Random House Publishing Group announced yesterday its partnership with Lexcycle, Inc., owners of the Stanza eBook reader for iPhone and iPod Touch, to make full-length eBook titles available to Stanza users at no cost. The publisher is the first major house to offer free eBooks for the application.

Currently available for download are backlist titles from the Random House and Ballantine imprints, by authors including novelists Charlie Huston and Arthur Phillips and essayists Laurie Notaro and Simon Rich, as well as excerpts of newly released books. Links are provided to booksellers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders to promote the sale of titles previewed on Stanza.

"A free eBook is a great way to sample a new writer, and help spread the word," said Huston in a press release. "Besides, it's good to give things away. They're books. We write them for people to read them."

Lexcycle also recently partnered with eBook retailer Fictionwise, which stocks over forty thousand titles, and Pan Macmillan, which took its "first small step" into iPhone application territory, according to digital director Sara Lloyd, by offering Stanza users free downloads of classic literary works, as well as excerpts from bestsellers. 

The Stanza eBook reader, which has an estimated five hundred thousand current users, is available for free from the iTunes App Store.