Would you pay $14 every month for unlimited access to new
bestsellers on your tablet or smartphone? StarHub has started a
subscription-based e-book app in partnership with Russian-origin
Bookmate, two months after the local telco suspended Booktique, an
online store that sold books individually to consumers.
A premium monthly subscription of $14 grants access offline and
online to half a million titles, from new books and bestsellers to
business books, in nine languages including English and Russian. A
standard $8 subscription limits access to older books, according to
the official website bookmate.com.
Smartphone apps for Android and Apple platforms can be downloaded
for free from the Google Play store and App store, and Bookmate can
also be used via tablet computers.
Bookmate's subscription-based model is very much like that of a
library and indeed the National Library Board's free OverDrive app
and eReads app are its biggest competitors.
Previous now-defunct bookstores followed the direct sales model,
including StarHub's Booktique, which launched in March 2013 and
closed shop in October this year, SingTel's skoob and MediaCorp's
ilovebooks. These stores sold individual e-books to customers.
Industry watchers say the main hurdle was that the e-books often
cost close to the price of print books instead of being at least 40
per cent cheaper, a strategy deployed by bigger overseas e-book
retailers such as Amazon's Kindle store.
BookMate, which claims to be the market leader in Russia, began
expanding into other countries including the United Kingdom this
year. Major English-language publishers such as Serpent's Tail and
Harper Collins are onboard the Singapore tie-up, allowing
subscribers to read books such as this year's Man Booker
shortlisted novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen
Joy Fowler, or Singapore writer Ovidia Yu's mystery novel Aunty
Lee's Delights.
International sales reps are cautiously optimistic about the new
store, saying that it avoids the pricing hurdle which killed other
local bookstores. It is also unlikely to affect sales of printed
books, says one spokesman for Harper Collins, adding, "they are two
completely different markets".
ST