Book publishers are now presumably all aware of the Japanese craze of novels being written for, and directly downloaded onto, mobile phones. If they’re not, then they have no excuse, as $82 million is being spent on them in that country alone per year, and it’s not as if publishers can ignore that kind of a market.
So lets presume Random House, Penguin, Hachette and all the other large publishing conglomerates are aware of the trend. The question we have to ask ourselves is: why aren’t they out in the West?
- Technology?: Hardly. The format of the file does not have to change form the Japanese to other phones, and the level of mobile phone market penetration in some European countries rivals that of Japan.
- Distribution?: Nope. All the major networks already sell ringtones, backgrounds, etc very successfully through their websites. We’re used to it and so are the networks.
- Content?: Possibly. It took the Japanese 5 years to come up with the style of writing that became popular: namely bare-bones romantic and relationship based novellas. Up to that point they tried to sell successful authors, and other novel style content unsuccessfully. Perhaps the publishers of the West are having difficulty commissioning such lowest common denominator content from scratch, instead of the gradual literary degradation that happened in Japan. It is also possible that the English alphabet is proving more difficult to read on a small screen than symbol-based Japanese, causing entrepreneurs in the West to shy away from the idea.
-Culture?: Not every trend that does well in Japan does well in the West. It is almost taken for granted that whatever the Americans do the Europeans will be doing in a few years, but Japanese culture is different enough to introduce considerable uncertainty. They are much more tech savvy (or obsessed) in general than the Europeans and Americans, so their rapid takeup of this technology might be giving false optimism to forward thinking Western businesspeople.
I don’t think there is a good reason why this trend hasn’t been offered to European mobile phone subscribers yet. It would be very difficult to not make the first step profitably. It’s not as if the network will have a warehouse full of wasted stock if the first one doesn’t sell. Maybe we’re just waiting for someone to unite a mobile network with the appropriate content provider…
June 11, 2007 at 10:05 am
Hi,
I think the size of mobile phone is a very good reason because
1. Alphabet based content is indeed too big for a small mobile phone, you do need to keep pressing down button or have it run automatically. It is also quite annoying for some people to read such a small text with so many lines.
On the other hand, other activities such as listening musics, watching TV and chatting on mobile phones can be integrated into a small device. Why would we bother change it into a much bigger one just to read some texts?. Also, small is a hip trend (in fact, I really hate my pocket pc because of its size even though I can do everything with it).
Therefore, in customer perspective, it is possible that the idea is not good enough.
2. The entry fee for this market is low and if there are someone jump in, unless they make a big fortune, they’re not gonna survive easily.
Hence, from publisher’s perspective, tons of risk from this market, better beware.
However, why not invest into symbol based language speaking countries such as China, Japan, Korea rather than alphabet language. Big publishers such as RH do have their brands/offices in those countries.
Son