Rockstand, an e-book initiative by Handygo Technologies, has partnered with Delhi Press, Next-Gen Publishing, Hay market, BPB Publications & Magna Publishing. Post partnership, Rockstand will get access to the entire book collection of these publishers and provide the digitized version of these books on its platform.
The partnership will allow Rockstand to expand its e-book and e-magazine collection across various categories such as regional content, lifestyle, entertainment, computer, children magazine, computer books and celeb magazine. Through Delhi Press, Rockstand will get titles such as Champak, Grihshobha, Sarita, BS Motoring, The Caravan, among others. Through Next-Gen Publishing, it will get titles such as Smart Photography, Car India, Bike India, Computer Active, and from Hay Market it will get access to titles such as Stuff, Autocar, What Hi-fi? Sound and vision. From BPB Publications it will get Computer books, Learn C++, whereas from Magna Publishing it will get titles such as Star Dust, Society, Society Interior, Starweek, among others.
Rockstand app is available on Android smartphone platform and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. In February 2013, Rockstand had partnered with publishers like Diamond Comics Books, OM Books, Rajkamal Prakashan, Katha, Times Group and Pratham. At that time, the company had claimed that it also plans to partner with Disney by end of this financial year.
Rockstand allows publishers to share the pdf of the books with RockASAP Retail Pvt Limited which are then converted by them into ePub. Rockstand bears the cost of digitizing the books.
E-Books and E-Magazine stores
E-commerce ventures like Amazon, Flipkart, Skoolshop.com, learnpedia.in, among others, offer educational and reference e-books. There’s also Vriti and thedigilibrary.com, although, they only seem to provide books for entrance exams.
At the Google I/O 2013, Google had announced a dedicated Android app store called Google Play For Education, which will only feature educational apps for grades K-12. The app store is expected to launch in the fall, with app submissions opening in the summer. However, it’s not clear whether this would include Indian E-Textbooks.
Amazon already offers Kindle Singles which are one-off essays and short stories which range typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words i.e. longer than a magazine article but shorter than a novel. In November 2012, Amazon had launched the Kindle Serials which enables publishers to offer stories in a serialized format and allows users to buy a book once and get future episodes at no extra cost.
Mumbai-based E-Book marketplace Attano has launched a new service called ChapterBuy to sell individual chapters from reference books for higher education in an e-book format. Although, Attano’s service is for educational content, it still seems to be working the same model.