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Guinness World Records is to publish a free e-book alongside its print edition this autumn, including the records broken at the 2012 Olympics.
Editor-in-chief Craig Glenday said: “We always have the issue in an Olympic year that the print edition goes to press before the Games. With the Olympics in London, there is so much excitement this year. The e-book is a way of squeezing the Olympic records in, and it’s also a way of giving people a free taste of the book in digital form.”
The e-book will be released alongside the £20 hardback of Guinness World Records 2013 on 13th September. In October the publisher will also release a digital version of the full book for a second year running, priced at £15 for the fixed format for the iPad, and at £7.99 for the reflowable version for Kindle and other black-and-white devices.
Glenday reported that more than 10,000 digital copies of Guinness World Records 2012 have been sold so far. “For our first time—and for something that is normally an impulse gift buy that lends itself more to bricks-and-mortar shops—that’s doing well,” he said.
The publisher has also stepped up the digital dimension of the physical book this year, providing augmented reality content through a free camera app, which, when aimed at QR codes in the book, produces augmented reality images of record breakers. Readers can interact with these and take their photo to share with friends. Glenday said: “It shows that we are in touch with whatever new technology is available, and it is more about enhancing the book’s content. We wanted to do something that readers have never seen before.”
The Guinness World Records offices will be the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, due to air in September on ITV1.