Now Pay for Books by Chapter on Your Smartphone

Publisher Westland has tied up with Dailyhunt, a mobile publishing platform to sell author Amish Tripathi's Shiva trilogy books, one chapter at a time, which readers can download and pay for on their cellphones.

Popular abroad especially in Japan, the format of book chapter downloads is a "first-of-a-kind" in the country, claim publishers.

"Out of the 16 Indian and international languages that the Shiva trilogy is available, Dailyhunt will offer chapter downloads for the books in 9 languages - Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and English to begin with and over a period of time, provide all 16," Westland said Tuesday.

Readers can make payments using their mobile bills or prepaid balance instead of having to use credit or debit cards.

"India is a country with only 2 per cent credit card penetration and many Indians do not have a bank account.

Mobile payment is the only truly penetrative mode of payment online. With this Dailyhunt mobile app, my books will reach over 850 million customers via Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Aircel and Reliance, at a cost as low as Rs. 15 per chapter," Tripathi said in a statement.

Gautam Padmanabhan, CEO, Westland has called the initiative a "game changer" for the publishing industry.

"We has always been supportive of innovative ways in marketing and selling books to readers both in the digital and physical space and we strongly believe that chapter downloads is potentially a game changer for publishing," he said.

Meanwhile Dailyhunt, which focuses on local-language mobile users is set to bring this feature to more books in the coming weeks as it targets the next wave of smartphone users.

The company also solves the problem of digital payment by allowing users to purchase using their mobile phone bill with flexible price points ranging from Re 1 to Rs. 500.

"Chapter wise billing was developed with the aim to provide users with access to content across various languages at affordable pricing," CEO and Founder, Dailyhunt, Virendra Gupta said.

"We will continue to support publishers, and make relevant content which is affordable and accessible in multiple regional languages. 'Shiva Trilogy' chapters with downloads priced at Rs. 15 will be available exclusively on Dailyhunt mobile app in the ebook section," he said.