Last night Lexcycle and Macmillan’s St. Martin’s Griffin imprint teamed up to release a stand-alone application for the iTunes App Store. The digital version of The Hunted will test the teen market for digital books on the iPhone or iPod Touch.
The e-book retails for $17.99, and was released concurrently with a 250,000 hardcover print-run for the novel. It is part of an ongoing “House of Night” series about a teenage vampire struggling through finishing school. The application includes graphical and text indicators showing how far a reader has read in the book, and gives Google-raised readership the ability to perform full book text search.
In addition, the MySpace Generation can create their own reading experience: “The application created by Lexcycle and based on the popular e-book reader Stanza, allows readers to totally customize their reading experience including setting fonts, background colors, and foreground colors.”