Harper Collins, IRM plan digital offering

Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. IRM aims to roll out a broader product offering within the next year, such as an audio version to enable users to hear how to pronounce the word as well as spell it.

News Corporation-owned Harper Collins has teamed up with Interactive Rights Management (IRM) in its first digital initiative that sees it launch bilingual mobile dictionaries.

IRM is devising a global strategy for the product launch. The new service will allow consumers to access foreign words wherever and whenever they want.

Harper Collins dictionaries are available in more than 15 countries and the first version interaction will be a downloadable application containing words and their translations. Additional content will be available by connecting to a server.

Initially, IRM will launch bilingual pairs worldwide in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. IRM aims to roll out a broader product offering within the next year, such as an audio version to enable users to hear how to pronounce the word as well as spell it.

Harper Collins is the first publisher in this sector to have taken a worldwide approach and to launch a mobile application. Catherine Love, business development director at Harper Collins Dictionaries, says: “We needed to sustain our market-leading position by developing new brand extensions; as pioneers in this market, IRM seemed the perfect choice”. Business development director at IRM, Megan Goodwin-Patel, said of the deal: “This is what IRM is all about.”