Kobo – Expanding and innovating

Kobo is moving firmly into the number two position in international e-book retail (no prizes for guessing who is in first place), and being acquired by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has added the financial muscle to accelerate this move.

Over the last year Kobo has launched local offerings in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, and in July they entered two more major markets.

In conjunction with its parent company (Rakuten) Kobo launched its full e-reading offering in Japan on the 19^th July. This includes a fully localized Japanese experience including popular Japanese content (novels, essays, business and comic books) and authors in local currency.

In Italy Kobo has partnered with the Mondadori Group, Italy’s largest book retailer and publisher. The Kobo touch device will be available in 400 of Mondadori’s stores, and the publisher will also make 4,000 of its titles available to the overall 30,000 Italian e-books. The Italian e-book market is valued at close to 10 million Euro.

Kobo has also announced a self-publishing platform called Kobo Writing Life (KWL), which offers authors a range of tools, including live metrics of how and where their e-books are selling and the ability to manage pricing at a country level. KWL will launch in English, but localized language versions are already on the roadmap.

Kobo launched in December 2009 and now has more than 9 million registered users worldwide and a catalogue of over 2.5 million books, newspapers and magazines. Kobo is focused purely on e-reading and has launched many industry firsts such its social experience which includes Reading Life and Author Notes as well as e-book gifting. Kobo has customers in 190 countries.

Pushing publishing boundaries: Lessons to be learned from Fifty Shades of Grey

Fifty Shades of Grey, the world's fastest-selling book, was originally a work of fan fiction published for free online. Based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, Fifty Shades (originally titled Master of the Universe) places ‘Bella’ and ‘Edward’ in a world of sexual submission and dominance, and has profited hugely from it.

Author EL James published the story in installments on FanFiction.net and received feedback and suggestions from fellow fan fiction authors, slowly building up a huge following of readers and fans [some might say ‘co-producers’] in the process. Fanfiction.net, the biggest online fan fiction community, has over 2.2 million members. The most popular ‘Fandom’ by far is Harry Potter, with almost 500 000 fan fiction stories.

James is not the first fan fiction author to successfully go ‘pro’. Among the list of commercially published fan fiction authors are Naomi Novik (Peter Jackson has signed on do the film version of her Temeraire series), Sarah Res Brennan (The Demon's Lexicon) and Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries).

In a blog post titled “Is Fan Fiction Ready to Go Mainstream?“ Alma Katsu makes the point that “While it is difficult to imagine another fan fiction-based book duplicating Fifty Shades’ heady success, it would be naïve to think that … others won’t try to follow in James’ footsteps.” Fanfic authors seem to agree: “If James can do it, what's to say the rest of us fanfic writers out there can't either, so long as we aren't blatantly plagiarizing someone else’s work?”.

Read more...

E-Book Sales Increase by 333% for US Publishers in 2011

US publishers can be pleased with their reach in territories outside the US. According to a report released from the Association of American Publishers, e-books sold in foreign countries reached $21.5 million in 2011, from $4.9 million in 2010 - representing a 333% increase. Traditionally, foreign distributors in non-English speaking countries offered only 5% to 10% of US publishers' English-language titles.

The report states that US publishers work with "nearly 15 000 international retailers in 200 countries" and export 90% of their books to 750 million English readers outside the US.

Most popular were pop culture and business books, but also children's and young adult books in countries where people are keen to learn English. "English language education has reached into increasingly younger demographics," explains Lorraine Shanley, president of Market Partners International, a publishing consulting firm. "The expectation is we'll see the trajectory for English language book and e-book sales continue to go up."

Three factors have influenced the spike in e-book sales:

• the growth in new local and regional retailers – among them TxtR in Germany, OLF in Switzerland…

• a greater number of tablets sold

• the expansion of leading US book vendors (Apple, Amazon, Kobo, etc) into international markets.

According to Seth Russo, Vice-President, Director of International Sales at Simon & Schuster, "the international market isn't necessarily going to be dominated by multi-nationals. Other, smaller regional players will be able to carve out their own niche in the e-book market."

However the market leaders, Amazon and Apple, are dominating all markets, USA included. In 2011, Amazon - already dominating the US and UK - opened branches in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Barnes & Noble aspires to international reach and recently opened Nook offices in the UK and Berlin. Kobo, though small internationally, has concluded agreements with local booksellers in Europe and holds now a larger market share outside the US than within it.

According to Russo, the international market is far from being settled and even "the established players are still emerging."

In the US, e-book sales are still growing but at a slower pace. E-book revenue in February 2012 reached $122.5 million in the US, a 25.9% increase compared to February 2011. US e-book sales are set to reach $1.5 billion in 2012.

Waterstones & Amazon – Dancing with the devil

At the London Book Fair this year one of the most talked about announcements was the one which never took place, a partnership between Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

With Amazon, Kobo, Apple and even Google expanding their e-book offering internationally Barnes & Noble is behind the game, and Waterstones, who many years back helped launch the first wave of e-books in the UK with Sony, is now looking anything but e-book focused. Waterstones and the Nook (Barnes & Noble’s e-reader) partnering in the UK looked to all to be the perfect marriage.

Barnes & Noble’s CEO, William Lynch, had signalled intentions of expanding the Nook internationally and they had begun engaging with app developers and publishers outside the US. There was plenty of speculation in the press that a Waterstones/Barnes & Noble deal was on the horizon and the London Book Fair seemed the obvious event for such an announcement. Not a word.

As the London Book Fair drew to a close and in the weeks that followed the general assumption was that these are complex deals and the lawyers are making some money. Than just over a month later on the 21^st May an announcement came completely out of left field: A Waterstones and Amazon partnership.

Read more...