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Canada's largest book retailer, Indigo Books and Music, moves aggressively into the burgeoning e-book market tomorrow (Thursday) with the launch of its Shortcovers service.

The result of 12 months of planning and preparation, Shortcovers will enable users to buy and download e-books to their wireless smart phone or computer via the Internet, mimicking the iTunes model, which revolutionized the music business.

“It's like having a bookstore in your pocket – and more,” Michael Serbinis, Indigo's vice-president of information technology, marketing and online business, said this week.

For its launch, Shortcovers is offering “a humongous” 50,000 book titles for sale, priced from $4.99 to $19.99, as well as individual chapters of books for 99 cents each. In addition, an estimated 200,000 sample chapters will be available free for potential users.

Shortly after the launch, the service will offer magazines and newspapers – “all the big names” – for sale, and the option of buying virtual copies of individual articles, an entire issue or a yearly subscription.

In North America, Amazon already offers a similar service, but the difference is books must be downloaded using its Kindle e-book reader. Kindle's competitor, the Sony Reader, works in a similar way.

Sales of e-books still represent less than 3 per cent of the retail market in North America. But “consumption of digital media is really starting to ramp up,” Serbinis said, citing the highly successful introduction of the Apple iPhone in Canada in 2007, as “what really triggered our commitment.”

With more than 200 stores across Canada (including Chapters, Coles, Smithbooks and Indigo Spirit outlets), Indigo controls 65 per cent of the Canadian retail book market, by some estimates. Moving decisively into the e-book realm simply recognizes that “people are reading differently,” Serbinis said.

“They're reading as much, if not more, and they're doing so on screens as well as [using] physical books. When they're on-screen, they tend to read in shorter bursts and more frequently. There's this whole notion of ‘info-snacking,' of leveraging downtime – that time when you're waiting at Starbucks for a friend, or sitting in the back of a cab or on a train.”

Shortcovers is being launched simultaneously in Canada (www.shortcovers.ca) and the United States (www.shortcovers.com) at 12:01 ET Thursday. Virtual content can be downloaded using a BlackBerry Storm, Apple iPhone, Apple iPod touch and Google's Android mobile application, as well as via computer.

If you're a U.S. customer and you want a hard-copy book (as opposed to a virtual copy), your order will be filled by the Barnes & Noble chain; in Canada, fulfilment is through Indigo.

Users looking for Canadian titles on Shortcovers won't find much initially. Because of Shortcover's intent to break into the U.S. market, Serbinis has been dealing mostly with large multinational companies such as Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Harlequin to secure licences for titles to which these publishers have either North American or worldwide electronic publishing rights.

While “a number of Canada publishers have come to us, as well as groups such as the Association of Canadian Publishers,” Serbinis said Shortcovers' immediate challenge is one of logistics and volume, “to prioritize what we think consumers are going to want Day 1 in both Canada and the U.S. – and that happens to be a lot of bestsellers and perennial bestsellers, plus core fiction and non-fiction.”

CanCon is coming, though, likely next month. Random House of Canada, for instance, recently completed digitizing 100 titles, with more books scheduled for conversion.

According to Lisa Charters, Random's senior vice-president of digital publishing, their availability in the Shortcovers pipeline is “imminent.” Included are Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the Canadian Army by Christie Blatchford, winner of last year's Governor-General's Award for English non-fiction, plus Miriam Toews's recent best-selling novel, A Complicated Kindness, Bret Hart's memoir Hitman: My Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling and Broken, a suspense novel from Kelley Armstrong.

Random House will also be providing content soon to the stand-alone Sony Reader device, which went on sale in Canada last May.

Meanwhile, in keeping with the Shortcovers slogan “Find Your Next Great Read,” Serbinis expects his service will be offering book recommendations to its clients by late March.

“We need a month because we basically need to see how and what you read. Those recommendations will be based on your reading habits, your reading day … We'll know exactly what you're reading, how often, whether you've read the whole book that you've bought or not, taking that engagement information into account to provide great recommendations similar to the Netflix [online DVD sales] model.”

Shortcovers is also creating a forum for self-published and unpublished writers. An author can submit a chapter from a novel, a short story or an article directly to shortcovers.ca or shortcovers.com and list it for free, with or without ads, or for a fee of 99 cents. An entire book can be submitted, too, albeit one chapter at a time: if you want to submit the entire text en masse, you'll need to contact content@shortcovers.com.

“We'll be making the self-serve interface more powerful over time, enabling direct marketing and more functionality,” said Indigo's director of public relations. Right now the revenue split on the self-published side is 70 per cent for the author, 30 per cent to Shortcovers.

“We are not accepting any self-published physical books” for ordering at present, she added.