Everand’s startup is now bringing together e-books, audiobooks and book clubs in a challenge to Amazon

Audiobook, eBook, or both? Now, you won’t have to choose. Scribd Everand-owned reading subscription service wants to make choice unnecessary. On Tuesday, the company removed the wraps of a combined subscription that combines Everand’s catalog of more than 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.

The new subscription is available to the two apps’ combined 5 million readers, and provides access to a library of more than 1.5 million audiobook and eBook titles, as well as Fable’s nearly 200,000 online book clubs. As you read or listen in one app, that activity is synced with the other app. The company says it has licensing agreements with all five major US publishing houses and other major distributors.

The Starter plan offers one book for $11.99 per month in the US, while the $16.99 per month plan offers three books, and the $28.99 per month plan lets you dive into five books. Since the subscription covers both eBooks and audiobooks, this is a fairly competitive deal compared to Audible Premium Plus ($14.95 per month), which offers one audiobook credit in addition to its catalog of originals and podcasts.

The hope on Everand’s part is that this combined approach can help smaller players like him make an impact in Amazon’s reading empire, which today includes Audible audiobooks, Kindle e-books, reading recommendations and the still-popular Goodreads recording app.

It’s a textbook case of using acquisition to create switching costs and deepen user engagement — exactly the playbook Amazon has been running for years. By combining the features, Fable’s over 100 million ratings and reviews can now be visible in Everand, while Everand readers can navigate to communities related to 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, providing advanced reading statistics, personalized reading goals, additional badges, and an ad-free experience. (Fable Plus is usually priced at $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year.)

Everand isn’t the only one circling the Amazon. Spotify has also entered this market with its own audiobook offerings, and oddly enough, physical books. To help users navigate between formats, Spotify offers a “Page Match” feature that syncs your location between the actual 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 her own survey of more than 1,600 U.S.-based adult readers conducted in 2025, which found that more than half of readers regularly consume both formats.

Timing is important here too. Thanks to the BookTok effect and the general resurgence of offline (or “analog”) activities, especially among Gen Z, readers today are interested not only in consuming content, but in forming communities around content, where they can discuss their latest reads, rate and review titles, share favorite quotes and passages, and more.

The Fable community app caters to this trend, offering a book tracker, reading goals, daily streak trackers, lists, book clubs, and discussion rooms.

The app is not without competition. Today, there are many reading companion apps to choose from, including Hardcover, StoryGraph, Margins, PageBound, Bookshelf, Bookly, TBR, Reading Journey, Bookwise, and many more. The overcrowding has already killed one person. Tommy announced the closure of the service earlier this month, due to overwhelming competition.

In addition to the built-in subscription for U.S. readers, Everand is also expanding its Standard, Plus, and Deluxe subscription tiers to global markets. It has also modified how Unlock works, allowing unused balances to be renewed for up to six months, rather than expiring at the end of a subscriber’s billing period.