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Fri,Oct 24,2014
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Digital is just part of the new reality, the new normal for publishers

By Wu Yanping (People's Daily Online)    10:30, October 24, 2014
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Jo Lusby, managing director with Penguin Books China

Excerpts

Sell books in a new way: “Digital is just part of the new reality, the new normal for publishers. We know that in America, e-book market is worth approximately 30 percent of the overall book market. In the UK, it’s smaller. I think it’s 15 percent of the overall market. In China, it’s a much smaller market. When I talk to publishers here, they will say 2 percent or 3 percent of their overall sales are going to be e-books. But for us, e-books, internationally, it’s a question of opportunity. Of course, it changes the way we do business. But for us, there isn’t the same kind of threats in e-books that you saw may become to the music industry. Print books still sell very very strongly. The growth of e-book, in the UK and in the US has stopped. They’re still high, but they’re stopping really where we are. So for us, it’s an opportunity to use the new format to reach more new people. For now, it’s just a new channel for us. It’s just a new opportunity to sell books in a new way.”

Penguin’s creativity in the digital era:” A lot of it is really about experimentation. The view of the company has very much been fail fast and fail often. You allow yourself to fail. You have to experiment because there’re no fixed rules about how you operate and if you’re afraid of failing, then you would never try anything, you’ll never do anything and you’ll just be waiting for the markets to happen, so really, the creativity comes in a lot of experiments. And those experiments are in two areas, one is in format, meaning how we develop the book. And in other area where we have been innovative is about marketing. It’s around social media, particularly with young adult books. It also allows us to be creative in terms of building better relationship with our readers.”

Challenges and opportunities: “E-books in China have not reached to the point where they have reached in the US and UK. One reason for that though is partly that there is such established Internet literature culture here. Internet literature are these various literary websites mostly run by one company Shengda, which sell books chapter by chapter, or subscription services, VIP subscriptions and so on. The business model is very different. The stories are very different. The way people write for internet fiction is very different. They’re very different styles of stories. If you wanted to turn these stories into printed books, you have to rewrite them because these stories are designed to be read on a subway ride with your phone in front of your face and very busy, lots of interruptions, so very exciting, there’s a lot of excitement in these stories, short format. So the format is very different. And I think in some way that has held back development of e-books because people have divided these books and these internet novels. And the two are quite for a part. These internet fiction sites are more than 10 years old, so this is not new. So that’s being a challenge. It’s something that we thought as an opportunity. We saw Chinese readers already reading online. They love digital. China is such a big country. Isn’t this great? We can just use digital and we can reach everyone and everywhere. We don’t have distribution. We don’t have to send books to Urumqi, or to Yunnan, or to Guangdong. We can just do it to the internet. We’re certainly very aware that there is now a good e-book market. And so for us now, we want to start doing much more into the e-space than we have done in China recently, because the readers have really arrived now. It’s really a good time for us to get started. ”

(Editor:Wu Yanping、Liang Jun)
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