You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Random House titles are now available to download and read on the Apple iPhone for free. Through Lexcycle's Stanza – the electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch – users can select from a variety of e-books published by Random House and Ballantine.
In November, Pan Macmillan said it was making free excerpts from bestsellers available on the iPhone via Lexcycle's Stanza. But the US publisher has gone a step further: deputy director of marketing for Random House, Avideh Bashirrad, said the concept of giving away books was an unusual marketing tool. But, he added: "We're happy to modify our traditional marketing methods to make use of the new technology available to readers today."
Books are available from authors including David Liss, Arthur Phillips, and Julie Garwood. One of the featured authors, Charlie Huston, said that free e-books would put the power back into the hands of the readers. He added: "It's good to give books away. We write them for people to read them."
Penguin Group (USA) has also announced a new digital publishing program, Penguin 2.0, with the launch of Penguin Mobile. This will develop content for iPhone and other web-enabled mobile devices. The plan is to roll this out, along with social networking and community functionality, over the next 12 months.
There are currently 500,000 Stanza users, with the Stanza public domain library seeing nearly 40,000 downloads a day. Lexcycle said they hoped to make more free titles available to their users in the future.