The recent research which was conducted by iShare, a marketing research company, showed that almost a half of young generations in Japan e-book that one can read comics or novels online. The fact may perplex to publishers and imply that they have to change their business model in future.
According to the research, 48% of twenties reads comics on web or mobile because of the convenience and reasonable price.
In Japan, it was said that the market scale in e-book of 2006 has reached to 28 billion JPY(almost $0,28 billion) and is expected to grow more in future. On the online market, customers can buy one episode of comic or novel very low price such as from 10 JPY($0.1) to 100 JPY($1).
Accompanying those market growth, the phenomeno that unfamous or budding writers sell their works directly to customers on line, not through publishers has been accelerated.
It is doubtful that those facts are welcomed to publishers. In those days, publishers are absolute neccesary, because if wanted to publish novel or comics, one has to go to publisher first. However, as recent incidents shows, the role of publishers in comic or novel market seem to get unclear and unprofitable. Publishers have to release the books or comics in paper as usual and at the same time compete with e-books which are produced in very cheap price.
If more and more people read books on line in future, will editors and publishers disappear?
1 comment:
Nice blog.
I wonder why Sony's Librie ( http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/LIBRIE/ ) failed in Japan while Amazon's Kindle ( http://www.amazon.com/kindle-store-ebooks-newspapers-blogs/b/ref=topnav_storetab_kinh?ie=UTF8&node=133141011 ) is doing so well in the States.
-Greg
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