Shortcovers promises to resell magazine content a piece at a time

Indigo Books & Music, one of Canada's leading purveyors of magazines, is set to launch Shortcovers, a new e-reader application for iPhones, iPod Touch and Blackberries. It would give readers wireless access to sample pages/chapters of books and tastes of magazine articles that they could then buy.

Called by some the "Kindle-killer", it is expected to put a severe dent in prospects for e-book devices like Kindle and to follow a model very much like iTunes. All that remains is approval by Apple for use on its patented devices.

Walter Mossberger, the technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal had this to say about the new application:

Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books — say, the first chapter — and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls “shortcovers.”

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

Mossberg said that he found using the new applications on personal wireless devices less satisfying than reading on a full-size e-book.

Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of a business or travel book — the typical price will be 99 cents.

The new device(s) raise anew the question of what rights magazine writers are giving publishers that allow them to resell magazine articles in whole or in part; and what is a reasonable share of the take that should flow to writers.

[Thanks to Kim Pittaway for tipping us to this.]