The demand for e-books has been growing, as evidenced, for example, by Amazon.com’s much-vaunted Kindle e-book reader selling out twice. Indigo Books & Music Inc. believes strongly that the market for e-books is hitting critical mass, and, most important, that consumers will want to read e-books anytime, anywhere. Which is why the multi-channel retailer next month will launch Shortcovers, a mobile and conventional web destination for free and paid electronic content ranging from books and magazines to newspapers and blogs.
Shortcovers, Indigo Books & Music tells Internet Retailer, is a new division of the company with its own e-commerce infrastructure. Shortcovers in February will launch its web site and a mobile application for the iPhone. IPhone users can download the free program in Apple’s App Store. They create an account and profile through the mobile app or at Shortcovers.com that will enable them to search, browse and download e-books in numerous file formats, most significantly the publishing industry’s ePub standard. Indigo will introduce mobile applications for smartphones using the BlackBerry, Android and Symbian mobile operating systems, in that order, but did not specify a timeline.
Indigo, No. 137 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, sees Shortcovers software as having a significant edge over e-book reader hardware like Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, even though e-book-dedicated hardware has a larger screen than smartphones.
“We’re not just for the avid reader. Our goal is to make content available for anyone on any device,” says Michael Serbinis, executive vice president and chief information officer at Indigo Books & Music. “Shortcovers is a service for anyone who wants instant access to content with the convenience of having that access from the device they already own. Ultimately, a device like the Kindle is not something you will have with you all the time; your phone is.”
When it rolls out, Shortcovers, which also will have community and sharing features, will offer 200,000 shortcovers, free and paid excerpts from numerous publishers. The complete works of 50,000 of these shortcovers will be available for purchase in digital form, the rest as physical books. About 30,000 of these titles will be contemporary while 20,000 will be older or in the public domain. E-book prices will range from $10 to $20; paid shortcovers will cost 99 cents.
Many consumers, especially older ones, pooh-pooh the notion of reading books, magazines or newspapers on the smaller screen of a smartphone and contend it will not catch on; they’re behind the times, Serbinis contends.
“It’s not that people one day will read differently—they already are,” he says. “They are reading on regular computers, they are reading on iPhones and BlackBerrys, and they are reading a wider variety of content than you would find in any bookstore. This is not something that will happen at some point, it already is happening, and being mobile is a key part of the equation.”
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