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Orb Entertainment has released an e-book version of Simon's Cat for the Playstation Portable in partnership with Canongate.
It comes a week after the company, founded by Walker Books head of digital Paul Rhodes, released a graphic novel of Paul Auster's City of Glass through Faber. Simon's Cat, Beyond the Fence, is price £5.59.
Rhodes said, “The e-books phenomenon has so far been utterly focused on Apple vs Amazon - but what about the devices that are already in people's pockets? The Playstation is already set up as a comic reader. You can download comics from the PSP store and read them on the games console.”
Rhodes is working with a number of adult publishers to make their graphic novels available for this device. He said: “It sits between a book and a film as you can direct the reader through the experience of reading a comic. It doesn’t display the whole page at once but directs the reader to the most important parts of the page.”
He added: “There has been a lot of interest in this because it takes on the established comic market. It makes it possible to publish a literary graphic novel for an audience that publishers have not been able to reach before.”
Orb Entertainment does not plan to make the graphic novels available for the iPad as well as the Playstation.
Children’s publishers including Egmont and Puffin have already made a number of fiction titles available as interactive ebooks for the Nintendo DS device; Egmont said sales of the Nintendo titles have outstripped their ebook sales.