Update On Shortcovers

On January 16th, I posted here about a new e-book app called Shortcovers from Indigo Books, a Canadian company.

The Wall Street Journal described Shortcovers as:

. . . a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books -- say, the first chapter -- and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls "shortcovers."

On Thursday, Indigo Books issued a press release:

Specifically, Shortcovers released the following information about its growth and global reach:

• Users in 160 countries. Top global regions include the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India and China
• More than 100,000 people have tried Shortcovers, and 10,000 registered with the service
• The average purchase is just under $10 USD
• The most popular purchases include the Twilight series and Outliers
• Authors have contributed thousands of books, chapters, short stories and other works directly through Shortcovers.com

Indigo's executive VP reported that they'd expected most downloads to be on the iPhone, but the company had discovered Blackberry and Android users were also downloading Shortcovers' offerings.

Go here to read the entire press release.

Thanks to Publishers Lunch for pointing me to the story.