Self-publishing on a larger stage

Not surprisingly, bestselling erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, got a lot of attention at Frankfurt as a self-publishing success that became even more successful once it was picked up by Random House. The trilogy is rumored to have sold over 50 million copies, but James couldn’t have done that on her own, writes Publishing Perspectives editor-in-chief Ed Nawotka: “It took Random House and Bertelsmann’s global network–and editorial, production, distribution and sales expertise–to make that happen.” He cites 50 Shades as a prime example of how self-pubbed authors and traditional publishers can work together: “Amid the continuing economic recession, the publishing industry needed 50 Shades of Grey. James didn’t need a publisher as such, but once she turned to the pros, her relatively modest success was turned into a maelstrom of money.”

At Frankfurt, publishers were on the lookout for more self-published titles to snap up. Penguin bought the UK rights to crime novel Natural Causes by James Oswald, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies as a self-published book, in a six-figure deal; German publisher Goldman Verlag also made a six-figure deal for the title, and offers were in from Brazil and Italy.

Amazon continued its promotion of its self-publishing platform KDP. The company held daily sessions about the benefits of using self-publishing through KDP, and also announced that it is expanding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — which lets Amazon Prime members who own Kindle devices borrow one ebook a month from a library of over 200,000 titles, most of them self-published — to the UK, Germany and France.

In order to offer their books in the KOLL, self-published authors must make them available exclusively through the Kindle store.This is “dangerous…for the ebook rivals who have yet to open their doors to self-published content,” Eoin Purcell writes. “In reality, only Kobo has a fully functional platform for self-publishing authors beyond the USA (Apple does too, but only to the extent that those who have a nice Mac can access their iBookstore, but not everyone has a Mac). Nook’s [self-publishing platform PubIt!] is US only, though the talk is that this will change soon. The longer B&N and Microsoft exclude non-U.S. citizens from the service, the longer Amazon has to lock in exclusive content for three months at a time.”

Speaking of Kobo, the company announced a few more initiatives to compete on the self-publishing front through its self-publishing platform Writing Life. It acquired French digital software company Aquafadas and will make iBooks Author-like tools available to users. Writing Life is available in new languages — German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch — and the company said authors from 82 countries are now using it.

Three bookselling startups to watch

Three of the most-talked-about startups at the Frankfurt Book Fair focus at least in part on new ways of selling books. Ganxy lets authors and publishers create “showcases” to sell books and control marketing and promotions. They can ssell books directly through the showcase or simply provide links to retailers. The entire showcase can then be tweeted, embedded in a blog, website or Facebook page, or can stand alone as a website.”

BookShout! lets users import ebooks they’ve purchased from Barnes & Noble and Amazon into its app. Once BookShout! has verified the purchases, users can access a DRM-protected version of the file uploaded by the publisher.

BookShout! is already working with Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Wiley, but the practice of providing a third-party site with your Amazon user name and password is causing controversy: As Baldar Bjarnason writes at FutureBook, “We don’t know nearly enough for us to decide whether we can trust Bookshout. If they use their own servers as a proxy for the process, then those machines become a prime target for hackers. Compromising them would give them instant access to a host of Amazon accounts and their associated credit cards.”

BookShout! founder Jacob Illian addressed some of the concerns in a comment on paidContent’s story, writing, “At BookShout, we do not store your Amazon or B&N password when you import your books. In fact, if you import your books, buy another book from Amazon and then want to import the new one, you have to enter it all over again.”

ZolaBooks, founded by former literary agent Joe Regal, will begin selling ebooks by the end of this month, Regal said at the Tools of Change Frankfurt conference. “We intend to have every book from every publisher,” Regal said. Most books sold on Zola are protected with the company’s “proprietary” DRM — that was a requirement of the big-six publishers Zola is working with — which Regal claims is “unbreakable.” And, he said, “our answer to competing with Amazon is not to compete with Amazon…Our value system is so completely different from theirs.” He claimed “they’re not fundamentally editorially driven. [Amazon, which is publishing its own print and ebooks, might disagree.] They are pure commerce…Their value is price.”

