Hemingway's work goes digital for the first time

25.04.14 | Lisa Campbell - The Bookseller

Ernest Hemingway’s collected works will be made available in e-book for the first time in a global project by Simon & Schuster.

Twenty-eight titles will feature in The Hemingway Collection, to be published in digital in the UK on 22nd May in a “fresh and modern” style. Designer Tom Poland was commissioned to create “bold, clean, bright images” that “stand apart from the classic designs previously seen on bookshelves and illuminate screens with the same vigour as Hemingway’s work.”

The e-books will cost £4.99 each, or £99.99 for the whole collection. S&S has world English digital rights to the Hemingway titles, despite Random House having UK print rights to the author’s work.

Jessica Leeke, fiction senior commissioning editor at S&S, said: “Hemingway is a literary cornerstone and Scribner [an S&S imprint in the US] is his originating publisher. Working with our colleagues at Scribner in the US, S&S India and Australia, we are each looking to our own territories to build Hemingway’s presence in the digital arena.

“We begin here in the UK with three new introductions to classic Hemingway texts, each lending a unique and fascinating perspective to his work: Colm Tóibín on A Moveable Feast, Philipp Meyer on The Sun Also Rises and Jeremy Bowen on For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Leeke said.

Michael Katakis, who looks after the Hemingway Estate, said: "If he were alive today, I believe that Ernest Hemingway would be very intrigued by the current developments in publishing. He of course was a writer, a content man, not a techno one, but I think he would have appreciated how, along with his long-standing publisher Scribner, his works have stood the test of time and spanned generations and technologies."
He added: "It is the work that endures after all. He would have seen these people who hold in their hands devices unimagined a short time ago, as people like himself - readers - and would have known that his words, on page or screen, would convey the same emotion."

S&S will work into 2015 on bundling various Hemingway works together, basing promotion and marketing on key anniversaries and themes. The publisher also said it was aiming to work closely with e-tailers to support the e-book- exclusive programme with seasonal price-promotions, as well as events and online competitions.