A startup, Everand, is now bundling e-books, audiobooks, and book clubs in challenge to Amazon

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.