Going global, thinking mobile

As digital reading expands globally, it won’t look the way it has in the West. In particular, mobile phones could be key in less wealthy countries, but many of those opportunities are so far untapped. ”I’ve been perplexed by the relative lack of interest for books on mobile,” Andrew Bud of the Mobile Entertainment Forum told Publishing Perspectives. “Yes, it’s a harder sale, but as the traditional products that do well on mobile–ringtones, for example–are fading, there is an opportunity for publishers to become a stronger part of this morphing market.”

Ebooks are already selling well on mobile phones in China. At the International Rights Directors Meeting on Tuesday, Gary Tan, owner of the Grayhawk Agency in Taipei, offered a brief overview of China’s mobile ebook market. China has over one billion cell phone users and 300 million smartphone users as of March 2012 and China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, is the country’s largest ebook platform. Publishers may be reluctant to sell foreign rights to China Mobile, as it takes a huge cut of sales — at least 50 percent and sometimes as much as 70 percent — and sells the ebooks at a 90 percent discount from the print price. “These terms sound really bad,” Tan said, but China Mobile has such a large user base that if a book becomes a bestseller on the platform, “we might be talking about six-figure U.S. revenue.”

A panel on potential for ebooks in sub-Saharan Africa also focused on mobile. Ben Williams, a South African bookseller and founder of Avusa Digital Books, a platform for African ebooks, mentioned mobile payments company M-PESA as “one of the most sophisticated banking services you can have in Africa” and said digital bookstores could be built on top of it. He also cited initiatives like Paperight, which rely on photocopying machines in “the copy shops that are all over Africa” to print out copies of ebooks. (There’s advertising on the paper’s margins.” “The copy shop is now like a library or bookstore,” Williams said. Nevertheless, Togo’s Yasmîn Zahra Issaka-Coubageat, publisher of Graines de Pensées, noted that only “thirty percent of the population has a mobile phone in Togo,” and so for many countries even a mobile phone revolution could be a few years away.

Globe, bookshelf photos courtesy of the Frankfurt Book Fair

Amazon launched KOLL in the United States last November with a library of about 5,000 traditionally published titles — some of which weren’t included with the publishers’ permission but, rather, were purchased by Amazon at the wholesale price each time a user borrowed one. This caused a controversy that has since subsided as KOLL has primarily become a vehicle for self-published authors to promote their books: Amazon opened it up to self-published authors in December 2011 through a program called KDP Select, and the library now contains over 200,000 titles, nearly all of them self-published. Authors are paid out of a fund each time their ebook is borrowed. (In exchange for including books in the KOLL, self-published authors must sell them exclusively through Kindle for a period of at least 90 days.) All seven Harry Potter ebooks are also available through the KOLL in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

It is unclear how many people in Europe will be eligible to borrow ebooks from the KOLL. Amazon has not released Prime membership numbers in any country, but it seems safe to assume that there are fewer members of “Amazon Premium” in the UK, France or Germany than there are in the United States, and fewer still who own a Kindle. But the expansion of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Europe comes at a time when Amazon is heavily promoting its self-publishing capabilities on the continent. At the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, Amazon has been holding daily sessions for international audiences about how to self-publish their books on Kindle.

In the press release announcing the expansion to Europe, Amazon said it is increasing the pool of money that self-published authors are paid from to $700,000 for October, from $600,000 last month, and “a larger increase anticipated in November.” The company says “in September, authors earned $2.29 per borrow, which is more than many KDP books earn per sale.” (Of course, not all books are borrowed even one time.)

Amazon also says that “in September, KDP Select books that enrolled in August earned 77% more royalties from paid sales than the three months before they were enrolled in the program.  This figure is conservative and only includes books that were available via KDP for the entire three months prior to enrolling in KDP Select.”

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO, to a crowd of people that included not just press and book fair attendees but also teenagers and children wearing Angry Birds sweatshirts. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale in the iTunes store for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.69 (an Android version is expected soon). The app includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

“Look at the implications of Rovio getting into the book business,” Vesterbacka said. “With ‘Angry Birds’ the game, we have built the biggest distribution format on the planet, with more than 1 billion downloads. For us, it’s very, very easy and very fast to cross-promote the book in all our games.”

