Year One for Taiwan's e-Book Industry

Joining the global rush into the rapidly evolving e-book market, Taiwanese e-reader makers are joining hands with content suppliers in launching e-book services whose reach could extend to the huge market across the Taiwan Strait.

Such ventures were at center stage during the 2010 Taipei International Book Exhibition, held at the Taipei World Trade Center on Jan. 27-Feb. 1.

BenQ, for instance, teamed up with eBook Japan to launch eBook Taiwan during the book fair. eBook Taiwan enables readers to tap a bonanza of digital content via its e-reader, dubbed the BenQ nReader.

Jerry Wang, vice chairman of BenQ, claims that the combination of eBook Taiwan and BenQ nReader offers consumers a reading experience approaching that of print publications and enables them to buy books with just a touch on the e-reader.

eBook Taiwan is an open-end platform with a webpage featuring a safe, stable, smooth, and simple design. It serves as a neutral outlet for Taiwan's digital-content providers, with a reasonable sharing of profits and a DRM (digital rights management) mechanism capable of offering publishers full protection of their rights. Thanks to the support of cutting-edge technologies such as a high-clarity, high-compression post-production tool, chapter-based sales management, and the ability to support multiple formats including ePub, EFI, PDF, and TXT, e-books can be easily put on the shelf of the platform. This capability enhances timeliness and enriches the content of the platform, which in turn will boost consumer willingness to use it.

In addition to the provision of popular books and magazines in traditional Chinese characters, simplified Chinese characters, and Japanese, eBook Taiwan also offers publication and delivery of magazines simultaneously with the print versions. More than 10,000 books and magazines covering a variety of fields are now available on the platform, and readers can even access parts of books and summaries of feature reports in magazines before placing purchase orders.

eBook Taiwan currently allows access only via e-readers but will open to PCs, notebook PCs, and mobile phones in the future. With a price tag of NT$8,900 (US$278), the BenQ nReader features a 6-inch B/W touch screen, 3G wireless communications capability, a thickness of only 0.8-1.1 centimeters, and the capacity to store 4,000 books.

Jerry Wang predicts that his company will sell 50,000 nReaders in Taiwan this year, about one-eighth of its global target of 400,000 units. The largest outlet will be China, where BenQ expects to sell 300,000 units through cooperation with Chinese telecom carriers.

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Delta Electronics has joined hands with udn.com in launching an e-book venture, offering access to an abundant supply of books and cloud-end bookshelf services. At the book fair udn.com displayed an e-book collection of the works of Kao Yang, a famous author of Chinese historical novels, for the Delta e-reader.

Another highlight of the exhibition was an e-book containing all the works of Jin Yong, a famous Chinese martial-arts (kungfu) master novelist, offered by the Yuan-Liou Publishing Co.

Chunghwa Telecom showcased its "Hami book castle" service, which enables its smart-phone subscribers to download abundant content including magazines, comic books, and books.

In view of the e-book surge, market insiders are calling 2010 "year one for Taiwan's e-book industry." This underscores the rosy outlook of the industry, which has been incorporated into the government's flagship development plan for the digital content industry. The government predicts that the production value of the local e-book content industry will hit NT$30 billion (US$937 million at NT$32:US$1) in two years and NT$100 billion (US$3 billion) in four years.

Deputy Economics Minister Huang Chung-chiu notes that while Taiwan enjoys a strong edge in the hardware sector, a critical element for the local e-book industry is the formation of a large group of domestic e-readers to support its development.

Attracted by the huge market potential, growing numbers of domestic electronics firms have been jumping onto the bandwagon for e-readers and related products. The Economics Ministry reports that total investment by local firms in e-readers and components/parts has topped NT$15 billion (US$469 million), with major participants including Prime View, BenQ, Delta, Hon Hai, Gold Circuit Electronics, and ASUS.

Prime View International is now the world's dominant e-paper manufacturer, with 90% of the global market. Its products are supplied to major e-reader vendors, including Amazon, which sells the Kindle, the most popular e-reader worldwide, and Sony.

Gold Circuit Electronics is a major contract manufacturer of Amazon's Kindle, supplying 30% of the devices.

The Topology Research Institute predicts that Taiwan's e-reader market will reach 100,000 units this year, compared with 1 million in the Chinese market and only a fraction of 9.1 million globally (including 6.8 million in the U.S.). Topology believes that the global e-reader market will remain in the fledgling stage for two more years before embarking on a period of vigorous development.