So, given the profusion of software, hardware and digital business models, what is happening in the case of Russian publishers? According to Prohorenkov, the relative scarcity of content for new mediums is a bad sign: We are not having much success with digital content. Publishers are afraid of illegal copies and don’t target the market [...]
All posts for the month F, Y
Publishers in the face of the digital revolution
The advantages of digital, in spite of everything
Technology and the Web are advancing at such a speed in Russia that they appear to exceed the possibilities of traditional publishers. However, it is clear that digital could represent a significant qualitative leap in this country with regard to the distribution of written content. Russian publishing has always faced an obvious obstacle: the problem [...]
Possible trends
Although as yet there are no digital business models in Russia that can entirely supplant the traditional system, there are forces that could accelerate the migration of the industry: Sooner or later the economic crisis that has plagued the book sector since 2008 will lead publishers to reduce print runs and seek new and more [...]
Presentation
India has extraordinary human capital with regard to IT development. This has enabled it to build up a thriving industry of publishing services and online platforms that can compete against the US giants themselves for variety and dynamism. Among traditional publishers, digital is often seen as an interesting opportunity, although it is not without its [...]
Technical data
Surface area: 3,287,595 km² Population: 1,155,347,678 (2009) Urban population: 66.9% (2009) Language: Hindi is the official language. Each state and territory of the Indian nation has its own official languages, with the Constitution recognizing 22 in total. GDP: US$ 1,310,170,521,447 (2009) GDP per capita: US$ 1,134 (2009) Politics and society: After a long history of [...]
India as a global provider of IT services
In order to analyze experiences related to digital books in India, we must begin by reminding ourselves of the importance that information technology (IT) services have acquired within the country. According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), the IT sector represents no less than 6.4% of GDP and 26% of exports.[1] [...]
Publishing services companies
The championing of the software industry has made India a global centre for publishing-related technological services. There are countless companies of varying sizes offering services that include digitization, text recognition (OCR), conversion to ePub and layout. In one survey disseminated by Valuenotes in early 2010, 66% of publishers interviewed from the US and the UK [...]
Selling printed books through the Web
Many entrepreneurs from the IT world in India have dedicated themselves to e-commerce. Sachin and Binny Bansal, both computer science graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, opened the store FlipKart in 2007. Like Amazon – a company in which they had previously worked –, they began by selling physical books, but have now branched out [...]
Stores that sell electronic publications. The emergence of digital ecosystems
Let’s look now at some of the sites that have made inroads into the distribution of digital books and magazines. The virtual bookstore Odyssey360, for example, offers freely downloadable e-books in PDF through a link received by email. The texts are on subjects related to marketing, computing, health and self-help. In addition to almost 14,000 [...]
Public sector efforts: scientific repositories, virtual libraries and mass-market devices
If, as we have sought to show, Indian commercial platforms demonstrate remarkable dynamism, free-access websites are certainly not to be outdone. First of all, we find hundreds of institutional repositories built using free and open source software – in particular EPrints and DSpace. A considerable number of these portals host texts related to applied sciences and [...]
Cell phones
Despite the efforts of public and private bodies, neither fixed Internet connections nor e-readers, or tablets have mass penetration in India today. As occurs in sub-Saharan Africa, the only devices that are found on a wide scale are cell phones. In late 2010, India had around 752 million cell phone users, and to give an [...]
Indian publishers and experimentation with digital tools
It must be recognized that for Indian publishers, experimentation with new technologies is not an exotic option but rather an extremely valuable opportunity. On its portal, a long-established publishing house like Pustak Mahal proclaims itself to be “India’s largest publisher of mass appeal books” and at the same time “the first Indian publisher to be [...]
The digital age: challenges and proposals
Of course, not all Indian publishers show the same enthusiasm for new technologies. In fact a significant number of associated problems are mentioned repeatedly in the comments we have collected. Below we will give a brief description of these difficulties, as well as a number of proposals aimed at mitigating them. 1) To begin with, [...]
Possible trends
At any rate, digital publishing in India will be positively impacted by a series of powerful tendencies that will carve out a new landscape in the medium and long term: To begin with, we are already witnessing a social phenomenon that will leave a profound imprint: the emergence of a new middle class hungry for [...]
Presentation
Of all the developing countries, China is perhaps the most advanced in terms of digital publishing. E-reader manufacturers, digital ecosystems and mobile phone companies have a huge market volume, as well as plentiful economic resources. The State, for its part, keeps an iron grip on all the players’ movements and actively encourages the restructuring of [...]
Technical data
Surface area: 9,596,960 km2. Population: 1,331,460,000 (2009) Urban population: 44% (2009) GDP (nominal): US$ 4,984,731,371,688 (2009) GDP per capita: US$ 3,744 (2009) Unemployment: 4.2% (2009, official figures) Official language: Mandarin (Putonghua). There are a host of local dialects. Politics and society: China is a socialist republic governed by the Communist Party. It is the most [...]
The world’s factory. China’s leading role in e-reader production
As is well known, China has for decades been a world centre for manufacturing all kinds of goods including footwear, textiles, toys, chemical products and electronic items. Over 30 years after the first economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, its low labour costs and its growing domestic market have made China one of the most dynamic [...]
The new giants of online transactions
The extraordinary flow of goods towards foreign and domestic markets has enabled the emergence of major players in electronic commerce in China. Around 1999, the Chinese entrepreneur Ma Yun – Jack Ma –, a native of Hangzhou, created the site Alibaba, in partnership with 17 co-founders, as a trading platform for importers and exporters of all kinds [...]
Ecosystems and private digital aggregators
As we have pointed out in other sections, one of the ways to elude the process of price cannibalization affecting hardware industries and online sales is by developing ecosystems that integrate different units of the business. In the case of digital publishing, one alternative would be to combine the sale of content with the distribution [...]
Migration to digital, a State policy
As we recalled at the beginning of the chapter, China has been undertaking economic reforms for over 30 years. Since 2001 in particular – when the country joined the World Trade Organization –, the Chinese public sector has been going through a process of significant restructuring, and both publishing houses and bookstores have accompanied this shift. [...]
Mobile phones
If the earnings brought in by e-books scarcely amounted to 1.83% of the electronic publishing sector in 2009, there was another field that performed far better. Indeed, according to GAPP itself, content for mobile phones represented 40% of that same total, meaning that the platform on which the greatest flow of digital content is circulating [...]
The many challenges of the digital age
As we have attempted to highlight, new technologies are profoundly transforming the Chinese publishing world. However, there are many challenges to be faced by publishers in this digital age – particularly by small and medium players with private capital.[1] To begin with, digital piracy is a spectre that, for obvious reasons, looms large over all publishing [...]
Possible trends
There are a number of forces within Chinese digital publishing that are likely to be sustained in the medium term. Below we will enumerate the most significant trends that we have identified: First of all, like in Brazil and India, a new middle class is being rapidly incorporated into the market, particularly in the consumption [...]
Thematic axes
As we have attempted to demonstrate thus far, digital publishing displays considerable dynamism and diversity within the developing world. Below we will rearrange these geographical results along the following recurrent thematic axes – technologies, the human factor and the R&D variable. This will allow us to broaden the proposals already outlined in each region and draw [...]
Technological infrastructure
From the point of view of technology, there are four prime movers that continually crop up: POD, online platforms, e-readers – and tablets – and mobile phones. POD, which is relatively strong in Latin America, is less widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world, in spite of the important advance this tool might represent in countries [...]