“We’re not looking thousands or tens of thousands of downloads,” he continued, “we’re looking for millions of downloads of this book…We’re going for massive, massive volume.”

On pricing, he said, “there’s no reason why you should price book applications any differently [from other kinds of apps]. There’s no reason why something should cost more just because it happened to be a book before it turned up on one of these digital platforms.” So the app is $0.99 for now — it will later go up to $4.99 — while the print version of “Best Egg Recipes” is $9.99 on Amazon.

Here’s a short video of the app demo at Rovio’s stand at Frankfurt.

“Customers are going to pay for value. In the long term, we’re going to see ebooks worth something,” Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo, said. “We see a very healthy business.” As for changes in pricing models, “we just see them as fluctuations in this long-term evolution.”

Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at Barnes & Noble, agreed that “for quality works, customers are really willing to pay for ebooks”. “We [and publishers] have been sensitive to the value of the book,” he said, adding: “Even people that buy ebooks still read a lot of physical books – (which is) very different from other industries.”

Santiago de la Mora, director of print content partnerships for Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said ebooks are just at the beginning of adding “tremendous additional value relative to the print book.” He mentioned functions like translations, locations, definitions and highlights (all of which are available in Google’s recently updated Play app for Android). “The ebook is a boon to the industry because, in some cases, it’s an enhanced product [over] print.”

Venkat Valliappan, head of books at Indian e-commerce site Indiaplaza.com, said ebook prices must remain low in India. “[International] publishers sell print books in India at [lower] prices and the same should be true for ebooks,” he said. The volume of Indian customers that international publishers will gain by keeping their ebook prices low “has to be given the utmost importance. That’s why the major publishers have accepted [lowered prices] in the past couple of years,” he said, claiming: “India has bailed out their business at an international level.”

Similarly, booksellers noted differences in the types of devices that consumers are looking for. “Our customers, when they’re frequent readers, just want e-readers. That’s very clear,” said Elodie Perthuisot, director of books at French bookstore chain FNAC. And she said they “don’t hesitate to spend thirty more euros to get the very new device. It’s not a matter of price, it’s a matter of content.”

Valliappan, meanwhile, said “the majority of the Indian public are looking for multiple functions, not just an e-reader. E-reader companies should look at multiple functions.”

Kobo doesn’t see the e-reader market plateauing. “We’re seeing triple-digit growth on dedicated e-ink e-readers,” Serbinis said, adding that users who buy Kobo devices buy five times more books annually compared to customers using a Kobo app on a third-party platform.

De la Mora cautioned that publishers and booksellers shouldn’t forget about smartphones: “There are more than one billion smartphones in the world.” As for device choices, “the consumer will decide, but it has to be made easy for them to access the content”.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge 

The Dallas-based startup is doing this with the support of large publishers. The startup has already signed deals with Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Wiley, and is “finalizing” agreements with Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Hachette, along with other publishers. Ingram’s publisher clients can sign up directly or through Ingram.

A login workaround — not breaking DRM

BookShout founder and CEO Jason Illian explained to me — sort of — how the process works. The company’s app doesn’t break DRM on Nook or Kindle books. Rather, Ilian compared BookShout’s model to personal finance site Mint, which imports transactions from users’ bank accounts. Neither Mint nor BookShout relies on APIs (Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t make their APIs public). Rather, to import books to BookShout users log in to the app with their Amazon or Barnes & Noble user name and password. The app verifies their purchases and then — if a consumer has bought a Kindle or Nook book from one of the publishers that BookShout works with — lets the user access the publisher’s version of the file through the app. These publisher files are protected by DRM.

“The great thing is, it’s just your book,” Illian told me, adding, “It’s not taking Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s sale. If you want to buy from them, great, keep buying from them.”

The advantage for readers is supposed to be the ability to integrate their ebooks with BookShout’s social reading capabilities — a goal that many startups have focused on, though it’s unclear that many readers actually desire these features.

