HarperCollins and Foyles Bundle Up

Shelf Awareness

HarperCollins has teamed up with Foyles, the iconic English bookshop with six stores in London and Bristol, to offer eight frontlist titles that can be bought in hardcover/e-book bundles, an arrangement the partners called a first for "a U.K. high street bookshop."

Starting today, a print copy and e-book version of the eight titles are available as a package for a price that is £5 (about $8) more than the price of the hardcover alone. The hardcovers are shrink-wrapped and include a voucher for the e-book version. Customers can then enter a code on Foyles's website to download the book in ePub format.

Foyles CEO Sam Husain said that e-book bundling is "something that Foyles customers regularly ask for."

HarperCollins U.K.'s new CEO, Charlie Redmayne, said that the company is "always keen to experiment with getting our authors' work into the hands of readers in as many different formats as possible."

The titles available as bundles are:

Catastrophe by Max Hastings
Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
As Luck Would Have It by Derek Jacobi
Faster Than Lightning by Usain Bolt
The Pagan Lord by Bernard Cornwell
Sense and Sensibility by Joanna Trollope
Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan
The Demon Dentist by David Walliams

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In the U.S., HarperCollins yesterday announced a partnership with Accenture, which has built and will operate "an end-to-end e-commerce and direct to consumer distribution solution for HarperCollins Publishers e-books globally." The first efforts are sites featuring C.S. Lewis titles, CSLewis.com and Narnia.com. The sites will include tools for the publisher "to analyze all online purchase data, which will lead to expanded decision-making capabilities. This e-commerce approach will be extended in time to other HarperCollins online properties."

Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer of HarperCollins, said, "Launching a platform that allows HarperCollins to establish a direct-to-consumer marketing and sales proposition to expand some of its strongest brands to new audiences means we honor both our past and our present."