Ebook - the savior of the publishing industry

While bookstores gradually narrowed their territory and slowly disappeared, the amount of printed books sold on the market decreased.

The habit of reading books on tablets threatens to kill printed books.

While bookstores are gradually shrinking their territory and slowly disappearing, the amount of printed books is decreasing in consumption in the market, the market share of ebooks (digital books) with skyrocketing revenue is a new turning point for the publishing industry. According to the latest statistics of the Association of American Publishers, e-book revenue has surpassed the revenue of printed books in the US and that is becoming a reality in Vietnam not far away.

After 1 year of operation, despite entering the ebook market quite late, Ybook - the e-book business unit of Tre Publishing House - still reached a revenue level that surprised many publishing "giants": 4 billion VND/year, owning 3,000 digital books. Achieving that is not easy, because the cost to digitize a book is 1 million VND. Although it has just escaped the "revenue to cover expenses" branch, this is also a good sign. And in the near future, the plan to digitize the rich book collection of Tre Publishing House and other book partners with the speed of adding up to tens of thousands of titles per year is an admirable thing.

Currently, there are many ebook suppliers online, but the main copyrighted ones are still: Alezaa, Phuong Nam, Lac Viet, Ho Chi Minh City General Publishing House, Ybook. Compared to technically strong units such as Alezaa, Lac Viet, the bookstores of Phuong Nam, General and Ybook are richer in terms of books, especially copyrighted books. To compete in the market, each house has a way to attract readers. Specifically, Alezaa Reader protects the copyright of e-books through encryption and modern anti-copying methods. The costs of transmission lines, taxes, service fees... account for 30% of the cover price on Alezaa. The remaining 70% of the cover price will be divided 50/50 between the bookstore and the author.

Ybook is the only ebook publisher in Vietnam that has an ebook reading application available on all four major app stores in the world: Microsoft, Apple, Google and Samsung. Moreover, this is also the first place to provide university textbooks and student theses in ebook form to serve students nationwide at low prices.

Another special point is that since the first quarter of 2014, Ybook has developed publishing services, supporting authors in self-publishing e-books at a much cheaper cost than paper books (only need a publishing license). This is a "new horizon" that the publishing industry cannot dream of, because only when all symbiotic costs are reduced, the ease of appearing on the ebook market will bring new names to readers faster, and who knows, after a period of dominating the internet, they will step out into real life as writers with a large readership?

Although opening up such a bright prospect for the publishing industry, digitization is often “robbed”. A series of electronic libraries “share” ebooks freely, but still charge readers as usual, even though the quality of the books does not meet requirements. Recently, in response to warnings and “pleadings” from many publishers and publishers, a number of websites had to close because the number of unlicensed books was the majority. But right after this library announced its closure, its entire database was transferred to another address for people to access again.

According to Labor