Freebies of full-length books in Stanza—from Random House: Alan Furst, Charlie Huston, other brand names offered

This news release from Lexcycle should be of strong interest to iPhone and Touch owners. Download the free books while you can! – D.R.

New York, NY – December 8, 2008 — The Random House Publishing Group and Lexcycle, Inc., jointly announced today that Random House and Ballantine will be the first major book publishers to make full-length books available for free on iPhone through Lexcycle Stanza, the most popular electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

This promotion will allow over 500,000 Stanza users to enjoy free eBooks from a varied list of authors including Alan Furst, Julie Garwood, Charlie Huston, David Liss, Laurie Notaro, Arthur Phillips and Simon Rich. The initial offerings will be drawn from each author’s backlist and will include excerpts for any new hardcovers coming in 2009. Random House is providing links to retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Borders.com, Powells.com and IndieBound.org to encourage readers to purchase more books by these authors.

“A free eBook is a great way to sample a new writer, and help spread the word,” says Charlie Huston, whose novels ‘Caught Stealing’, ‘Six Bad Things’, and ‘A Dangerous Man’ will all be available on Stanza. “Besides, it’s good to give things away. They’re books. We write them for people to read them.”

Stanza users already have access to a public domain library which sees nearly 40,000 downloads a day.

“Stanza has clearly tapped into an audience that’s hungry for content, and we’re happy to modify our traditional marketing methods to make use of the new technology available to readers today,” commented Avideh Bashirrad, Deputy Director of Marketing for Random House.

Neelan Choksi, Chief Operating Officer of Lexcycle, added, “We are thrilled to bring Stanza readers a sampling of the wealth of titles published by the Random House Publishing Group imprints. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: we look forward to extending this promotion to make even more free titles available.”

Availability
The free Random House and Ballantine titles will be available beginning today to all Stanza users. Stanza for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch is available as a free download from the iTunes App Store or from http://www.lexcycle.com.

About Lexcycle
Lexcycle is a private company that strives to bring the digital reading revolution to readers around the world. With over 500,000 users in 50 countries, Lexcycle Stanza is the highest rated and the most popular free electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. To learn more, visit www.lexcycle.com

About The Random House Publishing Group
The Random House Publishing Group is a division of Random House, Inc., the U.S. company of Random House, which is the trade book publishing division of Bertelsmann, AG, one of the world’s foremost media companies. The Random House Publishing Group is comprised of Ballantine Books, Del Rey, Modern Library, One World, Presidio Press, Random House, and Villard.