Hachette Livre publishing houses primed and ready for the iPad

As of Friday, 28 May, the Apple iPad’s first day on store shelves in France, thousands of titles published by Hachette Livre’s general literature publishing houses (Grasset, Fayard, Stock, JC Lattès, Calmann-Lévy and others) – including new titles and all the latest bestsellers – can be downloaded to the iPad from Apple’s iBookstore via the iBooks application for iPad. This offering will gradually be enriched at the rate of several hundred titles per month.

All new titles published by Hachette Livre publishers are automatically converted and adapted to a wide range of digital formats. The process of digitalizing the backlist catalogues that began three years ago is continuing at a sustained pace. The goal is to make the full range of books in Hachette Livre’s catalogues available for all types of digital book readers.

Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Hachette Livre, stated: “I am delighted that Hachette Livre is one of the first publishers to be able to offer its authors a revolutionary new way of publishing their works, thanks to the iPad, which should help them expand their audiences to include new categories of readers. It will also be possible very shortly to enrich their books with special text, music, photos and video. The fact that we set the prices of books sold on the iPad protects us against a general devaluation of books which would be detrimental to the entire book distribution chain, and particularly to booksellers.”