TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Big news from Scroll Motion/LibreDigital!! 100,000 books for the iPhone

By Paul Biba

Today ScrollMotion and LibreDigital will announce a deal that will deliver the first 100,000 books, newspaper and magazine titles to the iPhone from popular publishers like HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and more. These books and publications will be available for sale as part of the ‘in-app” purchasing capabilities of the new iPhone 3.0 platform. Here is the press release:

ScrollMotion, creators of the Iceberg Reader and a leading developer of original iPhone applications, today announced agreements with dozens of major book, magazine and newspaper publishers to create new digital content for the iPhone.

Central to the announcement is an agreement with LibreDigital, the leading provider of digital content platforms that drive distribution and marketing through digital stores and eBook devices. ScrollMotion will make LibreDigital’s entire library of books, newspapers and magazines from dozens of the world’s top publishers and distributors, including HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Baker & Taylor and Wiley available on the iPhone. The company also announced individual agreements to create iPhone-friendly content for dozens of the world’s largest publishers, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Tribune Company and Wiley.

Launched in 2008 to create original applications for smart phones, New York-based ScrollMotion has been quietly inking deals with the country’s leading print content publishers over the last 8 months. The company has won a rapid fan base among both publishers and consumers for its artistic reinvention of the traditional print experience in the handheld medium. Pioneering design breakthroughs such as the tactile reading experience, which allows users to move through “pages” with only a swipe of a finger, and animated graphics, which bring moving images to books, magazines and newspapers, ScrollMotion has redefined print for the digital age. Other ScrollMotion developments include the ability to copy, paste, notate and e-mail passages of text and a consistent pagination feature that enables easy reference in educational settings.

“Digital content efforts to-date have fallen short of reader and publisher expectations because they’ve tried to shoe-horn print content into a digital package,” said ScrollMotion CEO John Lema. “Readers don’t just want utility; they want to be excited by the experience of reading and interacting with the text. We believe we’ve found the formula to make digital fun, and, in-turn, profitable.”

ScrollMotion applications give content publishers multiple ways to monetize their digital content: through original download, embedded high resolution advertising (critical for magazines and newspapers) and embedded Web analytics and keyword technology. Among the hundreds titles currently available from ScrollMotion are Twilight by Stephenie Meyer; Angels and Demons by Dan Brown; Coraline, by Neil Gaiman; and Curious George’s Dictionary.

“ScrollMotion is unique because they understand that the handheld device is its own medium that can actually enhance the reading experience as we know it,” said Russell P. Reeder, President and CEO of LibreDigital. “They are not just converting paper into pixels; they are extending the art to create something entirely new. And that is the breakthrough that will allow publishers and their customers to feel confident about the transition to digital.”