The advantage for participating publishers, Illian says, is more data about their readers: “We want to be able to give information back to the publishers on how people are reading, where they’re shopping, what they’re sharing.” The Kindle and Nook book importing, though, doesn’t actually provide publishers with much information about their readers other than which platform they’ve bought a book on. Rather, BookShout’s hope is that publishers will choose to run promotions and let their authors interact with readers through the BookShout platform. BookShout is also selling ebooks directly — through its website, not its apps — and takes a cut of those sales. So far, most of the titles on BookShout’s website are Christian and religious titles from Thomas Nelson, which is now owned by HarperCollins.

“They said it was impossible”

It seems like only a matter of time before Amazon and Barnes & Noble shut down BookShout’s import function. “I think they’ll find us,” Illian told me, smiling. “I’ll be interested to see what Amazon thinks. My argument to them is, one, we’re not taking your sales, and, two, we’re not breaking any terms of service because we’re not taking any files from you. Will they try to shut it down? Maybe. Amazon is notorious for protecting their ecosystem. We’ll see how they react.”

What about Barnes & Noble? Illian leaned in close. “What do you think Barnes & Noble would do to have our technology?” he asked.

BookShout is ambitious — “They said it was impossible to import your books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble,” Illian bragged at Tools of Change Frankfurt Tuesday evening — but when I tested the import function through its iPad app (the function is not yet available on the BookShout website), it didn’t work at all for Kindle books. (I asked Illian about the problem in a follow-up email and was told that other users had been able to successfully import Kindle titles; as of this writing, BookShout was working to address my problem. but I wonder if Amazon has already moved to shut the function down.) The app appeared to login to my Amazon account successfully, but then I got a message saying “No books could be found to import.” (There are over 70 books in my Kindle account, including many from the publishers that BookShout says it is working with.)

The app was able to login to my Barnes & Noble account and showed the purchases I’ve made there, but because none of those purchases were titles from publishers working with BookShout, I couldn’t access them.

The acquisition will help Kobo, which just announced a new tablet called the Arc, compete against Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple, all of which sell their own enhanced content. (The new self-publishing tools could also be Kobo’s answer to Apple’s iBooks Author.) “This radically improves our ability to bring illustrated content like magazines, graphic novels, manga and children’s books into a compelling reading experience,” Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s EVP content and merchandising, told me. “We see a lot of companies trying to do quick and dirty digital magazines that lose the potential richness of that experience. We wanted to find something that made the  format as compelling in digital as it already is in print.”

Aquafadas could also help Kobo quickly convert foreign publishers’ illustrated books into ebooks. Aquafadas already works with international publishers like Egmont International, Lagardere and Mondadori.

Aquafadas tools will be available to authors through Kobo’s self-publishing platform Writing Life, though Tamblyn didn’t specify when the tools will roll out. Writing Life is available in new languages as of Wednesday — German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch — and the company said authors from 82 countries are now using it.

Separately, Kobo announced that it is expanding its presence in New Zealand. The company partnered with New Zealand bookstore chain Whitcoulls in 2010 and has now partnered with New Zealand independent booksellers association Booksellers NZ and book and stationery chain Paper Plus Group. The new agreements bring Kobo devices to over 300 stores in New Zealand.

One country that can be particularly challenging, but also particularly rewarding, is China — the largest publishing industry in the world, and the focus of this year’s meeting. “This market more than pays off the time and effort if you are willing to invest in it,” said Lynnette Owen, copyright director at Pearson Education in the UK.

Wuping Zhao, VP of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, outlined the lucrative opportunities for foreign publishers who want to sell translated titles in China. There are 580 state-owned publishers in China, he said, with 70 percent of those based in Beijing and Shanghai. Rights acquired from foreign countries have increased greatly: Chinese publishers acquired rights to 15,592 foreign titles in 2011, up from just 1,664 in 1995. The increase is thanks to the market opening up slightly, as China’s General Administration of Press and Publishing no longer controls the publishing of translated titles directly. Today most publishers have translated titles on their lists, Zhao said.

