Penguin 2.0 launches, Random House partners with Stanza
If last week was full of bad news from the publishing world, I hope things are different this week. And they seem to be. I was preparing for another flood of bad news from my usual morning Publishers Weekly email. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised at what I found instead. While the publishing world didn’t do a complete turnaround over the weekend, at least two large publishers are trying to take steps in the right direction, according to this PW article.
Penguin is jumping into the digital age feet first, with several offerings on this new part of their website. According to the PW article, the website..
…will feature a new blog and access to exclusive Penguin content, including enhanced e-books, videos and special print products.
As a proud iPhone owner, though, I’m most excited about this juicy bit of news:
The other piece of Penguin news is Penguin Mobile, an iPhone app, available for free from the Apple App store. The application makes the features of the Web site—the blog, book previews, podcasts, news and Penguin-specific book-finding tools—available on the iPhone. Some Penguin e-books are already available to iPhone users through eReader; the Penguin Mobile app offers the Penguin 2.0 site’s enhanced content, not access to Penguin e-books. Jeff Gomez, Penguin’s senior director of online consumer sales and marketing, pointed out that Penguin is "the first of the big New York publishers to have a dedicated iPhone app."
Very cool! You can probably bet I’ll be downloading the new app very soon and I’ll let ya’ll know what I think after playing around with it for a bit.
Random House is not to be left out!
The same PW article also mentions that Random House will be partnering with Stanza, the iPhone ebook reader from Lexcycle, which will start making selections from various RH authors available for download:
The roster of authors includes Alan Furst, Julie Garwood, Charlie Huston, David Liss, Laurie Notaro, Arthur Phillips and Simon Rich. The first books available will come from these authors’ backlists and will include previews of upcoming 2009 titles by each.
Now here’s the really cool part…wait for it…the backlisted titles will be offered for FREE! That’s right, a major publisher is actually giving away free titles in hopes of getting readers hooked on a particular author:
Acknowledging the growing need to use free content to market new books, Avideh Bashirrad, deputy director of marketing for Random House, said, "we’re happy to modify our traditional marketing methods to make use of the new technology available to readers today.
Obviously, this is great news! But it also means that it looks like the publishing industry has learned some valuable lessons from the record industry (RIAA) and are trying to move in the direction of new technology, rather than fighting it (and suing their own customers).
Random House is also showing again how the power of free can be applied to a struggling industry, during an economic slump, to get people buying again. I talked briefly about the power of free with regards to another publisher in this post.
I’m sure after last week’s grim news from publishers, this is a breath of fresh air for everyone. I know I needed to read an article like this to keep me from getting too depressed about the economy. It’s kinda hard to get depressed when publishers are offering you free books!
Related posts
- Random House adopting the Sony Reader for in-house work!
- Random House now claiming ebook rights to backlist titles
- Two large publishers going digital, kind of
- Amazon buys Lexcycle (Stanza) – What does this mean for ebooks?
- 5 reasons why Stanza might be my iPhone ebook app of choice
Read More: Publishing News
