Growing by 30 percent annually, the ebook reader market remains underdeveloped, because not many enterprises and publications have joined the market.
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Ebook reader market remains modest
Amazon is the most popular name in the ebook reader market, the market which has the annual growth rate of 30 percent, but remains very small.
Hoang Giang, Managing Director of maydocsach.vn, the company which has been authorized by Amazon.com as the only sales agent in Vietnam, said that the company sells 300-500 reader machines a month. The main clients of the company are businesses, schools and retail ebook reader shops. The number of orders for Kindle Fire that Amazon plans to market in November is higher by 30 percent than the previous version.
According to Giang, to date, no big company in Vietnam has been chosen as the official distributor of Amazon.
Besides some electronic devices which allow to read ebooks--such as laptops, iPad and mobile phones, specialized reading devices have appeared on the market, such as Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader or Nook, priced between 3-10 million dong. Of these products, Amazon Kindle remains the most popular which accounts for 70 percent of the ebook reader market.
However, according to Giang, only 10-20 percent of the reader machine owners buy ebooks from Amazon, while the remaining people read the books they collect from libraries or online forums, or books from the companies which sell machines.
Meanwhile, publishers have just entered the market, hesitantly. They have just explored the market, saying that they will really jump into the market when the market grows big enough. However, analysts say that in order to make the market big enough, the publishers need to join the market to develop ebook sources.
The potentials and challenges
First News Company has signed a contract with Samsung Vina on the sale of 50 books of the “Soul seeds” bookcase which will be integrated into smart phones. The Lac Viet Informatics Company has finished the digitalization of 3000 books out of the total 5000 books in the cooperation program with the Vietnamese Writers’ Association. However, the figures prove to be too small.
At first, making ebooks is considered “economical” and “attractive”. If it costs at least 80-100 million dong and six months to publish a print book, while it is less costly to make ebooks. Publishers just spend money on informatics technique, while they do not have to pay for printing, paper, while they do not have to fear about big stocks.
However, according to Nguyen Minh Nhut, Director of the Tre Publishing House, it is not easy to do business in the field. The house is planning to launch ebooks this year, but he said he still cannot make public the details of the plan.
Ha Than, General Director of Lac Viet Informatics Company, said that his company has to pays 200 million dong a month to network operators to lease bandwidth, while it is still unclear when it can make profit from the business.
According to Tuong Tran Mai Van, Business Director of First News, one of the best ways for ebook companies is to cooperate closely with the partners who sell ebook reader machines, telecom companies and mobile network operators. It is estimated that there are 500,000 smart phone users now in Vietnam, and if just 1/10 of them download ebooks, this would bring the revenue high enough to maintain the ebook system.
First News plans to announce a project under which it cooperates with an ebook distributor to build up an online ebook house. First News will sell its ebooks at the prices which are equal to 30-40 percent of the prices of print books. Especially, First News would also launch the electronic versions of some print books, about several months after the print books hit the market.
Van keeps optimistic about the prospect of the ebook market. The surveys conducted by First News show that reading ebooks is becoming a growing tendency. People now tend to read e-versions first, and if they really like the books, they will come to bookstore and buy print versions to put into the bookcase.
(Source: TBKTSG)
