Author: Anthony Ha

Subscription ebook and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers. It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books. The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Scribd started out as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription ebook business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day. Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised Scribd’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.” “We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio....

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Facebook is shutting down Moments; here’s how to save all your photos Facebook Moments, the standalone mobile app designed to let users privately share photos and videos, is shutting down next month. The reason is simple: Not many people used it. For those who did use it, there are two export options. One will create a private album on their Facebook account; the other option downloads everything to their device. 2. StarCraft II-playing AI AlphaStar takes out pros undefeated AlphaStar is different from the traditional StarCraft AI. It learned from watching humans play at first, but soon honed its skills by playing against facets of itself. 3. Theranos documentary review: The Inventor’s horrifying optimism The documentary that premiered yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival explores how the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley is “really dangerous when people’s lives are in the balance,” as former employee and whistleblower Tyler Shultz says in the film. 4. Facebook to encrypt Instagram messages ahead of integration with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger As first reported by The New York Times, the social media giant said it’s reworking the underlying infrastructure of its three messaging apps to allow users to talk to...

Okay, I’ll admit it: Sometimes, I write stories because I think they’re going to be popular. And sometimes, those stories fall flat anyway. It makes sense — both on a cosmic level, because life isn’t fair, but also in the more specific sense that some topics are simply over-covered. Yes, people seem to like reading about Apple, but are they going to read my Apple post if it’s fiftieth story published on the same topic? Analytics company Parse.ly is trying to address that very problem with a new feature in Currents, its free product highlighting broader audience trends. The feature is called “demand sorting,” because it points out the topics that are most “in demand” by the audience. Demand, in this case, is determined by taking the total number of views for a topic and then dividing that by the number of articles. In other words, if a topic is in-demand, it’s attracting a lot of views but has been covered by relatively few stories — creating an opportunity for a writer looking for their next subject. In part, CEO Sachin Kamdar said this is highlighting Parse.ly’s “differentiated data, showing what people are actually reading versus what people are sharing or searching for.” Special Projects Lead Sal Gionfriddo said it’s also taking advantage of the natural language processing technology used in Currents to identify the main topic of a story...