AUTHOR FRANK VEERKAMP
Brazilian e-books
with a
Dutch heart
Book selling in the digital mall
Digital reading is an enormously growing market in Brazil. Publishers,
self-publishers, booksellers, as well as, readers see a future in online
publishing. Biblio Mundi facilitates for many online bookstores and publishers not only the sale and marketing, but also the publishing process.
For the last one they use a system of Dutch produce.
Traditionally the people behind Biblio Mundi
are active in retail. They develop, build, and
exploit malls. Raphael Secchin from Biblio
Mundi says: “We noticed that our clients
started to buy more online, so we followed the
client and started an online mall, with many
different retailers all together. Then we
noticed that in the United States of America
and in the United Kingdom the selling of
online books increased. Brazil is about 4 years
behind regarding e-commerce compared to
those countries, so when looking at those
markets we knew what to expect. We could
study the large international online
booksellers before starting in our country. Big
players, such as, Amazon and Kobo did not
have a dominant position on the Brazilian and
Portuguese market, so we saw the
opportunity.”
The organization behind
Biblio Mundi does the
same online as they do in
the malls: they do not
exploit shops, but they
facility the sale by others
by realizing and renting
out infrastructures. When
they also wanted to start
selling books their own
shop and back office
Raphael Secchin
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proved to be adequate, however on the input
side some parts were missing: because it was
too difficult to create e-books, the supply fell
behind.
A Complete Environment
According to Biblio Mundi it was not enough
to just offer the marketing services, but they
also had to support the manufacturing: by
offering good editors in a good workflow and
enabling publishers and authors to create
good e-books. From the start, the organization
did not focus only on publishers (who also
struggled with the production of digital
books), but also self-publishers and others for
whom creating books is not their first job.
In 2014 Biblio Mundi visited the Frankfuter
Buchmesse, looking for partners to help them
with the production of
e-books. Raphael Secchin:
“We came to the fair to
look for partners who
could take care of the
conversion of text files to
e-books. When we saw
PublishOne of Diskad, we
were immediately
impressed because it is an
integrated solution. It is
more reliable than the
systems which just convert files.” In
PublishOne authors will write in MS Word or
an online editor. The files are saved as XML,
which makes it easy to turn them into an
e-book on the fly.
Wilto Hofman from Diskad: “The choice for
Diskad was not only made because of the
possibilities of the system, but also because
the time-to-market and cost-to-market plays
an important role: because the software was
made, tested, and proved, the package only
had to be tailored for the local Brazilian
market. It was only a matter of developing
style sheets, assigning roles, and creating
links to the e-commerce software. Within 6
weeks it was working. That meant that it could
be used with relatively low investments and
could be proved in practice.” The whole route
from author to reckoning is now automatized,
although a publisher can still decide if an
editor has to make changes or if an edition can
only be published online when the marketing
campaign starts.
Reading in Brazil
Biblio Mundi only sells e-books, no printed
ones. The distribution in the enormous
country makes the transportation of paper
difficult and expensive, while there is a good
digital infrastructure available, which is also
growing and improving. In Brazil people
mostly read digitally on their cellphones.
Raphael Secchin: “Tablets are too expensive
for Brazilians. E-readers are not available
everywhere and they are only suitable for
reading, while smartphones can do everything.
Brazilians use their phone for everything:
sending text messages, looking up
information, reading books, playing games,
and banking.” Even though it is no problem to
add pictures and moving images to e-books
with PublishOne, most of the books on Biblio
Mundi consist only of text. “The added value
of multimedia on the small screens of
cellphones is little,” Raphael Secchin
comments. Besides: “Readers do not want to
use all their data in once to download a book.
Children books are the exception. Parents read
the text out loud and record their voice, so the
children can listen to it over and over again:
those are very popular.”
The exploiters of the web shops are mostly
existing bookstores who want to expand their
assortment with e-books: the same product in
another shape. Raphael Secchin: “We made it
really easy to connect a web shop: it is a
matter of importing the catalogs and start
selling immediately. The catalogs are
maintained centrally, so they do not have to
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take action: they always have the most recent
books available.” There are also publishers
who sell their own books through their own
website to the consumer.
Readers’ Data
Biblio Mundi often asks both readers and
retailers for feedback, so they can respond to
the wishes of the market. Besides through the
central system, data of the users is collected
so complete user profiles can be created.
Biblio Munid shares the readers’ data with the
retailers who use the system, because they are
the ones who implement the marketing.
Raphael Secchin: “In the past publishers
barely knew who read their books. Book
retailers knew their clients a little bit better,
but their knowledge was fragmented: they
knew their own clients but did not have an
overview of the complete market. Through
social media we could already collect more
information, but now we can collect a lot more
data: age, gender, address, and which titles
and series someone reads. We share this
information with both the retailers and the
publishers. That is why the publishers are also
positive about the service: they now have a
direct connection with their readers. They do
not only see that their books are being sold,
but also how excited the readers are.”
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PublishOne
The whole production of the
e-books takes place in
PublishOne. Authors can
import MS Word files or use
the online editor. The authors
get a toolbar, which only
contains the functions that
are supported by the XMLscheme,
the
InDesigndesign and
the e-book
conversion. The import is
always immediately verified
with the underlying scheme,
so the quality of the end
product is always guaranteed.
The file is saved in the Cloud
as an XML-file. Also the
assets are saved in there.
When a book is requested,
based on the most recent
version the content is
compiled. The output can be
exported in many different
formats, like a (printable) pdf,
a web file, or an e-book.