Gray Tan, owner of the Grayhawk Agency in Taipei, discussed the differences between China’s two language markets — the traditional character/complex language market, which encompasses Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, and the simplified language market of mainland China. While foreign publishers often think of selling foreign rights to mainland China, they need to consider Taiwan as well, Gray said: “Taiwanese publishers buy a lot of rights and are strongly influenced by international trends,” whereas mainland China, like Japan, “has its own rules” and books that sell well there are not necessarily the same as those that sell well in the West. That’s why Tan recommends publishers sell foreign rights to Taiwan first: It’s an “important reference point for mainland Chinese publishers,” as once a book is published in Taiwan, any publisher in mainland China can read it easily and may want to buy the rights.

When it comes to ebooks, think mobile phones

Foreign publishers may confront specific problems when they publish their titles in China as ebooks. Chinese publishers usually sell ebooks for 35 percent less than the print price, which some publishers have a problem with. Amazon Kindle is still not operating in China, so the only sites selling ebooks are Dangdang and 360buy.

Tan offered brief overview of China’s mobile ebook market, which can often seem confusing to foreign publishers — but it’s worth understanding because China has over one billion cell phone users and 300 million smartphone users as of March 2012. China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, is the country’s largest ebook platform. Publishers may be reluctant to sell foreign rights to China Mobile, as it takes a huge cut of sales — at least 50 percent and sometimes as much as 70 percent — and sells the ebooks at a 90 percent discount from the print price. “These terms sound really bad,” Tan said, but China Mobile has such a large user base that if a book becomes a bestseller on the platform, “we might be talking about six-figure U.S. revenue.” And, he suggested, “if your ebook clause says you can’t sell an ebook with a price under 50 percent of the print edition — you might want to modify that clause” in order to work with China Mobile.

Get ready to get “modified”

While many Chinese publishers are still reluctant to buy foreign rights, Zhao said — preferring, for example, to translate public domain titles — some books are so popular that Chinese publishers rush to bid for them. One good example is E.L. James’ blockbuster 50 Shades of Grey. A Chinese publisher bought the rights before realizing how much of its graphic content would need to be deleted in accordance with Chinese censors. As a result, the book has not been published in China yet, and it’s unclear when that will happen.

Chinese publishers often delete content they deem controversial, which can pose hurdles for publishers of the original works. Owen said that publishers should tell the Chinese publishers they are working with about any such content in advance, but the problem is that in some cases it’s impossible to predict. Pricing can also be an issue: Sometimes a Chinese publisher wants to sell a book for half the price as the original, and so they suggest cutting the book’s length in half. “We ourselves tend to produce shorter versions of our textbooks,” Owen said, and “steer” publishers to those versions.

“Modification sometimes happens,” admitted Xie Na, director of the international department at China’s Peking University Press. She suggests that publishers talk to their authors, who may be “upset or offended.” Sometimes a Chinese publisher simply wants to divide one book into two volumes, in order to sell more, and “maybe the author will have no problem with that.” When it comes to editorial changes, though — changing or deleting “some sensitive part” — “it is the fact. If we don’t change, maybe you cannot publish [the book with us].”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Chiyacat

New York-based startup Ganxy provides an easy solution. The company, which was founded in 2009 and is officially launching today at the Frankfurt Book Fair, gives authors and publishers a straightforward toolset to let them sell books and control marketing and promotions. In just a few minutes, anyone can create a “showcase” for a book that includes its cover, description, video and other marketing materials, and purchase options. Authors and publishers can sell books directly through the showcase or simply provide links to retailers. The entire showcase can then be tweeted, embedded in a blog, website or Facebook page, or can just stand alone as a website.

Ganxy also allows authors and publishers to track where their sales are coming from. “People have had no idea what’s working,” cofounder and biz dev lead Joshua Cohen told me. With Ganxy, they know if a book was purchased by someone who clicked on their showcase from Facebook, for example, versus from a tweet. Users can also add an email capture field to a showcase, allowing them to connect directly with readers who are interested in their books.

