You’ve been able to read illegally pirated comics on Scribd‘s digital reading service for some time. The company has been shifting into a more legitimate business moving into a digital book service among other services like audiobooks. We’ve known for some time that they’ve been shifting into the digital comic service, but the first two of many announcements to come have dropped. If you go to their website they also have offerings from Archie, Dynamite, IDW, Top Cow, Top Shelf, Zenescope, and Valiant.

Marvel has officially announced they are partnering with Scribd to provide an all you can read service for $8.99 a month. This is a limited catalog for Marvel unlike their own digital service Marvel Unlimited. The deal brings about 500 trade paperbacks to read through the service. That $8.99 is part of Scribd’s unlimited subscription service which includes e-books and audiobooks.

IDW Publishing not much after Marvel also sent out an official release announcing their addition to the service and has nailed down their offering to more than 3,500 comics between them and their imprint Top Shelf.

We host our PDF previews on their service and the navigation is generally lacking when it comes to reading, so it’ll be interesting to see what (if any) improvements the company makes to enhance the reading experience. The company has also attempted to clamp down on copyright violations, sending out lots of DMCA take down notices, and in our case, every one being erroneous, a broken enforcement system.

You can still easily find hundreds of pirated comics on their site. It’s interesting to see publishers enter into a deal with a company that has up to this point allowed content to be stolen. Money is a powerful thing (and we’re told from numerous sources Scribd offered a lot of it)….

Update: I should add, the Scribd official release also lists Arcana, MediaDo, Kingstone, and Space Goat as being offered. Good luck finding them on the landing page set up, or seeing what issues are offered for any of them….