Random House adds e-books

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the “Magic Treehouse” children’s series.

The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format; its digital library will grow to nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months.

Although e-book sales have increased dramatically this year, thanks in part to Amazon.com’s Kindle reader, they remain a tiny part of the overall market, widely estimated in the industry at 1% or less.