It’s free to create a showcase, but Ganxy makes money in two ways. The company takes 10 percent of each sale when an ebook is sold through a showcase (authors and publishers can choose whether they want to sell ebooks directly). Ganxy also makes money through the affiliate links to retail sites that are embedded in the showcase. An author can also request to use his or her own affiliate links in the showcase; in that case, Ganxy displays its affiliate link 25 percent of the time and the author’s 75 percent of the time.

Ganxy also wants to appeal to readers. When someone buys an ebook directly through a Ganxy showcase, it’s added to his or her library and can be downloaded in any format (EPUB, iOS, Kindle and so on). All the ebooks Ganxy sells directly are DRM-free. (Publishers who don’t like that can just display retail links and not sell ebooks directly.)

So far, a few clients are using Ganxy in beta: Diversion Books (the publisher of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and the Washington Post ebooks, among others), romance author Barbara Freethy (who’s achieved huge success self-publishing her out-of-print titles as ebooks) and author and Cracked columnist Robert Brockway. The site is now opening to everyone and will accept new users in waves.

Ganxy is entirely self-funded. The company’s president is Aleks Jakulin, who previously taught data mining at Columbia and is an expert in artificial intelligence. (The European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence named his PhD research the best artificial intelligence dissertation in Europe in 2005.) Cofounder Cohen previously cofounded the German video identification company iPharro Media and worked at Merrill Lynch, Random House and MTV.

I asked Cohen if and when the company plans to expand Ganxy to include other forms of digital content. For now, he said, the primary focus is books, with the direct sales functionality focused heavily on ebooks. (In an earlier version, Ganxy focused on direct music sales, and those are still available.) But as a promotional tool, Cohen says, Ganxy’s showcases could be used for any type of digital content.

At the Publishers Launch conference here on Monday, retailers discussed what they are seeing so far…

Windows to new markets

Barnes & Noble is quickly expanding its library of global digital content. The company is being “very aggressive” about expanding its offerings and “shaking that content from the trees internationally”, VP of digital content Theresa Horner said.

And she said Barnes & Noble’s partnership with Microsoft, which spins off B&N’s Nook and college businesses into a separate company called Nook Media, gets ebooks to more international readers. “The Windows 8 partnership allows us to be in markets where we can’t get our own device there,” Horner said. “It removes hurdles to us setting up storefronts.”

Partnership choices

Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s EVP of content sales and merchandising, described lessons learned as the company expands into more foreign countries…

Partnering with local bookstore chains has been key, he said, and is central to Kobo’s international strategy: “The infrastructure of selling ebooks is a global endeavor, but bookselling is fundamentally a local experience.” So far, Kobo has partnered with UK bookstore chain WH Smith, France’s FNAC, Canada’s Indigo, Australia’s Collins and New Zealand’s Whitcoulls. ”It turns out that even though they are bricks-and-mortar retailers, they can do some of the most important parts of e-bookselling very well.”

Kobo had planned to expand to 12 new countries in 2012. It’s likely to reach that goal — Tamblyn said the company will announce new partnerships at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. But, in some instances, that expansion was slower than the company had predicted. ”Book retailers take the ebook partnership shockingly seriously,” Tamblyn said. “It’s the most important decision a bricks-and-mortar bookseller will make in the next five to 10 years.”

Tamblyn didn’t explicitly mention British bookstore chain Waterstones’ partnership with Amazon, which many in the industry have found baffling. But local retailers have to ask themselves, “‘Who am I willing to trust my customers to?’” Tamblyn said. “It’s a momentous decision.”

Matter of fact

As Kobo chose the countries it wanted to expand to, it looked at several factors, Tamblyn said: literacy, disposable income, reading market size, internet availability, WiFi availability, availability of digital content, and local partners.

While North American and many European countries fit those requirements, after that, markets become more fragmented and smaller. “The fiction-driven ebook market we’ve become very used to through North America and Europe is not going to remain the prominent theme for selling outside of those markets,” Tamblyn said. Rather, as digital reading expands to countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, expect to see “more educational-instructional content” and a greater role for independent players.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Borys Shevchuk