Starbucks starting from Wednesday is adding a multitude of downloadable contents including free e-books and music to its internet offering. The famous coffee chain’s latest digital entertainment network pledges its huge customer base free movies, e-books and loads of other exclusive stuff. The coffee chain is also offering access to loads of paid News and Journals websites like Wall Street Journal. The move is basically meant to lure customers to spend more money on drinks and coffees alongwith the contents they are gonna buy through the company’s digital network.

This move by Starbucks is basically to counter tough competition that the coffee chain is experiencing from the likes of McDonald’s Corp and numerous others fast food chains that are increasingly revamping their coffee offers with fancy coffee drinks. This dedicated digital network move will also offer the coffee chain an option to earn money by selling digital multimedia contents like songs, movies, books and various other digital materials. Last year alone almost 30 million customers logged-in to the free WiFi that Starbucks offered, making the customers to linger on because of this free WiFi option.

Starbucks Corp started in July the offer for free WiFi service in its outlet. A new network in partnership with the tech giant Yahoo is the latest point on its agenda and the company is chalking out a detailed strategy.

All the customers of Starbucks will see the latest digital network the moment they will log-in to the Starbucks free internet on their gadgets; may it be a Smartphone, a laptop or a Tablet computer like iPad. A greeting page of Starbucks will permit the users to navigate and browse different sections made on the network including wellness, business, entertainment and careers. An added option of My Neighborhood is also included which provide the customers with community news, reviews of hotels and restaurants and many more.

The partners added in this digital network of Starbucks include Apple’s iTunes, Patch, New York Times, Zagat and USA Today. The special gift that the network is providing comprises of copies of books via deals with popular publishers like Penguin, HarperCollins and iTunes downloads.

Most of the free contents offered on the network are so designed and curtailed that they can only be viewed or read within the time span you are in Starbucks. The contents are designed in small doses like pattern so that users can go through it like in 15-20 minutes. In this way, only two things happen, either the customers buy the contents right away or they return back to Starbucks for viewing or reading the remaining. The sites designed by the partners are such that once the customer leaves it in the middle of a movie or a book, the network remembers it and once the user log- in again, the contents pick up for the same old place seamlessly.

When particular contents are being bought by the consumer, like an e-book or a song, Starbucks makes the money by cutting a specific portion of the sale. The company has declined to disclose its share percentage when contacted. Burke Callaghan who is Vice President of Products management at Yahoo Inc. said in a press release that the companies designed their contents in such a manner that the users can only get hold of bits.

He said that users across the web domain have started preferring “Snackable Behavior” instead of giving a dedicated time to the internet. The Vice President of the company’s Digital Ventures said that the company has worked out to get hold of contents that the customers of Starbucks won’t find anywhere else and this factor lures them into coming to Starbucks again and again.