textunes specializes in releasing published content on mobile devices and launched a book platform for smartphones a few months ago. The platform allows readers to use smartphones, i.e. an iPhone, as an eBook reading device.

“textunes is the bookstore for smartphones. Anyone with the textunes app can browse through books, read excerpts without any obligation to purchase and download them directly to their device if they wish,” explains textunes spokesman Simon Seeger. “Another added value comes from the ability to integrate eBooks into online networks such as Twitter, enabling readers to send snippets from the books to friends and contacts.”

textunes will initially add a four figure number of titles from Holtzbrinck and Random House, including bestsellers from Frank Schätzing, Stieg Larsson, Cecilia Ahern, Val McDermid and Daniel Kehlmann.

Currently, nearly 60 publishers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland are cooperating with textunes. Numerous titles are being expanded with multimedia content, interactive modules or the corresponding audio book.

"Together with our partner publishers, we want to create an offer for a young and mobile generation of readers – a generation that would otherwise get more and more lost for booksellers. This transforms the time spent waiting for the subway train into browsing and reading time,” says Managing Director Volker Oppmann on textunes’ mission.

The books will be available for the roughly three million German-speaking iPhone or iPod touch owners. The connection of additional devices to the textunes platform has been announced.

About textunes

The Berlin-based company textunes specializes in releasing published content on mobile devices. At the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008, textunes published the first new release of a novel on both the iPhone and iPod. The company currently cooperates with over 60 German publishers and has implemented a number of innovations, such as the first ever combination of book and audio book in an iPhone app and interactive books. With its range of offers for the iPhone and iPod as well as its web platform www.textunes.de, textunes is the market leader for the latest German literature on smartphones.