Editor’s Note: Back in May of last year we published an article about the start of Adamo Books in Hungary. At that time I wrote to Atilla and asked him to keep us informed as to how he was doing. I am very proud that I received the following email: I am Attila Lukács from Adamo Books, the Hungarian ebook site that started last year. You wrote that you would like to have more info on how things are going at Adamo Books. Here is their report PB
Our site, Adamo Books (www.adamobooks.info) started to operate on June 15, 2009 offering password-protected PDFs. At the beginning we only had 23 titles to offer for download. It took a while for us to realize that we had to change our security method, but a couple of months later we did: we dropped password-protected ebooks and chose to sell PDF files into which customer’s data are copied into while being downloaded. At the same time we started to use Google Analytics to have information on site visitors.
We noticed that most visitors came from the capital Budapest. We thought that
most of our customers would be from Budapest,but we were wrong: although our first downloader, a woman was from Budapest, later most customers downloaded ebooks from other towns or settlements in Hungary. Int he first five months of our operation, we had customers from the following places: Budapest, Budaörs, Dunaújváros, Nemesnádudvar, Szarvas, Halásztelek, Vértessomló, Sóskút, Gödöllő, Albertirsa, Nyíregyháza, Tatabánya and Veszprém.
But because our sales numbers are still tiny (weeks ago I joked my business partner Peter about selling our sales data to BookScan…) it doesn’t mean a lot. What’s more, latest data indicate that „Budapesters” will buy more ebooks from our site than customers from any other settlements or towns in Hungary. But to my great surprise, int he first week of February we had our first customer from outside Hungary: a (presumably ethnic Hungarian) woman living in Slovakia purchased an erotic novel. We hope to attract Hungarian-speaking customers from foreign territories such as Western Europe or North America.
But of course, in order to achieve this, we will have to increase selection significantly. Well, we have made progress in this field: the number of available ebook titles grew from 23 to 150 in about six months. Currently, we offer 179 titles for download.
The Hungarian ebook market is in its infancy: about 1,000 ebook readers have been sold in the country and ebook piracy is rampant. Most other Hungarian ebook sites are selling DRM-ed stuff and selection is very poor. Still, there are signs that things are improving: many more people talk about ebooks than even half a year ago and we managed to convince some small and medium sized publishers to experiment with ebooks through Adamo Books.
