Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

A startup, Everand, is now bundling ebooks, audiobooks, and book clubs in challenge to Amazon

read original get Kindle Paperwhite E-reader → more articles
Why This Matters

Everand's new bundled subscription service combines ebooks, audiobooks, and social book clubs, challenging Amazon's dominance in digital reading. This integrated approach aims to attract more users by offering a comprehensive and social reading experience at competitive prices, potentially reshaping the digital book market. It highlights the importance of bundling and community features in driving user engagement and loyalty in the tech industry.

Key Takeaways

Audiobook, ebook, 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 ebooks with the social book club app Fable, which Everand acquired in 2025, into a single plan, directly challenging Amazon’s dominance in digital reading.

The new subscription is available to two apps’ 5 million combined readers and provides access to that over 1.5 million title library of audiobooks and ebooks, plus Fable’s nearly 200,000 online book clubs. As you read or listen in one app, that activity is synced to the other.

Image Credits:Everand

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 ebooks 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.

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 ebooks, 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. 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.

Image Credits:Everand

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, and an ad-free experience.

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 ebooks 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.

... continue reading