Domestic e-book market outside the heat cold

For the e-book market, which looks “attractive, practically difficult”, there are still some challenges to achieving scale profitability.

First of all, there are not many people in China who currently have e-book reading habits and are willing to pay for reading. In last year's "National Women's Digital Reading Status Survey", although more than half of women often read digitally, only 12% of female readers are willing to pay for e-reading. For this reason, some e-book companies have begun to increase the reader's stickiness through various ways such as improving the user's reading experience and providing personalized services, thereby guiding readers' reading habits, but it still takes a while to cultivate habits.

Second, the copyright issue is also a “can” for the development of e-books. According to a terminal vendor, cooperative publishers rarely provide copyright for new books and best-selling books when they provide digital content, which leads to people’s interest in reading not being met and resulting in a substantial loss of readers. Publishers also have their own difficulties: On the one hand, they worry about the high operating costs and risks of the e-book business. On the other hand, they worry that e-books will cause piracy problems, which will affect the sale of paper books. Therefore, the copyright issue has become one of the factors affecting the future development of e-books.

In addition, the innovation of the profit model is also "testing" the Chinese market. The dual cross-subsidization model of the Amazon Kindle has become a target for many e-book companies. This "hard money + money for content" model still dominates the market for Amazon e-books, but it is still specific in different markets. Applicable conditions. In the United States, the book publishing industry is dominated by six publishers. Therefore, as long as Amazon negotiates with these six companies, it can basically guarantee the supply of upstream book content. If the model is implemented in the country, the first thing to face is hundreds of publishers, and the high cost of negotiation has deterred many companies. On this basis, Amazon also created a "copyright model" that bypassed publishers and bought copyrights directly from authors at a higher price than publishers. In the domestic e-book market, it is able to face the authors directly, allowing them to continuously provide “fresh” content resources and provide them with highly efficient publishing companies. At present, only Shanda, Chinese Online and others are among the few. Therefore, the possession of fresh and high-quality content resources will continue to be the focus of e-book companies.

At the same time, news of model innovation has also emerged. A few days ago, a "Queen forty" e-book was sold at an Apple store. Uniquely, with the help of Apple Store's features and technology, readers can purchase related music products through links in the book. Some industry experts believe that this will redefine the profitability model of e-books and become an important turning point in digital publishing. Although the new model impacts and inspires the market again and again, whether it is feasible in the country is still unknown.

In short, the emerging market of e-books is still in the cultivation period in China. “The prospects are generally good, and occupying positions first” has become a realistic choice for the public at the moment.