Entitle Books, a customized ebook subscription service, is adding another “E” to its identity.

The Wilmington-based startup recently announced a partnership with The Ellen DeGeneres Show that launches Ellen’s Book Bar, the TV show host’s book club. Cobranded with Entitle, the book club is similar to the one Oprah Winfrey featured on her former TV show, but with a retail platform, said Bryan Batten, Entitle’s founder and CEO.
 
On her daily talk and variety show Monday, DeGeneres announced the club’s launch and first monthly book pick, Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please.”
 
“Ellen’s Book Bar is a new place for people to discover great eBooks recommended by America’s favorite talk show host/bookworm, Ellen DeGeneres,” the show’s website states.
 
DeGeneres will recommend a different book each month, Batten said. Through the show’s website, viewers can enroll in the book club and purchase book picks from Entitle. For viewers who become subscribers, Entitle will donate $2 to a college fund to help send deserving but financially needy students to college, he said.
 
“Ellen’s goal is for Entitle to raise $1 million,” Batten said, adding that a decision on how often scholarships will be awarded has yet to be made.
 
The exposure and credibility that the new book club partnership brings is extremely valuable to his company, Batten said.

“Ellen has four to five million daily viewers and 35 million Twitter followers," he said.
 
The new alliance has been 10 months in the making, according to Batten, who said he thought about DeGeneres as an ideal partner when he first started his company.
 
“There was a huge hole [in on-air book talk] when Oprah went off the air. Ellen’s a big reader, and [collaborating] made natural sense if we could introduce ourselves to the Ellen team,” Batten said.
 
Once Entitle got the nod, Batten said his company built the Book Bar signup process on top of Entitle’s own platform so it’s a “pretty integrated system” and allows both the show and the eBook company to cross promote. In the partnership’s infancy, Entitle earlier this year donated money through DeGeneres to create a mobile library for a school in Oklahoma. Batten said that the new scholarship initiative will continue his company’s charitable commitment to education and reading.
 
The Book Bar’s ebook focus will capitalize on the growth in the segment in recent years, Batten said.
 
“The overwhelming majority of people now have access to e-reading devices, with phones and tablets. Our main market is tablets,” he said.