For the next eight weeks, New York City subway riders can download free short stories and 175 book excerpts offered by Penguin Random House. It’s part of PRH’s “Subway Reads” promotion, in partnership with the MTA, “celebrating the installation of free wireless connectivity in more than 175 underground subway stations.” The NYT notes that, “Transit officials approached Penguin Random House…because it had run a similar e-book promotion in the London Underground last year, celebrating Penguin’s 80th anniversary. Transit officials said they were open to other platforms from publishers, and platforms for more than books — anything to draw passengers to the Wi-Fi […]
Features/Offers
Briefs: Amazon’s Inspire; Nook Press’s Print Platform
Attentive readers will remember that back in February we were the first to write about Amazon K-12 Education, a unit working on “improving the education of students with services for teachers, students and parents.” Those efforts were focused on “building a large discoverable library of open educational resources for K-12 teachers across the country, using Amazon’s scale and experience.” And the objectives included building distribution options for traditional content as well: “Imagine a school district that wants to put ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ e-book on thousands of tablets for their students to read – a single click of a […]
Briefs: More James Patterson Library Grants; DRM-Free Star Trek eBooks; and More
For the second year in a row, James Patterson will award $1.75 million in grants (of $1,000 to $10,000) on a rolling basis throughout the year to school libraries. Once again the initiative is run in partnership with Scholastic Reading Club. Aligned with the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, Pocket Books has announced the release of more than 700 tie-in novels and novelizations in DRM-free ebook editions. Pocket president Louise Burke says in the release, “We’re excited to re-introduce many classic stories and to enable discovery and the ease of purchase that DRM-free provides.” New visitors to the site will be eligible for a […]
Harper Offers Authors Additional Net Royalty For Online Direct Sales Referrals
As promised in July when HarperCollins relaunched their web site to focus on making their full catalog of books, ebooks and audiobooks available for sale to consumers, the company is now ready to provide additional compensation to “our authors who want to sell directly” via Harper’s shopping cart. Authors who add a linked HarperCollins “buy” button on their sites or directly integrate the Harper shopping cart will receive an additional 10 percent of net on those sales, to be credited through their regular twice-annual royalty statements. Authors interested in implementing the new offer should start by contacting their editors, though […]
Scribd Enters Digital Book Discovery Fray; Same-Day Service from BN & Google
Scribd relaunched what it dubs its “new browse experience”, the company’s try at digital book discovery to complement its existing subscription program, which now boasts 500,000 titles (with Princeton University Press, Samhain, and National Geographic among the most recently added publishers.) The browsing capability is available at Scribd’s website and in the coming weeks through its various mobile apps. Scribd vp, marketing Julie Haddon told us in an interview earlier this week that the company enlisted a “50-person team of scientists, book publishing experts, librarians, and marketers”, as well as a small editorial staff, to “work out the ideal browsing […]
Harper Launches Reader App and Direct eBook Sales, Starting with CS Lewis
HarperCollins has relaunched their CS Lewis and Narnia websites, adding for the first time a direct-sales ebookstore to both sites, selling Lewis’s work in English in ebook editions in major territories around the world. As part of that new ebook sales offer, they have launched a branded Harper Reader app on iOS and Android. A customized version of the Bluefire Reader, it displays the encrypted EPUB files that Harper is selling — along with digital “extras” that Harper is offering their direct customers. So when you download the app, it comes with an “exclusive” free copy of Beyond the Wardrobe: […]