With all eyes on Amazon's new tablet today, a quieter launch has happened for Bloomsbury, which is setting live its new digital imprint, Bloomsbury Reader. The digital publishing unit was announced in May--despite the name, it is not a device--and features digital and print-on-demand titles where English-language rights rest with an author or estate. Bloomsbury is working with a number of literary agencies, including The Rights House, to acquire books for the imprint, which debuts with 500 titles.
The titles, according to a Bloomsburry, rep are available in all e-book formats, but currently only available through Amazon's U.S. and U.K. sotrefronts. This, the rep noted, is because Amazon is currently "the only retailer to have ingested all the books." The titles are also not available in Apple's ibookstore, since Bloomsbury does not follow the agency model.
POD editions of Bloomsbury Reader titles are expected to become available next month, and e-book editions are priced at $8.99 (or 6.98 pounds) and cross a wide variety of various genres. Among the authors with titles featured through the program are V.S. Pritchett and Edith Sitwell.
