E-book sales make gains in ČR

The struggling publishing industry was dealt another blow with the increase of the value-added tax rate applied to books that took effect at the top of the year, but the burgeoning e-book market has seen exponential growth. Just over a year since e-books have been widely available in the country, publishers and distributors say important strides have been made, but there is still a lot of catching up to do.

"Our e-book sales increased a lot during 2011, and it seems the attitude of readers toward e-reading is getting much more positive and enthusiastic," said Jana Lišková of Host Publishing House in Brno, citing recent monthly e-book sales figures of around 250 copies.

Though still a very small market, co-owner of e-book store eReading.cz Martin Lipert said his company's revenue increased more than 1,000 percent between December 2010 and December 2011.

Impressive as the growth in e-book sales may be, publishers say the reason Czech e-book readership lags far behind other countries is because access to quality reading devices still eludes Czech consumers.

"There is still a lack of technologies that would make e-books accessible to the Czech reader," Lišková said. "The use of imported mobile devices is still quite complicated technologically because of the incompatibility of formats and the absence of Czech-language versions."

Enter Lipert with his own version of the Kindle, the eReading.cz reader, which he said works just like its better-known counterpart from Amazon.

"We wanted something for ordinary people, for Czechs who are not IT experts, with which they can easily download and read e-books without any problem," said Lipert, whose device sells for 3,500 Kč ($172/136 euros), comparable to the amount one would pay for a name-brand e-reader at a store in Prague, though still too high to build broad-based demand, according to Lipert.

Lipert says eReading.cz is the only e-book distributor in Europe with its own device, but regrets there is only one company holding the patent to the e-reader technology used in all devices to make the experience more similar to reading from a page than a screen.

"Whenever you have a monopoly, you have higher prices," he said.

Publishers are gradually increasing the number of titles they publish as e-books, and over the past year were surprised to find - besides graphic-heavy texts that are difficult to transform into digital versions - there is no specific type of book that is more popular as an e-book.

"We assumed that the first in line would be specialized books," said Stanislav Hudský, editor-in-chief at Beletris Publishing House. "But it turns out that e-books are likely to affect the whole spectrum of genres."

It's this potential of e-books to sweep the publishing market that has caused a negative reaction to the trend among some publishers. Lipert says compared with even just one year ago, it is much easier to convince publishers they should invest in e-books, though he concedes knowing which titles are best-suited for e-publishing can be difficult since the higher price of publishing rights for e-books means the publisher has to be certain of the financial viability of the book.

And the ultimate challenge for e-book sellers continues to be readers' devotion to the visceral qualities of paper books.

"An e-book is not a book, in the same way that a photo of Leonardo's Mona Lisa on the Web is not the Mona Lisa," said Hudský. "A classic book - as an artifact, a beautiful gift, and a good investment - will be with humanity for many decades to come."

Emily Thompson can be reached at
ethompson@praguepost.com