Flipkart launches Flyte digital store now offers eBook app for Android
Flipkart has announced that its digital store name Flyte. Flyte is now offering eBooks for android mobile phone and tablet. The store currently features a selection of more than 100,000 books price starting with 30 Rs.
Flyte has expanded its category offerings by introducing eBooks including 100,000 titles. eBooks purchased on Flyte can only be read through the Flyte eBooks app and at launch, this app is available for Android OS; apps for Windows 8 will soon follow. Flyte is also pricing its eBooks starting at Rs 30, besides providing 4,000 free titles.
Flyte eBooks app for Android allows users to instantly purchase, download and read eBooks on the mobile deivce. There’s also a free sample of each book on the site/mobile app. Other notable features include ability to read each eBook on up to six devices, sync reading location, take notes, highlight text, search, add multiple bookmarks. You can download Flyte eBooks for Android here.
Further, Flipkart notes that the books are delivered in a proprietary format and one cannot copy, email, or save images from the purchased books, although one can share up to 140 characters from a specific book onto social platforms.
When go there site and checked, we noticed that the site was offering a mixture of free and paid ebooks and is spread across various categories like Literature & Fiction, Teens, Children, Biographies & autobiographies, Academic & Professional, Religion, and Self-help among others.
Users can either browse through the best selling books and new book releases on the homepage or else head over to any specific book category to browse through books of that specific genre.
We noticed that in each category have filtering option. you can filter the book listings based on sub-categories and pricing or sort the listings based on popularity or pricing. There is also an additional keyword based search box which allows one to search for their preferred e-book in that specific category.
It will be interesting to see how Flipkart’s e-book store will fare against Amazon’s Kindle Store which was launched in India in August 2012 and claims to offer more than one million ebooks.
Tata Group-owned retail chain Landmark had also launched an e-books store LandmarkOnTheNet.com in September 2012, although the company didn’t offer any reading app of its own at launch and had stated that it was still developing an Android eReader app of its own.
National Book Trust India, the autonomous publication house which works under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, was also looking to create e-books and launch its own e-store. The organization had put out an ‘Expression of Interest’ notice in September 2012, inviting software development agencies/firms who provide similar services to reputed publishers in India and abroad.
Sameer Nigam, VP, Digital, FlipKart.com, said, “We have a growing, tech-savvy reader base that is constantly on the go – and they are looking for options to buy and read their favourite books on their mobile devices instantly. In the US and European markets, which have been early adopters of eBooks, the market share for digital trade books is currently at 50%. In US, the eBooks market recently crossed $1 billion in annual sales.”
Flipkart’s venture into eBooks store comes days after their top rival Amazon (Junglee) had launched the Kindle eBook store. Flipkart had launched its digital store Flyte earlier this year. The digital store so far only focussed on music, and featured authentic MP3 downloads at affordable prices, starting at Rs. 6. Users can buy MP3s encoded at high quality 320kbps bitrate and are DRM free and can be played on any device. Furthermore, Flipkart allows you re-download a purchased song up to 4 more times (in case you accidentally lose your backup).
