A major bookstore chain, an international ebook platform, a crowd of media, a comically large ereader – welcome to the launch of the Borders ebookstore in Australia.
On the edge of Sydney Harbour today, the media saw REDgroup Retail, owners of the Angus & Robertson and Borders bookstore brands in Australia launch its ebook offering. There are now 2 million ebooks live on Borders.com.au and Australians finally have a competitive local ebook site.
Seemingly permanently stuck two to three years behind the rest of the world, Australia’s ebook lovers are a long-suffering bunch. It took the Kindle a few years to get hear, and what local ebook offerings we had before today had pegged the cost of books somewhere near the cost of paperbacks – $25-30. Yes, you read right, we’re used to paying that much for books.
So ebooks at less than half that price should be an easy sell Down Under, right? Well, yes they are. We just go elsewhere to buy them. Places like Amazon.
The local publishing industry knows it is losing tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to offshore ebook and p-book retailers. And yet this is our first competitively priced ebookstore. This speaks volumes about the mentality of booksellers here. Lobbying the government to keep Australian publishing walled off on one hand, and totally inboard the global ebook revolution on the other. We can only hope things are changing.
Powered by the Kobo platform, and selling the Kobo reader ($A199, about $US175) Borders Australia hopes to capture some of those Amazon sales and also expand awareness about ebooks here. At today’s event Borders also launched their apps for most major phone platforms, PCs and the iPad, which launches here in a little over a week. The ebooks are ePub format, and shareable across all your devices, but you can’t share them with friends like the Nook can. Books will range in price up to around the $A20 mark but REDgroup group managing director Dave Fenlon said the vast majority would cost between $A5-$15. Not Amazon prices but close.
The graphics on the 10-foot Kobo reader at the front of the auditorium – the screen for their presentation – trumpeted that Borders.com.au would offer 2m books at launch. Not bad. Unfortunately Fenlon had to admit that all but 50,000 are public domain titles.
He did promise that the site would boost that number to 250,000 “within weeks”, and added that Borders had more than 100 local publishers signed to provide content. That’s almost the entire industry here, which is a great result. Since many big-name Aussie authors’ titles aren’t available at Amazon due to the ongoing regional publishing restrictions farrago, it’ll be the first time many local authors will see their names on an ebook. And we have too many fantastic local authors for that. About time and halle-f…ing-luljah.
At the event, Kobo readers were there for testing, but the device has been around for long enough for me to skip that review.
I’ll just wrap up with a couple of points that left me disappointed after the launch. Borders made a splash this week with a “price guarantee” to beat Amazon’s book prices (with freight included). Competition is always good, but the guarantee doesn’t extend to ebooks. Also, after espousing Borders/Kobo as the caring, sharing platform and how they are taking on the ebook world in this exciting global market, Fenlon admitted that all their books would be geo-restricted to Australia (with the possible exception of New Zealand). Hardly global, and hardly open. What a waste to spoil a spanking new ebook platform by continuing down the same old-school regional road, when it had an opportunity to challenge the publishing paradigm. Is this closed-openness going to carry through to the Borders US offering? Is the Australian launch just a test (market) run?
We’ll have to wait for the US launch next month.
Editor’s Note: the above is a special report to TeleRead from Australian journalist Jason Davis. Davis runs the Book Bee ebook site. PB
No retailer is in a position to ‘challenge the publishing paradigm’ when it comes to geo restrictions. They are part and parcel of the publishing rights landscape, and will be so for quite some time — maybe forever. Kobo is an international platform, but its offering will necessarily vary in each country: where there are clear world rights for an ebook, Kobo will be able to offer that ebook to customers in Aust, NZ, Canada, US, wherever — but if the author/agent has sold rights to different publishers in different territories, Kobo (and any/all other e-tailers) will only be able to sell the ebook in the regions for which the publisher holds rights.
Spot on Tim Coronel, unfortunately retailers cannot just go around tearing up international publishing legislation whenever they like.
Also the same issue exists for pricing. It is punitive local legislation which protects the Australian publishing industry and drives prices up, not the retailers. Do you not think Australian retailers want to be able to compete with Amazon on price? Borders are taking on Amazon and the cossetted local publishing industry and have done it with a great ebook offering – fair play to them and good luck.
I’m waiting for Google to light a fire under the industry when their site comes online in July. It’s going to be interesting to see how current authors stack up when they have to compete against the best from the past instead of just their contemporaries.