Today kicks off a year of celebrations for Gabriel García Márquez, beginning with the Colombian novelist’s 85th birthday. To mark the occasion, his Spanish-language publishers are launching an ebook edition of his iconic One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published 45 years ago. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Prize; 65 years since he published his first short story; and a decade on from when the first volume of his memoirs, Living to Tell The Tale, was published.

García Márquez’s agent and long-standing friend Carmen Balcells has said that as well as sending the author his favorite yellow roses, as she does on his birthday, she will be emailing him a link so that he will be the first person to download a special first edition of the ebook of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“My relationship with him has been such an enriching experience that I no longer remember when we began to be anchored together in that cloud of dreams, or indeed if we still are. It’s a cloud that has transmuted into a digital version, where every book and every story can be stored,” said Balcells in a press release to mark the release of the ebook.

Balcells says that for the moment she has no plans to publish digital editions of One Hundred Years of Solitude in English or any of the other 35 languages it has already been translated into.

When the book was published in English in 1970, the New York Times review read: “The family chronicle centers on five generations of descendants of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula, who, sometime early in the 19th century, founded the village of Macondo on a river of clear water somewhere in South America. The uncertainties about time and place, like other factual puzzles in the book, are not fashionable evasions on the part of the author but genuine reflections of the minds of the people about whom he is writing.”

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