omonatheydid | E-book craze hits S.Korea (Reply)

E-book mania has hit South Korea thanks to successful sales of tablet PCs. Until recently, Korea was not part of the global e-book craze. This year, however, explosive growth in the domestic e-book market is expected.

Kyobo Book Center recently announced e-book sales for the first quarter of this year (Q1) 6.4 times higher than those of Q1 last year. The number of Q1 e-book downloads skyrocketed by a factor of 96 from 2010 to 2011. Statistics from online mobile device application stores also reveal the popularity of e-books. Among Korean application sellers, Apple’s App Store recorded sales of 16,440 e-books and 7,260 educational books, while T store sold 20,596 e-books and 5,068 educational and foreign language books.

A look at the publishing market also confirms the popularity of e-books. The number of popular printed books released simultaneously with e-books has increased. Also attracting attention are cases where books are published exclusively in e-book format: Kyobo Book Center did this for the Maigret series in November last year, while Interpark published Korean author Cho Chong-rae’s classic ten-volume Taebaek Mountains novel in e-book form for the first time this February.

E-book-related marketing is also in full swing. Since last month, telecommunications giant KT has been running an event where customers receive “electronic cash” that can be spent at its on-line “Olleh ebook” store (ebook.olleh.com). Off-line bookstores such as Kyobo Book Center, Interpark and Bandi and Luni’s, meanwhile, are running events where customers receive a free paper book when purchasing an e-book.

“When you consider the fact that smartphones and tablet PCs have only been around for a year, South Korea’s e-book market growth rate is extremely high,” said Chang Gi-yeong, director of the Korea Electronic Publishing Association. “Existing statistics do not allow accurate distinctions, but we estimate that around 100,000 e-book titles have been published.”

Until recently, South Korea’s e-book market had been somewhat detached from the global trend. Last year, following the success of the Kindle e-book reader, the global e-book market enjoyed huge growth, with e-book sales surpassing paper sales by Amazon. It was only in South Korea that e-book sales fail to take off. E-book readers such as those released by Samsung (Papyrus), iRiver (Story) and Interpark (Biscuit) failed to get much of a reception, while Samsung Electronics even withdrew from the e-book reader market last year.

The big change in the e-book market this year is beyond doubt due to the decisive role played by tablet PCs. The increasing number of tablet PCs in circulation since the beginning of this year, such as the Galaxy Tab and the iPad 2, has begun opening a new form of e-book market. Analysis by experts says that South Korea, where the growth rate for smart devices is high, is entering the tablet PC e-book era directly, without going through an era, like that in the United States, of dedicated “electronic ink” readers such as the Kindle.

The result is that businesses are leaping headfirst into the e-book market. On May 18, NHN launched “Naver Books E-book Service.” On May 17, Hancom entered into an alliance with Yes 24 to launch the “Hancom ReadOn” e-book viewer for the Andoid platform. SK Telecom is due to enter the market within the first half of this year, while KT is already the olleh ebook service.

The market for “self-publishing” services, which allow users to make their own books, is growing. Solutions allowing users to create their own e-books, such as the “Namo eBookEditor,” have been launched, while services creating custom-made e-books, such as textore, Autopub and Bucci, have also appeared.

Source: hani