A startup, Everand, is now bundling e-books, audiobooks, and book clubs in challenge to Amazon
A startup, Everand, is now bundling e-books, audiobooks, and book clubs in challenge to Amazon
初创公司 Everand 推出电子书、有声书与读书俱乐部捆绑服务，向亚马逊发起挑战
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, which Everand acquired in 2025, into a single plan, directly challenging Amazon’s dominance in digital reading. 听有声书、看电子书，还是两者兼顾？现在，你无需再做选择。Scribd 旗下的阅读订阅服务 Everand 希望让这种纠结成为过去。周二，该公司推出了一项综合订阅服务，将 Everand 拥有超过 150 万部有声书和电子书的资源库，与 Everand 在 2025 年收购的社交读书俱乐部应用 Fable 合并为一个单一计划，直接挑战亚马逊在数字阅读领域的统治地位。
The new subscription is available to the two apps’ 5 million combined readers and provides access to the over 1.5 million-title library of audiobooks and e-books, 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 and other major distributors, it says. 这项新订阅服务面向两款应用总计 500 万的读者，用户不仅可以访问超过 150 万部有声书和电子书，还能参与 Fable 近 20 万个在线读书俱乐部。当你在一个应用中阅读或收听时，进度会自动同步到另一个应用。该公司表示，他们已与美国五大出版商及其他主要发行商签署了授权协议。
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. Because the subscription covers both e-books and audiobooks, that’s a fairly competitive deal compared with Audible Premium Plus ($14.95/month), which offers one credit for an audiobook along with its streaming catalog of originals and podcasts. 在美国，入门级套餐每月 11.99 美元可获取一本书，16.99 美元的套餐可获取三本，而 28.99 美元的套餐则可获取五本。由于该订阅涵盖电子书和有声书，与每月 14.95 美元、仅提供一个有声书积分及流媒体原创内容和播客的 Audible Premium Plus 相比，这具有相当强的竞争力。
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 today spans Audible audiobooks, Kindle e-books, and the still-popular reading recommendation and logging app 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. Everand 希望通过这种捆绑策略，帮助像它这样的小型参与者撼动亚马逊的阅读帝国。亚马逊目前的版图涵盖了 Audible 有声书、Kindle 电子书以及依然广受欢迎的阅读推荐与记录应用 Goodreads。这是一个利用收购来制造转换成本并加深用户粘性的教科书式案例——这正是亚马逊多年来一直采用的策略。
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 company notes that last year, 820,000 Fable readers joined a new club in its app. With the new subscription plans, Fable Plus is included, offering advanced reading stats, custom reading goals, bonus badges, and an ad-free experience. (Typically, Fable Plus is $5.99/month or $49.99/year.) 通过整合资源，Fable 超过 1 亿条的评分和评论现在可以在 Everand 中显示，而 Everand 的读者也可以直接进入与当前阅读书籍相关的社区。该公司指出，去年有 82 万名 Fable 读者加入了应用内的新俱乐部。新的订阅计划包含了 Fable Plus 会员，提供高级阅读统计、自定义阅读目标、奖励徽章和无广告体验。（通常情况下，Fable Plus 的价格为每月 5.99 美元或每年 49.99 美元。）
Everand isn’t the only one circling Amazon’s turf. Spotify has also entered this market with its own audiobooks offering and, oddly, physical books. To help users move between formats, Spotify offers a “page match” feature that syncs your place between a physical book and the audio version. Everand believes the new combined experience could attract readers who want a subscription that covers both audiobooks and e-books in one place, citing its own survey of over 1,600 U.S.-based adult readers conducted in 2025, which found that over half of readers regularly consume both formats. Everand 并不是唯一一个觊觎亚马逊领地的公司。Spotify 也已进入该市场，提供有声书，甚至还涉足了实体书业务。为了帮助用户在不同格式间切换，Spotify 提供了一项“页面匹配”（page match）功能，可以同步实体书和音频版本的阅读进度。Everand 认为，这种全新的综合体验能够吸引那些希望在一个平台订阅有声书和电子书的读者。该公司援引 2025 年对 1600 多名美国成年读者的调查显示，超过一半的读者会定期使用这两种格式。
Timing matters here, too. Thanks to BookTok’s influence and a general resurgence of offline (or “analog“) activities, particularly among Gen Z, readers today are interested in not just consuming content but forming communities around the content, where they can discuss their latest reads, rate and review titles, share favorite quotes and passages, and more. Fable’s community app caters to this trend, offering a book tracker, reading goals, daily streak trackers, lists, book clubs, and discussion rooms. 时机在这里也至关重要。得益于 BookTok 的影响力以及线下（或称“模拟”）活动的普遍复苏，特别是在 Z 世代中，现在的读者不仅对消费内容感兴趣，还热衷于围绕内容建立社区，讨论最新读物、评分评论、分享喜爱的引语和段落等。Fable 的社区应用迎合了这一趋势，提供了书籍追踪器、阅读目标、每日打卡追踪、书单、读书俱乐部和讨论室等功能。
The app is not without its competition. Today, there are numerous reading companion apps to choose from, including Hardcover, StoryGraph, Margins, PageBound, Bookshelf, Bookly, TBR, Reading Journey, Bookwise, and many others. The crowding has already claimed one casualty; Tome announced a shutdown earlier this month, citing overwhelming competition. 当然，该应用也面临竞争。如今，市面上有许多阅读辅助应用可供选择，包括 Hardcover、StoryGraph、Margins、PageBound、Bookshelf、Bookly、TBR、Reading Journey、Bookwise 等。这种拥挤的市场已经出现了一位牺牲者：Tome 本月初宣布关闭，理由是竞争过于激烈。
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, instead of expiring at the end of a subscriber’s billing period. 除了为美国读者提供综合订阅服务外，Everand 还将其标准版、Plus 版和豪华版订阅层级扩展到了全球市场。此外，他们还修改了“解锁”机制，允许未使用的积分滚动保留长达六个月，而不是在订阅周期结束时过期。