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Bookmate Launches in Indonesia

6966883093_6079a0b141_kOnly weeks after launching in Latin America, Bookmate expanded its presence in southeast Asia with a partnership with Indosat, Indonesia’s second largest telecom.

Best-known for focusing on markets rife with piracy, Bookmate’s local service is launching under the brand name Cipika Bookmate, and is available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Subscribers will be able to pay $4 a month to access a library of 250,000 titles that includes English language works as well as Bahasa Indonesian. In anticipation of the launch, Bookmate had signed deals with the leading Indonesian publishers to add 4,000 locally-published titles to its catalog.

The Indonesian expansion follows Bookmate’s debut in southeast Asia last December via a partnership with Singapore telecom StarHub. Bookmate is facing several established competitors in Indonesia, including WayangForce and Scoop.

According to Tech in Asia, Scoop may have anticipated Bookmate’s arrival when it changed its business model last month to allow people to read an unlimited number of titles for a flat fee.

"The global book publishing industry is worth $120 billion, about eight times the size of the music industry, and we are seeing an accelerating transition to digital and mobile," Andrew Baev, managing director of Bookmate, said in a statement. "Our strategy is to focus on high growth, under-served markets where readers are jumping the gap directly from paper to mobile reading. Indonesia is right in our sweet spot for offering our mix of fun, social, and on-the-go reading."

image by Johan Larsson

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Comments


Mark Williams August 25, 2015 um 3:10 am

Indonesia is one of the most exciting prospects for indie authors going global.

Neither Amazon nor Apple offer ebooks in Indonesia but western indies can reach Indonesian readers through Google Play and e-Sentral.

To get titles into Bookmate both Ebook Partnership and StreetLib/Narcissus offer access.


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