Airtel Books to compete with Amazon Kindle and Play Books
Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s leading telecommunications services provider, today launched a new app – Airtel Books to bring an exciting collection of e-books to smartphone users. With this, Airtel has further diversified its fast growing digital content portfolio to add to its popular offerings like Wynk Music and Airtel TV.
Available to both Airtel and non-Airtel customers in iOS and Android, Airtel Books will initially offer over 70,000 titles from leading Indian and international authors. Latest launches like Mind Without Fear from Rajat Gupta are part of the exciting collection. Airtel Books plans to rapidly expand its e-books collection by partnering with leading publishers as well as leveraging its strategic partnership with Juggernaut Books.
All Airtel Books users will get a complimentary 30 day trial to experience the app and can access ‘Free’ titles from the Readers Club. Airtel smartphone customers will also enjoy a one-time special benefit of being able to access any five ‘Paid’ titles from the Readers Club, which has a collection of over 5000 e-books.
Airtel Books has a subscription service called, Reader’s Club which is priced at Rs. 129 for 6 months and Rs. 199 for 12 months. Customers can also buy books on a per book basis with best-in-class offers.
Sameer Batra, CEO – Content & Apps, Bharti Airtel said: “Airtel Books is another major milestone in our journey towards building a world-class digital content portfolio. E-books is a fast growing segment along with music and video, thanks to large screen smartphones becoming the cornerstone of digital lifestyle. We are delighted to roll out this initiative and take it to the smartphone users across India through our deep distribution reach. As we have demonstrated with Wynk Music and Airtel TV, our aim is to use deep customer science to curate great reading content for our users and add to their smartphone experience on our best-in-class network.”
Chiki Sarkar, Co-Founder, Juggernaut Books said, “Reaching the growing smartphone users in the country and getting them phone friendly books at low prices has been the reason Juggernaut was set up. Our association with Airtel has helped really make this vision come alive.”
Some of the popular authors on Airtel Books are Twinkle Khanna, Sourav Ganguly, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sunny Leone, Arundhati Roy, Devdutt Pattnaik, Preeti Shenoy, Yashwant Sinha, Kanhaiya Kumar, Raghuram Rajan, Rujuta Diwekar, Perumal Murugan, Benyamin and Rajat Gupta.
Alongside these names, Airtel Books also offers a large catalogue of stories from as short as five pages across a range of genres – crime, love, sex and romance, business, history and politics, fitness, diet, spirituality and classics.
