The Silicon Review ^Asia

Airtel is making a smart move after it survived the continual loss of mobile subscribers. The telecom company has unveiled a new app for eBooks. Dubbed as Airtel books, the app is available to both Android and iOS users. Users can get access to a wide range of eBooks in the app.

There are more than 70,000 titles featuring Indian and International authors in the app’s catalog. Most of the eBooks are fuelled by Juggernaut Books a digital book publisher. Airtel acquired stakes in the digital book publisher last year.

According to Airtel, it is planning to expand its range of eBooks collection by collaborating with major publishers too.

The new plan by Airtel comes at a time when other rivals such as Amazon Kindle (including Prime Reading), Google Play Books, and Apple Books have fairly a good market and has pumped in money to procure exclusive rights from leading publishers and authors as the demand for eBooks flourishes heavily.

Currently, the telco will offer a freeone month subscription as an introductory offer, which will include access to a collection of over 70,000 titles and the ‘free’ titles available as a part of the Readers Club membership. The subscribers can use a maximum of five paid eBooks from the readers club apart from the offers.

The prices for the Airtel Books Readers Club membership are Rs 129 for 6 months and Rs 199 for 12 months.  The members can avail benefits such as invites to book launch events, writing workshops.