Pelican Books takes flight

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter a successful re-launch in May, Pelican Books is taking flight into a fresh medium. Earlier this month, the non-fiction paperback imprint of Penguin Books unveiled its new website (www.pelicanbooks.com), which offers an innovative way to read books digitally.

Pelican’s digitalised books can be purchased and read on their website across a full range of devices, including smart phones, tablets and widescreen monitors. Usefully, any book’s text will adapt to offer the optimum reading experience, regardless of screen size. On top of this, the website automatically bookmarks your reading position, synchronising it across all of your devices, so that you can pick up from where you left off, no matter how you’re reading.

This is a brilliant idea for on-the-go readers: there will be no more wishing you had brought a book whilst waiting for the U1.

Pelican also offers a highlighting feature, so that you can mark a passage of text for future reference, or share it immediately on social media. Unfortunately, this is currently only available on desktop devices, but Pelican has announced that the feature will soon be available on mobile too. Every element of each of these books has been meticulously re-worked for digital reading, with footnotes embedded in-text, and maps and diagrams re-drawn in full colour and optimised for the web.

It is apparent that design has been a key focus for Pelican’s entire re-launch, with the project led in-house by Matthew Young, taking input from Fiasco Design in Bristol. The website itself is easy to navigate and eye-catching, with a simple design in the imprint’s characteristic turquoise.

The Pelican value of accessibility is clearly a driving force in this project – by embracing the popularity of e-reading, it makes its books easily available to a wider readership.

This is just what Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, originally intended when he created the imprint in 1937. In its heyday, Pelican sold over 250 million copies of its books, which aimed to combine intellectual authority with prose that could be understood by the lay reader. Lane himself described the series as “the true everyman’s library for the twentieth century”.

Five titles are currently available through the website – nothing like the thousands of books published by the imprint before its almost thirty-year-long hiatus, but a strong start. Six more are planned to be added to the series in 2015, starting with Classical Literature by Richard Jenkyns, which will make its debut towards the end of next January. While the re-born imprint is still very much in its fledgling stages, there can be no doubt that it will one day soar again.

Everyone has the chance to win five free Pelican books. If this sounds good to you, tweet @boarbooks with the title of your favourite non-fiction book. Make sure you do this by 3^rd December and you could have your Christmas reading sorted free of charge!