US-based e-book and audiobook subscription service Scribd has acquired LinkedIn's Slideshare, the hosting platform for presentations and other professional content, for an undisclosed sum.
"On September 24, Scribd will begin operating the Slideshare business, its 100 million users, along with its presentation upload and hosting tools, and tremendous archive of presentations and documents," LinkedIn said in a statement.
LinkedIn had acquired SlideShare in May 2012. "Over the last eight years, the SlideShare team, product, and community has helped shape the content experience on LinkedIn. We’ve incorporated the ability to upload, share, and discuss documents on LinkedIn," the statement added.
Meanwhile, Scribd's co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said that the acquisition is a major step towards creating the world’s largest digital library. “Scribd has accumulated a unique collection of user-generated and professional content that we make available to our readers via personalized recommendations, and the addition of presentations from the SlideShare community advances our vision. It allows us to continue diversifying our offering while driving even more readers to the books, audiobooks, magazines, and other professionally published works in our digital library,” Adler said.
He added that Scribd’s premium subscription service offers over 1,000,000 professionally published ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, sheet music, and magazines, and now with SlideShare, over 40 million presentations will be added to the Scribd reading ecosystem.
