Subscription is very much in vogue. Rather than create a collection of audiobooks, you can subscribe to Audible and take your pick. Rather than stack DVDs high on your shelves, you can subscribe to NetFlix and work your way through boxsets. Rather than build a library of books, you can subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and choose from hundreds of thousands of titles.

Subscriptions are designed for consumers who consume plenty and regularly. You won’t stay loyal to NetFlix unless you watch a fair amount of television each week. You won’t keep downloading from Audible unless you’ve built a solid audiobook habit. So, the subscription provider relies on customers who are excited to have all the choice and intend to take advantage of it.

Scribd is one such provider. It offers access to 60 million items of media on its platform, including ebooks, audio books and comic books, for a monthly subscription fee of $8.99. In the interests of comparison, Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel The Girl on the Train is priced at $8.97 for Kindle. So, it’s effectively the cost of one book a month to subscribe and have access to millions of books. It is easy to see why so many readers have signed up to Scribd.

But if you’re a romance reader, you’re about to face disappointment. Scribd has announced that it is dramatically reducing the number of romance and erotica titles it makes available because readers have been ‘overdoing’ their reading. Scribd told publishers:

In starting Scribd, we bore the majority of the risk when establishing a business model that paid publishers the same amount as the retail model for each book read by a Scribd subscriber. Now, nearly two years later, the Scribd catalogue has grown from 100,000 titles to more than 1m. We’re proud of the service we’ve built and we’re constantly working to expand the selection across genres to give our readers the broadest possible list of books for $8.99 (£5.74) per month.

We’ve grown to a point where we are beginning to adjust the proportion of titles across genres to ensure that we can continue to expand the overall size and variety of our service. We will be making some adjustments, particularly to romance, and as a result some previously available titles may no longer be available.

According to Smashwords, which feeds a lot of romance to Scribd: ‘80–90% of Smashwords romance and erotica titles will be dropped by Scribd, including nearly all of our most popular romance titles.’ Yes, you did read correctly: the company will deliberately eradicate the most-popular, most-read books – favouring instead the cheapest, least-read novels.

The reality is that romance and erotica have become commercially non-viable for the company because of the volume of downloads: Scribd is having to pay more to authors than it receives from readers through subscriptions.

Although I can see the business case for Scribd’s move, it is a shame to see romance readers being penalised for their passion and commitment to the genre, and I can’t help thinking that they will vote with their feet and leave the programme if the choice on offer isn’t good enough. Of course they will then go elsewhere. Because romance readers won’t be deterred from their passion. We live to read!