Audiobook, e-book, or both? Now, you won’t have to choose. The Scribd-owned reading subscription service Everand wants to make the choice unnecessary. On Tuesday, the company took the wraps off a combined subscription that brings together Everand’s catalog of over 1.5 million audiobooks and e-books with the social book club app Fable into a single plan, directly challenging Amazon’s dominance in digital reading.
What the subscription offers
The new subscription is available to the two apps’ 5 million combined readers and provides access to the over 1.5 million-title library, plus Fable’s nearly 200,000 online book clubs. As you read or listen in one app, that activity is synced to the other. The company has licensing agreements with all five major U.S. publishing houses.
The entry-level plan offers one book for $11.99 per month in the U.S., while a $16.99 per month plan offers three books, and a $28.99 per month plan lets you dive into five. That’s a fairly competitive deal compared with Audible Premium Plus ($14.95/month), which offers one credit for an audiobook.
A textbook acquisition strategy
The hope on Everand’s part is that this bundled approach could help smaller players like itself make a dent in Amazon’s reading empire, which spans Audible audiobooks, Kindle e-books, and Goodreads.
It’s a textbook case of using an acquisition to create switching costs and deepen user engagement – exactly the playbook Amazon has run for years. By combining the properties, Fable’s more than 100 million ratings and reviews can now be surfaced in Everand, while Everand readers can jump into communities associated with the book they’re currently reading.
The BookTok effect
Everand believes the new combined experience could attract readers who want a subscription that covers both formats, citing its own survey that found over half of readers regularly consume both.
Timing matters here, too. Thanks to BookTok’s influence and a general resurgence of offline activities, particularly among Gen Z, readers today are interested in not just consuming content but forming communities around it.
Fable’s community app offers a book tracker, reading goals, daily streak trackers, lists, book clubs, and discussion rooms.
Not without competition
The app is not without its competition. Today, there are numerous reading companion apps to choose from, including Hardcover, StoryGraph, Margins, PageBound, and many others. The crowding has already claimed one casualty; Tome announced a shutdown earlier this month.
In addition to the combined subscription for U.S. readers, Everand is also expanding its Standard, Plus, and Deluxe subscription tiers to worldwide markets. It has also modified how “unlocks” work, allowing unused credits to roll over for up to six months.
The bottom line
Everand’s bet is that readers don’t want to choose between e-books and audiobooks – and they also want community. By bundling both with social features, the startup is taking a direct shot at Amazon’s walled garden. Whether it works depends on whether 5 million readers are ready to switch.
