Hachette’s Little, Brown Books for Young Readers is partnering with Booktrack, a technology platform offering customizable soundtracks and sound effects for e-books, to supply movie-like soundtracks for its popular e-books for teens.
The soundtrack enhanced e-books from Novl, LBBYR’s digital-original imprint, will become available today though a branded Little, Brown Booktrack page. The titles will include works by such bestselling LBYR authors as Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Rebecca Serle, Libba Bray, Jennifer E. Smith, and Laini Taylor.
New original Booktrack-enabled LBYR titles, including works by Jennifer Rush, Virginia Boecker, and Emily Lloyd-Jones. among others, will be released on a monthly basis throughout the summer. With the San Diego Comic-Con opening this week, Booktrack has a Comic-Con promotion, offering three free music-enhanced e-books to users who sign on to the service by the end of July.
Titles will include “It’s Just a Jump to the Left,” an original short story by Libba Bray (The Diviners), which will be available on Booktrack on August 15. Garcia and Stohl’s Beautiful Creatures: The Untold Stories (a series of six novellas) are available now on Booktrack. And Jennifer E. Smith’s Happy Again, a YA romance novel, is also available now on the LBYR Booktrack page.
Booktrack CEO and founder Paul Cameron said the deal will allow LBYR to add “a totally immersive, enhanced experience to the Hachette titles we’ll be offering in our library.”
Founded in the early 2000s by Cameron and funded by more than $5 million in investments from COENT Venture Partners and Sparkbox Ventures, Booktrack technology can supply a polished musical soundtrack for an e-book that will synchronize itself to the reading pace of the user. Publishers can pay Booktrack to create soundtracks (or audio effects) for its titles or create their own soundtrack by using a licensed Booktrack library offering thousands of audio files. Booktrack’s audio file are tagged for emotional qualities and the technology allows users to synch sounds to specific passages or words.
Tina McIntyre, senior executive director, content development at Hachette’s Book Group, said, “We are eager to have these newly imagined digital versions of original titles available. We expect they will add an extra layer of reading enjoyment for current fans, while bringing a whole new audience to the titles to experience the joy of reading and listening together.”
