Penguin India To Offer Mobile Books

Penguin Books India is offering mobile books to consumers. The company has tied up with Mobifusion, and will initially be offering three books – ‘The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living with Mother Teresa’ complied by Jaya Chaliha and Edward Le Joly, ‘The Path to Tranquillity’ by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and ‘The Book of Prayer’ edited by Renuka Narayanan. Hmm…I haven’t seen any of these on the bestseller list, and it appears that Penguin is trying to test the medium first with these books. The price of the books has of course not been mentioned since Mobifusion hasn’t yet tied up with mobile operators, and the press release is probably in order to create a buzz about their partnership with Penguin, which may help in negotiations with mobile operators. It’s not as if mobile books are a new thing: Mobipocket has been around for a long time, and used to come pre-installed in some Nokia (NYSE: NOK) phones, alongwith book samples…Penguin is one of their publishers. I remember first reading a book on the mobile some four or five years ago, downloaded in the Mobipocket format from BlackMask Online (now called Munseys). I found the mobile good for short stories, and can’t really imagine reading an LOTR on that small screen. Rafat, on the other hand, travels with his Kindle, bulky as it is. Mobifusion appears to be focusing on text based mobile content. They already have stories from Chandamama, recipes’ from Chef Sanjeev Kapoor, the Bhagavad Gita, Travel Guides, among others. Last we heard from them, they were planning to release competitive exam materials and local language content in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Bhojpuri & Marathi.

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