Feb 26 2009
Indigo Books launches new ebook service
Indigo Books and Music may be a Canadian bookstore chain, but it’s putting out feelers into the United States now too, through a new ebook service called “Shortcovers.”
It launched today, at a brand new Shortcovers website (under the slogan, “Find Your Next Great Read”). According to yesterday’s Globe and Mail, in the article entitled “Indigo launches e-book service,” the new service imitates the successful iTunes model of music downloads. It begins with 50,000 available books, shortly to be followed by all “big name” magazines and newspapers. And then there will be even more books, including a large percentage of Canadian content, which unfortunately is sadly lacking at the moment.
Indigo is both a bricks-and-mortar book store chain, with more than 200 stores in Canada, and an online bookseller, whose internet selling is similar to that of Amazon. Amazon itself also has an ebook service, but its books can only be downloaded and read on the Kindle. Indigo’s offerings, on the other hand, can be downloaded on the Blackberry Storm, Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch, and Google’s Android mobile application. Furthermore, you can just download them onto your computer and read them there if you like. So there’s a lot more flexibility with this service than with the Kindle, or with Sony’s similar stand-alone book reader.
What is almost equally exciting about Shortcovers is that it will also feature 200,000 free sample chapters, perhaps even more. They could be from existing books, but self-published and unpublished writers will also be able to submit a chapter from their novel, or even an article. These can be placed on the site for free, with or without ads, or for a $0.99 fee.
The cost of book downloads is going to range from $4.99 to $19.99, or individual chapters can be bought for $0.99. The Globe and Mail article is presumably using Canadian dollar figures, being a Canadian national newspaper, so the U.S. amount will be slightly less than that, at least at the current exchange rate.
This service won’t preclude continuing to buy hard copy versions of the books, either. Anyone who wants one can order one through the service, and in the U.S. the order will be filled by Barnes & Noble, while Indigo and its sister stores in Canada will handle Canadian orders.
It’s going to be interesting to see if this wider, more flexible model will force both Amazon and Sony to open up and relinquish their attempts to become the sole ebook readers. My bet would be yes.
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