Offering an unlimited number of e-books, audio books, PDFs, sheet music and magazines for $14 a month, Scribd is the newest subscription entertainment service in town. Just in case you didn’t already have enough of those in your life.

Launching in Australia after operating for years in the US, Scribd claims to be “the largest digital library”, and the depth of its content — both local and international — is legitimately impressive. There are lots of PDFs with everything from educational modules on how to write resumes to artists’ reference materials. The sheet music library has a wealth of musical theatre, drum solos, popular music, and most other genres you could imagine on almost every instrument.

I haven’t yet searched for a book I wanted to read that Scribd didn’t have some form, although it sometimes only had the written or audio version. Plus, I can read all those third tier magazines I vaguely want to read, but not enough to actually pay for. Given how podcasts are usually free, having them isn’t really a selling point but it might be helpful for some people to have everything in the one app.

As an e-reader, the app is pretty decent. There’s plenty of customisation options for books covering everything from font size to background colour. The only annoying thing is that it’s very attached to the concept of pages and won’t allow you to scroll up line by line as Apple Books does, which better suits some people’s reading style. But that’s a pretty minor quibble.

The most obvious comparison is to Amazon’s Audible service, which gives users access to purchase audiobooks at a discount for $16.45 a month, along with one free monthly credit. It’s much more expensive, and any time you return an audio book to make the most of your membership, the author loses money. But you do get to keep the books you buy on Audible, even if you stop subscribing, which is not the case with Scribd.

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The problem Scribd will face in Australia is that there are already services that do almost the same thing for free: most local libraries have apps and services that allow members to borrow e-books and audiobooks, and read magazines and newspapers without charge.

Those services aren’t always as easy to navigate, don’t have the range of Scribd (certainly no sheet music in most cases), and there are limits on how long you can borrow things. But it is hard to beat free as a pricepoint.