India’s Flipboard-esque NewsHunt app sees accelerating growth, expands to e-books

Indian news-reading app NewsHunt is proving popular in its home market. When we last looked at the app it just hit 10 billion page-views. Today the app is growing at an even faster rate, seeing a billion page-views per month.

NewsHunt is expanding too. The app has just updated for Android and added in an e-bookstore (pictured above) with a mix of paid and free e-books. Like the app, the ebook catalog is multi-lingual and diverse, with titles in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, and English from over 50 regional language publishers across the country, according to the NextBigWhat blog. Paid e-books can be bought within the app using iPayy carrier billing.

NewsHunt will update its iPhone and Windows Phone apps to add the bookstore in due course, but for now it’s only available from within the Android version. It’s not clear if the Nokia or BlackBerry iterations will support e-books – or perhaps the smaller screens rule them out.

First launched in mid-2009, NewsHunt now serves up over 100 newspapers in 11 languages. This is what the news-reader part of the app looks like:

The new NewsHunt e-bookstore runs headlong into rival e-book services from Indian e-shopping giant Flipkart, as well as Amazon India. Plus, Google’s Android app store rolled out e-books in India earlier this year.

The updated NewsHunt for Android is here.

(Source: NextBigWhat)

(Editing by Terence Lee)