I’m Really Liking This Scribd Thing

I tried Amazon Kindle Unlimited (twice!) but just wasn’t that impressed. Sure, there were tons of titles, but a lot of them were of poor quality or uninteresting. Since the behemoth wasn’t able to impress me, I didn’t expect much of Scribd, but I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised!

I’ve been particularly impressed by the quality and quantity of theology, psychology, and philosophy books that are available. Currently I’m actively reading the following from Scribd:

• The Problem of Evil: Selected Reading, Second Edition.
  • Because the question of theodicy haunts me.
• Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs by David W. Bercot.
  • I don’t stop thinking for myself, but I find great value in knowing what others have thought before me.
• God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis.
  • Because it’s C.S. Lewis for goodness sake!
• Seeing through the Fog: Hope When Your World Falls Apart by Ed Dobson.
  • Dobson had ALS, I interacted with him electronically a (very) few times, seems like someone who could speak to this topic with wisdom.
• The First Testament: A New Translation by John Goldingay.
  • Really enjoying this, reminds me of Robert Alter’s translations, poetic, vivid.

I’m also listening to a few interesting audio books:

• The ADHD Effect on Marriage by Melissa Orlov.
  • Holy crap this book is important!
• Recovery: Freedom from our Addictions by Russell Brand.
  • This book is brutally honest but also quite vulgar.
• The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher.
  • Fisher is approachable in her book and her stories are…interesting, disturbing…
• God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman.
  • Ehrman left the Christian faith in large part because of the problem of suffering. I’ve never read anything by Ehrman before, but theodicy chills my soul as I mentioned above, so this seemed like a good option as well!

That said, I do have more than a few complaints I hope Scribd will remedy in the near future:

1. You can add books to a “saved” list for future reference/reading, but they fall off the list if your list gets too long (and no, there isn’t any warning…you just notice that books you’ve saved no longer are!).
   1. Update: Spoke with Moon at Scribd who informed me there is currently a ~500 book limit. I know, why do I have more than 500 books on my to read list? Don’t ask!
2. You can create multiple lists to manage your saved books, but the books are dropped from these lists if you removed them from the overall “saved” list (under some circumstances? I’m not sure which!). This wouldn’t be the biggest issue if they didn’t drop books off the “saved” list without warning!
3. When reading an ebook (e.g. on your phone) you have to flip pages, you can’t do a continuous scroll. This isn’t a huge problem in and of itself, but becomes quite significant because there doesn’t seem to be a way to highlight text from multiple pages (e.g. in Amazon, you hold in the corner and it continues the highlight onto the next page).
   1. Update: I was completely wrong about this – you can do scrolling. Moon from Scribd informed me that when I’m in a book I can click on Aa near the top right of the screen and there is a slider, top right, that can be changed from paging to scrolling. There are also some other nifty options there as well!
   2. Update 2: Unfortunately, this isn’t a scroll that allows for highlighting across multiple pages. 🙁

Okay, maybe those are only a few complaints, but they are pretty big ones! Please Scribd, take care of these so I can sing your praises without reservation!