MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
November 27 – December 4, 2008 Edition
Random House
To Expand e-Books
with Backlist Titles
NEW YORK, NY/Authorlink News/11/24/08Random House, Inc., the U.S. division of Random House, Monday announced its intention to make an additional 6,000-plus of its backlist titles available as e-books in the coming months, enhancing its status as the largest e-books trade publisher. Random House already has more than 8,200 newly published and backlist volumes that are currently downloadable as e-books. When this initiative is completed, almost 15,000 Random House, Inc. books will be published in electronic format.
The newly chosen fiction and nonfiction titles have been selected from the company’s children’s and all its adult divisions. Among the works being published this and next month in an electronic format for the first time are fiction by Terry Brooks, Italo Calvino, Harlan Coben, Philip K. Dick, Louis L’Amour, Philip Pullman, Ruth Rendell, and John Updike; HEALTHY AGING by Andrew Weil, and several classic MAGIC TREE HOUSE and JUNIE B. JONES children’s books by Mary Pope Osborne and Barbara Park respectively.
Random House will make each of its new e-titles available simultaneously to all our digital retailers and distributors in the months ahead. They will be downloadable to all reading devices and platforms that feature digital book content supported by our current and future accounts. For the first time, the company will be offering its entire current electronic catalogue, as well as future titles, in the e-Pub format, the emerging industry standard for e-books, thereby making the content more easily accessible for consumers from a larger number of potential partners.
Markus Dohle, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Random House, believes that while physical books will continue to be the dominant reading format for many years ahead “more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books. Random House is making significant investments in the digital future on behalf of our authors and our booksellers to create additional revenue opportunities for them and for ourselves. We are deeply committed to expanding the marketplace for book reading.”
Each newly obtainable Random House, Inc. e-book will be added to Insight, the publisher’s own online book content and browsing service. Insight makes available to consumers and retailers pages of Random House books which can be viewed by either directly accessing the sample pages or by entering a search term, presenting a robust sampling opportunity for prospective purchasers.
Matt Shatz, Random House, Inc.’s Vice President, Digital, said, “We are excited that through this effort we are creating advanced files for many thousands of our titles that will be used in multiple ways in the years to come to provide great experiences for readers and compelling ways for our authors to reach their audiences in the future.”
Other Random House publishing divisions worldwide are emerging as electronic-book publishing leaders in their respective countries. In September, the Random House Group in the United Kingdom debuted its first list of frontlist and backlist e-books and expects to publish some 1,000 titles by year-end. Canadians are able to purchase most of the available US Random House, Inc. e-books, and Random House of Canada also has initiated its own e-book program, with more than 100 of its Canadian titles becoming available in electronic format in the next few months. The German-language e-book publishing effort from Munich-based Verlagsgruppe Random House has been underway for several years. They are the electronic-book market leader with the largest offering of trade titles and number of units sold and are currently expanding their list rapidly in order to anticipate growing demand for e-books.
