Come Fly With An eBook

Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, has four hundred etitles available in English or Chinese which can be read in the airport on some thirty devices. However, today they can’t be taken away or downloaded onto the user's own device. The service is run by the airport duty-free shop and was instigated by Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, whose government-funded Institute for Information Industry injected some $101,720 to establish it.

With up to 17 million passengers a year, only thirty devices, some 400 titles and the restriction to the airport duty free area make the initative very questionable and also whether this has the power to lift off.

However, it does make sense to dispense ebooks at airports and it makes even more sense to rent them for a flight or journey. You could even rent out devices based on a return flight confirmation and deposit security. You could tie the service to major carriers and ensure that the content reflects not just English language but other major languages. You could also sell devices at duty free prices to a captive audience.

Imagine a circulating library in the sky? Every major hub offering a duty free service combined with the major airline alliances. You can preselect your rental when you book your flight and merely activate it on arrival and even have a device waiting for you, just like pre ordering a special meal. At the end of the rental the title merely deletes itself, offering the option to extend the rental at a further cost.

The attractive element is that the loan of the device can be secured against both refundable deposit and a know individual. Unlike other transport everyone is a known passenger which presents great opportunities to market and up-sell and even those in-flight movies could be tied in if the device is compatible.

Taiwan may not appear to have got the model right today but have opened up a very interesting channel full of rich potential and which has millions of potential customers.

Is eBook Exchange Wise Dot Com?

An old Shaman Friend from Canada, Duke Redbird, once wanted to test new ecommerce ideas in a real time online environment and called it ‘Is It Wise Dot Com’. A sort of online ‘Dragons Den.’ Today we came across a new venture which tested our commercial and business thinking and also posed many questions we thought would be good to share and ask ‘is it wise dot com?’

eBook Exchange aims to punch a hole in the ebook lending and potentially explore the used ebook market.

In principle it is setting itself up to be a social clearing house, linking ebook owners with ebook borrowers and promoting lending, reading, sharing and ultimately a second hand market in ebooks. Today it aims to accumulate borrowing request against a title until someone submits a contribution of $2 or more. A paid contribution secures a loan if the title is available. However the contribution is not mandatory and if no contributions are forthcoming, then eBook Exchange chooses who gets to borrow the book based on several factors, which all geared to a user’s history activity. Only one book at a time may be borrowed. However if you are contributing to eBook Exchange, you can borrow up to three books simultaneously.

Lenders will effectively be restricted to use the services created by Barnes & Noble and Amazon and use their accounts to achieve the process. They are interestingly encouraged to ‘suggest a price you think someone should be willing to contribute, based on what you think the author deserves and/or how strongly you're encouraging a borrower to contribute to the eBook Exchange cause of improving your ebook licensing rights and contributing to children's literacy.’ They clearly intend to push for used ebooks sales and rentals and are today limited to the speed at which players such as B&N, Kobo, Amazon, Apple, Google etc move in this direction

Ebook exchange have elected not to be a non-profit entity and state that all ‘profits’ during 2011 will go to charities supporting childhood literacy and fostering a love of reading.

We see a market demand for sharing and rental, we understand the current licensing restrictions and dilemma the industry has with public libraries versus resell, and we also see the clearing centre approach as novel. However, there was something that kept niggling us, ‘where’s the money?’ Despite all the nice words we felt a bit apprehensive about something that aims to make money out of something that although limited is free today. Building a service that is reliant on others to permit transactions and its growth, is an interesting concept, but we believe is also a dangerous one, as all the third party facilitators could change their own rules or set up their own service tomorrow and leave the exchange effectively dead in the water.

We could go on but leave it to you to judge for yourselves whether the venture is ‘wise dot com.’