We’ve talked about this before, but now the Sydney Morning Herald takes it up:
YUSUKE Ohki’s 2000 books were filling his Tokyo apartment, so he scanned them into an Apple iPad. Six months later, the 28-year-old is running a 120-person start-up company doing the same thing for customers.
Japan’s cramped living conditions and the arrival of the iPad in May have spawned as many as 60 companies offering to turn paper books into e-books as publishers have been slow to provide content for electronic readers. Japan has lagged the US in introducing e-books because of a rigid pricing system, copyright uncertainty and early problems reproducing Japanese characters on screens, said Toshihiro Takagi, an analyst at market research company Impress R&D in Tokyo.
”People are taking matters in[to] their own hands because the publishers are not meeting the market’s needs,” said Takagi.
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Bookscan converts books into PDF files that can be read on the iPad, iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The company charges 100 yen ($1.20) a book for a service called ”jisui” or ”cooking for oneself”.”The homemade e-book market will continue to exist as long as the copyright situation isn’t dealt with and people cannot find books they want in electronic format,” said Masashi Ueno, a researcher at Yano Research Institute.
Pay attention publishers. Anybody else who is tired of georestrictions would use this service if its available. I know I would. I’d have all the books I’ve already bought turned into ebooks the same way I would in the 70’s with a cassette recorder, etc.
If publishers are not meeting the market’s needs, it is because software technology is not there yet for them. EPUB is immensely insufficient for Japanese typesetting and layouts, and that is so because HTML and CSS are equally bad at it.
Japanese publisher have the option of either self-developing substandard books (and IMHO calling scans wrapped into a PDF substandard is being generous, OCR’ed or not) by going with a custom format based on plain text (as there are already quite a few), or gather and either create a format accepted by all Japanese producers (caring not one bit about international acceptance, since their market is not international anyway) or participate in international forums and push standards towards their side.
Around 90% of Japanese publishers are small to medium sized companies. Most of Japanese are not very proficient in English either, as little as most international parties are (not) versed in the immediate needs of the Japanese market. So do not expect a sudden increase of investment of Japanese Companies to participate in international forums and standard bodies.
Things are closer IMHO for a Japanese-only format good enough for their market’s need, while they passively wait for HTML & CSS to get there, which will, probably, eventually, but who knows what decade.
I think everyone who is in any business involving selling should etch this quote into the wall of every employee cubicle: ”People are taking matters in[to] their own hands because the publishers are not meeting the market’s needs.” So, so, so true.