Monday, December 08, 2008

A Random iPhone Giveaway

Random House Publishing Group is the latest to catch the iPhone fever and have teamed up with Lexcycle, to make full-length books available for free on iPhone through Lexcycle’s popular Stanza reader. Works by authors such as Alan Furst, Julie Garwood, Charlie Huston, David Liss, Laurie Notaro, Arthur Phillips and Simon Rich will be available via the platform . Initially the service will feature titles from each author's backlist and will include excerpts for any new 2009 titles. Random House is also providing links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Borders.com, Powells.com and IndieBound.org to encourage readers to purchase more books by these authors.

We should be careful for what we wish for. We are starting to offer backlists as a free incentive for front list, but what if the front list doesn’t sell and people are happy with the backlist they get for free on a relatively unsecure platform? Do the authors earn on the titles that are given away?

We ask whether this is Wise.com?

So we have a free reader, free backlist and we expect readers to pay to by new titles at what price? This free offer is the ultimate discount and could create a mindset value proposition in the market of free ebooks. This is likely to be compounded by others such as Google Book Search.

Have the children finally taken over the choclate factory?

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