Date:25/11/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/11/25/stories/2008112551102000.htm

International

Random House to digitise books

NEW YORK: With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House announced on Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form. These will include novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the Magic Treehouse children’s series.

Random House chief executive officer Markus Dohle said that “more people every day are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books.”

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher’s Insight browsing service. E-books remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1 percent or less. — AP