After $200 Million Funding, Flipkart Reinforces Its E-Books Section with New Apps

India’s e-commerce site Flipkart, which received the country’s largest e-commerce investment of $200 million recently, is launching three apps for the company’s e-books section today (via NextBigWhat). The apps are for iOS, Windows Phone 8, and the web. The apps will complement the existing Android app in catering to more users accessing Flipkart’s hundreds of thousands of book titles online.

Being an e-commerce site, the new apps are definitely built to encourage users to buy more e-books from Flipkart. In that regards, users will be able to read 10 percent of an e-book before making their purchase. And should they want to make a purchase, they can do so within the apps. NextBigWhat notes that the latter purchasing function is not available on the iOS app because of the revenue sharing scheme app developers need to conduct with Apple.

Inside the apps, users can sync their book reading habits like last read location, highlights, notes, and bookmarks. There is also a feature to let users manage their reading preferences like changing the font size and preferred reading mode of day, night, and sepia.

At the moment, Flipkart has 250,000 book titles available on the site, but the team plans to increase that number to as high as one million book titles at the end of this year. Senior VP of marketing Ravi Sora claims that Flipkart is the leader of the Indian books industry with 40 to 45 percent market share.

This focus on e-books could perhaps have something to do with Amazon India’s recent move in entering the country. The latter company did so very quietly and is only selling books and a few gadgets.

You can give the new apps a try here (iOS), here (Windows Phone 8), and here (web reader).

(Source: NextBigWhat)

(Editing by Steven Millward and Anh-Minh Do)