Bloomsbury signs up to new 'Spotify for textbooks'

A new company which describes itself as “Spotify for textbooks” has signed up more than 7,000 titles from Bloomsbury.

Perlego offers students more than 200,000 e-books from a range for £12 per month. Bloomsbury recently joined publishers such as Oxford University Press, Wiley and Palgrave in signing up titles to the service, which coincides with its 2020 digital strategy to increase revenues from digital channels.

The London-based company offers Palgrave’s entire content, Wiley’s For Dummies series, Wrox, Capstone and a selection of entrepreneurship titles as well as Bloomsbury’s full range of UK and US textbooks. It has also recently added US educational and trade publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Cliffnote Series to its offer as well as a range of business, economics and science titles from open access book publisher, IntechOpen, and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s full content selection. The Oxford University Press' Very Short Introductions Series and Dover Publication’s full content selection are also available as well as publications from McKinsey, IMF, World Bank, Bain&Co and Deloitte.

Perlego’s head of growth, Oliviero Muzi Falconi, told The Bookseller: “Bloomsbury will allow Perlego to become particularly strong in niche subjects such as Theology and Film Studies but also expand our library in Law, Philosophy and Politics, where we already cover a large part of university reading lists in the UK.

“For us, this is a great validation of our unique royalty model as another big brand has decided to join forces to offer university students an affordable solution to purchasing textbooks."

The company formed in August 2016 and launched its Beta version in January. It said it distributes the majority (65%) of the monthly subscription fee back to the publishers and keeps the remaining 35% of the value of the subscription. As with many academic publishers, the authors have been paid a fixed fee for their contribution.

Another company described as the “Spotify of textbooks”, Bibliotech, revealed “groundbreaking” web app to The Bookseller last October. It initially focused on Chemistry before expanding into biomedical science, medicine, law, mathematics, physics, politics, history and economics catalogues.