Two Reports: E-Textbook Market in South Africa & Ebook Market in South Korea

Two reports/links follow.
South Africa
From The Sunday Independent:

The nascent move towards e-learning is pushing publishers in the country’s R2-billion-a-year-plus academic textbook market to adapt to new ways of doing business – and causing misery among book retailers.
Michael Goodman, group content manager at educational publishers Via Afrika, says although it is still early days publishers are already gearing themselves to adapt to the changes.
Sales of e-textbooks amounted to only R277 000 in 2012, and continue to grow. His company has accepted the inevitability of change and is adapting accordingly. When the move towards digital started at some schools three years ago, his company sold only 1 000 copies of e-textbooks. This year, the number shot up to 65 000 copies.
Goodman says there is no uniformity in the industry, with some publishers simply selling books in PDF format and calling them e-books. “Technically, it’s an e-book but not quite so. It lacks the interactivity element, which is key, and makes it an engaging document.”

Read the Complete Article (743 Words)
South Korea
From The Diplomat:

“The news that Amazon signed up for a big office in the Gangnam district, one of the most affluent places in Seoul, has made South Korean publishing companies nervous. It seems that the biggest e-book providers in the world might be trying to lay the ground work for entering Korea’s rapidly growing e-book market.
In a country where people are enjoying the fastest Internet in the world, more and more people are turning to e-books. According to data from the Korea Information Society Development Institute, the scale of the e-book market in South Korea has steadily grown over the past few years: from $233 million in 2010 to $321 million in 2011, $414 million
in 2012 and $488 million in 2013.”

Read the Complete Article (545 Words)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, News, Publishing, Reports, School Libraries