Scribd can't afford to feed your romance habit anymore

The idea behind every all-you-can-eat-style service is that only a few people will consume more food/movies/e-books than it costs overall to keep the business going. Unfortunately people's lust for written romance is so immense that Scribd's cutting them off in order to remain a viable business. The company has sent out a letter to several publishers, including Smashwords, saying that it would be making some adjustments to its romance catalog.

As Ink, Bits and Pixels says, Amazon pays its Kindle lending library authors out of a single fixed pot of money, which is split by the number of books read every month. Scribd, however, pays the wholesale price every time someone reads more than 10 percent of a title. That's the sort of generous, author-friendly payment terms that'd make Taylor Swift reconsider her life choices, but also problematic for a subscription service that doesn't have other businesses (like Amazon) to lean on when the cash runs out. There's no details about how the cull is going to take place, or what sort of titles will survive (unless they're given away for free, which can stay) but we'd suggest that you all make hay while the sun shines.

In a statement, Scribd CEO Trip Adler affirms a commitment to keeping the romance genre alive on the service, and that the firm is trying to "grow in a sustainable way." He's also added that anyone who is half-way through a book that's due to be purged will get a 30-day stay of execution to finish reading it. In addition, the company is "working hard to establish more mutually beneficial terms" with publishers, which might mean that the payments aren't as generous as they've once been, but that you'll get back all those lost books.

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