India’s popular news aggregating app NewsHunt has expanded itself to bring Indian language eBooks store to its readers. NewsHunt earlier offered news aggregating service from over 85 Indian publications with more than 25000 articles published daily. It recently hit a milestone of one billion page views a month generated from its strong 30 million app installs.
NewsHunt’s new venture of eBooks store is available in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi & English from over 50 regional language publishers, with additional languages and books being added every day. The new eBook section is now available under the books section of NewsHunt app. Unlike other services NewsHunt offers this eBooks in plain readable text eBooks format (not in images or pdfs) which are optimized for best mobile experience with small file size and thus reduced bandwidth usage.
The eBook catalog contains a mix of free and paid books from popular Indian authors such as Surender Mohan Pathak, Rajesh Kumar, Rashmi Bansal and Chetan Bhagat amongst others. Paid eBooks can be bought from mobile or through NewsHunt online store using credit/ debit cards or can be purchased directly through customers mobile operator where they will be charged on their mobile balance.
“Just imagine the scale of problem – hundreds of publisher for each language..each publisher using their “set” of proprietary fonts for their books. Almost none of these books are available digitally to be converted easily to ebook format. Large problem like this presents a large opportunity.” said Vishal Anand, Chief Product Officer, NewsHunt.
Indian language eBooks store is currently only available on NewsHunt Android app and it will be expanded to iPhone and Windows Phones soon.