched an aptly title thing called Scribd Perks that gives you free subscriptions to other services just for having a Scribd subscription.

Some of these free subscriptions I haven’t really used and probably won’t have much use for (I still claimed my free perks though, because ‘high five for that lofi life’) but I was pleasantly pleased to see that one of the free subscriptions on offer was for the curated movie streaming site Mubi, which I have checked out / considered getting on its own before. Granted, I haven’t watched a tonne of stuff on Mubi since cashing in my free subscription, but it’s a pretty nice addition to get thrown in on top of Scribd’s already great unlimited ebooks/audiobooks offering (and it makes the ditching of our Netflix subscription awhile back much easier to stick to).

The only downside to Scribd is — and this is really only a downside if you have an unrealistic expectation of how the catalogue for an unlimited service should be and/or are not already familiar with how similar streaming sites / licensing deals work — the catalogue selection is not going to have everything you could ever want to read/listen to + some titles are only available for an amount of time and then get removed (new ones get added all the time too, of course). This can suck when one of your favourites get taken off—like the audiobook for ‘The War Of Art’ or most of the Pema Chödrön catalogue, and suddenly you lose the ability to repeat absorb some of your go-to faves — but, whenever that happens, maybe that’s just a sign that you should go outright buy those specific titles and get back to test driving new-to-you books until you find some more personal classics? Besides, in general, you’re probably only going to want to listen/read most titles once (they also give you a heads up when things are scheduled to be removed, so you’ll have a chance to cram into your skull one last time if need be).

All in all, I couldn’t HI54LOFI-ly RECOMMEND giving Scribd a try enough — it really opens up a whole wide world of knowledge and adventure for those parts of your brain that are important to keep engaged (something that feels more important now than ever), and the ‘Cost v. Value’ is really hard to beat.

So, if you think you’d like to give it a try, you can use this link to get yourself 2 free months (and I think I get 1 free month if you sign up, so everybody is a winner). I promise, it’s a smrt move.

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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI