Revenue Streams
IV. Results and Discussion
1. The lack of e‐book copyrights
Most of the popular books in Taiwan were the novels translated form other oversea languages. However, 3 Mobile
Companies (MC) 8 Book
Publishers (BP) 3 e-Book Association (BA)
3 Online Interent Book Stores (BS) 2 Book
Right Agency
1 Book reader device
(BD)
In the year of 2011, there were less than 10 books with the electronic copyrights. Even though many readers would like to pay for the e-books, they could only get the printed version.
Most of the publishers could not have the electronic copyrights of the translated novels. Can you imaged that there were only 5 popular translated e-books in 2010 year?(BA 2)
The sitiuation began to change since the end of 2011. There were more and more oversea publishers willing to lease the electron copyrights to Taiwan’s publishers. (BR 1)
In order to sell the popular e-books, the mobile phone companies would pay for the e-book copyright fees, not the publishers. For example, the CHT had paid $50,000 US dollars in advance to help the publishers to get the e-book. Therefore, the mobile phones companies will only pay for the top hit e-books and consider as the marketing fees.
In addition, the E/P (electronic/printed) version was not published at the same time. Usually there are at least 6 months lagged for the electronic version. Many readers could not wait for the long time and already bought the printed version.
For example, the e-book of “Steven Jobs” will not release until half year of the Chinese printed version published. Most of the customers alread buy the book and only few of them will spend almost the same price to buy the e-book again. (BP 5)
2. The cost and know‐how of e‐book process
Originally most of the book publishers did not save the electronic file of the final printed book. After the contents edited, the files were sent to the printing factory where the final books were made. If the book publishers need to print more books, they will only ask for the printing factory. They never owned the files of the final printed versions, even the big book conglomerates did the same thing.
We do not keep the electron files before. If the books need to reprint, just ask for the printing factory. Therefore, the publishers will need to digitze those out-of-print books by scanning as will as editting every pages and it becomes very expensive.
(BP 3)
Now we changed the book publishing process and hold the PDF or ePub file by ourselves. For the new books without the copyright problems, we can also publish the e-book soon. The cost of digitization become very low for text e-book. Howevery, for the APP or interactive e-book, it is still very expensive and time consuming. (BP7)
At beginning, the cost of e-book process was considered as the barriers for many publishers, especially for the small ones. Recently, the e-book version became easily and the costs were down to very low. However, many small book publishers still hesitate to get into the business. There are only 2 to 4 staffs in the small publishers and they do not have resources to make it.
3. The competition among the mobile phone companies
There are three major mobile phones companies in Taiwan. In order to provide more mobile
value-added services, all of them sell the e-book, music, video and game online. Currently they sell around 20,000 to 30,000 e-books in their platforms. However, few of e-books are the popular ones.
Although there are around 20,000 kinds of ebooks in our platform, most of them are not the top-selling in the printed book billboard. Consumers complained that they can not find those e-books interested in. (BA 6)
CHT telecom authorized SHE (Spring House Entertainment Tech.) company to provide all of the
multimedia services. There are near 200 staffs in SHE Tech. to create and maintain all kinds of music, video, game and e-book. On the other hand, for TWM telecom and FET telecom, there are only 6-8 staffs
responsible to run the e-book stores but the online database and system server was maintained by their mobile conglomerate.
For the big three mobile phones companiess, even thought you did not generate enough profit, you still have to provide the value-added contet services. If the competitiors did, your mobile subscribers would expect you do too. (MC 2)
Until now, none of the three mobile phone companies generate enough revenues to cover their costs.
However, compared to the revenue of their conglomerate, they consider that it is worth to invest the e-book service to attract more customers to subscribe their mobile online service.
It is impossible to generate enough money to cover the cost of platforms at this time. However, since the mobile phone companies can make profit from other telecommunication services, they are still willing to invest the platforms to attract subscribers spending time online. (MC 1)
4. The pricing of e‐book
Although the mobile phone companies would like to lower the price to increase the e-book sale, actually the book publishers have the power to make the pricing decision. Therefore, all e-books were sold in the same prices in various platforms and mobile phone companies.
Although we want to lower the e-book prices to attract customer to buy, the book publishers were not willing to do so. They afraided that would ruin their printed book market. (MC 3)
Currently most of the e-book pricings were 20% to 30% discount of the list prices. However, customers usually can buy the printed books online at the 10% to 20% discount of the list prices. There is only 10%
difference between the printed and electronic books. Therefore, the readers would rather buy the printed versions, instead of the electronic ones. Most readers expect that the popular book pricing should be at least 50% discount of the listed prices.
For the book publishers, they do not believe that low pricing strategy would increase the sale. They consider that the coefficient of elasticity is small. Those who are willing to buy will pay for the high price.
Those who are not willing to buy will not pay for it, even the price is already pretty low.
I do not believe that lowering the price would increase the sale of e-books. Those who would do not read books will not buy the e-book just because the lower price. On the other hand, those who like to read will still pay for the price. (BP 5)
Instead of pricing the individual book, some e-book stores bundle the electronic magazines and books in a monthly fee. Usually the price is around $3-5 US dollars very month. This pricing strategy attracts many light-readers to join the program because they can preview many contents and only pay for little money.
Some e-book stores even take half of their total revenues.
V. Conclusion
There are over 40,000 new books published every year in Taiwan. However, less than 5% of them had the published the electronic version, especially for the popular translated novels. Therefore, the
consumers will not be interesting to shop e‐books in the platforms of the mobile phone companies.
Besides, currently the prices of most e‐books were less than 10% of the printed books. There is no enough incentive pricing difference to attract customers to pay for the fixed cost of the e‐book machines and to buy those e‐books. Unlike the popularity of Kindles in the USA, very few people in Taiwan use the e‐ink devices to read. Most of them like to buy the multimedia pad for entertianment.
However, as more and more people own the tablet PC, such as iPad. They may have the chances to
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