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By Paul Biba

DSCF1003.JPGTyler Ruse, LibreDigital; Daihei Shiohama, Voyager Japan; Michael Tamblyn, Kobo

Ruse: LibreDigital, Harlequin Mills & Boon partnered in the UK to do ebooks and ecommerce site. A title is sold every 5 seconds in the UK. Got content production in place, do 70 titles per month. In M&B site power a widget for each book that readers can put on their own site. Content selling content. Conversion rate of people visiting site is 16%. Sell about 10,000 ebook titles/month. Seeing markets opening up with digital newspapers.

Shiohama: manga and graphic comics. Voyager is an independent digital publisher and owns Japans major ebook format called dotbook. Japan is world’s largest ebook market. Sales exceed $600 million and 80% of it is on mobile platforms. 300,000 mobile comics sold and readers are primarily female. Shows example of manga on a digital phone and it is actually pretty good. Directionality is key issue with epub. Vertical, from top to bottom and reading from right to left. Must be put into epub revision. ebook market is unusual in that it is only viable in the Japanese mobile network, which is isolated from the rest of the world. iPhones doing well in Japan with almost 4 million sold in Japan. iPad released this week. Android is expanding. On May 21, one of Japan’s best selling authors announced he will release an ebook on iPad simultaneously with the print book. Directionality issue applies to China and Korea as well. Manga has a large international potential as printed manga already selling well in other countries, especially France, Spain and Italy.

Tamblyn: about 100 employees. Sell into 200 countries and respect territorial rights. US, Canada, Uk, India and Australia are the top countries. On May 21, sold into 174 countries in one day. Receiving files from 1,600 publishers around the world. Kobo does a huge amount of work chasing international rights and it’s very difficult. In Australia had to do a lot of work converting PDF into epub.

 
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