Singapore, 17 December 2014 - Bookmate, the leading social ebook reading service, is finally available in Singapore. Boasting a comprehensive library of over 500,000 ebooks from 600 publishers, Bookmate empowers reading fans to search, discover, interact and read as much as they want, wherever they are.
Available at a flat monthly fee, the service offers books from major publishers such as HarperCollins, Head of Zeus, Profile Books, Serpent’s Tail and others.
As part of its international expansion efforts, Bookmate is exclusively partnering Singapore’s fully-integrated info-communications provider StarHub to introduce its book-streaming service to the local reading community and engage local publishers to offer their books on the platform.
Simon Dunlop, Founder of Bookmate, said, “Our mission is to make reading easy, accessible and fun for everyone with a smart phone. By expanding into Singapore, we have made a significant first step in increasing Bookmate’s footprint in Southeast Asia and thanks to our partnership with StarHub and their highly engaged customers we will be able to reach millions of new readers.”
Michael Sim, Lead Futurist–Entertainment of i3 (Innovation, Investment, Incubation), StarHub, said, “Singapore consumers are fast growing accustomed to getting easy access to an unfettered catalogue of premium online content, for instance, video and music streaming, across multiple devices for a flat monthly fee. This advancement is changing the way people consume content, and we believe the time is ripe to bring this same convenience to book fans, providing a timely boost to Singapore’s ebook scene. Through our partnership with Bookmate, local readers can now enjoy unlimited access to Bookmate’s vast collection of ebooks through its comprehensive association with leading publishers.”
Bookmate’s move into Singapore follows its agreement with HarperCollins, announced earlier this year, which saw Bookmate add hundreds of new authors to the service. This announcement also marks Bookmate’s first foray into Asia-Pacific. Bookmate currently has over 1.5 million active monthly users in countries including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, U.S. and Germany.
Service Details
The Bookmate service offers customers three subscription tiers – Free, Standard and Premium.
The Standard tier costs SGD 9.98/month and provides hundreds of thousands of fiction and non-fiction titles, including 2014 Booker Prize nominee “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” by Karen Joy Fowler, Lionel Shriver’s breakout thriller “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, the seminal “Why Nations Fail” by Robinson and Acemoglu, and David Peace’s “Red Riding” series. The Premium tier at SGD 15.98 /month adds on thousands of business and professional books, such as Donald Trump’s “Think Big”, Benjamin Graham’s classic “The Intelligent Investor”, the full “Collins Best Practices” and Economist series, and “Freakonomics” by Levitt & Dubner.
Through the partnership between Bookmate and StarHub, StarHub Hub iD users can enjoy an introductory rate of SGD 8/month for the Standard Tier, and SGD 14/month for the Premium tier. Registration for a Hub iD is open to all at www.starhub.com/hubid. From now till 23 December, the first 500 customers who register online at www.bookmate.com will enjoy full access to all ebooks on the Standard tier free-of-charge for 30 days.
The Bookmate app, available for free download on Apple App Store and Google Play, includes a social feed that allows users to follow their friends, favourite authors and celebrities on Bookmate, while also sharing their favourite books and passages. The service is also available through a supported web browser.
For more information, please visit www.bookmate.com
