Three leading Christian retail organizations are to start selling e-books in a partnership with Spring Arbor.

Mardel Christian & Education and the Covenant and Parable Groups have jointly announced that they are working with the distributor’s parent, Ingram Content Group, to offer Web store digital book sales, likely before the end of the year.

The announcement follows publication earlier this month of an e-book white paper by CBA in which the trade association said it had shelved efforts to develop an industry-wide platform for digital sales because there were too many obstacles to providing an option that worked for everyone.

“Our customers are looking to us to help them find great Christian books—whether those are print books or digital ones,” said Mardel President Jason Green of the three-way move. “Our work with Spring Arbor will help us continue to improve our ability to serve our customers.”

In their announcement, the three organizations said that they were collaborating “to allow each organization to develop their systems more effectively and efficiently, while offering separate delivery systems to their respective customer bases.”

Covenant Group President Chuck Wallington—owner of Christian Supply in Spartanburg, S.C.—said that as he had discussed e-book options with Mardel and Parable leaders “it just made sense to pursue a common delivery provider both in terms of the opportunity it brought for us to work together to get there faster with a better business model and in terms of presenting the provider we chose as an obvious major player to publishers determining how to prioritize their title base with various providers available.”

Parable President Steve Potratz said: “Together we’ll be able to develop common tools and provide product offerings that will allow us to compete and better serve our customers.”

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