MANILA, DECEMBER 18, 2011 (STAR) PENMAN By Butch Dalisay (Illustration by IGAN D'BAYAN)
Let me share the highlights of a talk I gave last week at the
University of Western Australia in Perth on how digital publishing has
changed the face of literature in the Asia-Pacific region.
There's no doubt that digital publishing has taken the Asia-Pacific
by storm. A tsunami may be a terrible metaphor to apply to the region,
but a gentler version of this big wave is what it is, a steady and sure
encroachment of digital media on the terrain of traditional publishing.
A cursory review of what's out there will show that the region has
been eager to adopt digital publishing — by which I mean not just the
application of digital processes to printing but the publication of
e-books, e-magazines, and such —albeit with certain apprehensions and
reservations.
In
China, where the 2nd Conference on Digital Publishing in Asia-Pacific
was held last week in Shanghai, industry leaders are looking to serve
more than 120 million digital readers in a market of Internet users
expected to exceed 750 million by 2015. [PHOTO COURTESY OF
CHINADAILY.COM - Display Search, a global market research and consulting
firm, forecasts China will overtake the United States as the world's
largest e-reader market before 2015, by virtue of the country's large
population. "But as the content provider, Chinese publishers are not
taking the lead owing to disputes over copyrights and profit-sharing
with IT and technology companies," Huang says. Nie Zhenning, president
of China Publishing Group, says digital publishing has changed the
workflow of traditional publishing, and urged greater collaboration
between publisher and technology provider.]
In
South Korea — where as of 2009, 95 percent of all homes had broadband
—the government has decided that all public-school textbooks will be
digital by 2015, a move for which it has allotted $2.3 billion. Scholars
and industry analysts are closely tracking Korea's transition to a
totally networked society, particularly the impact of e-books on
education — not just books ported over from print, but "books that
integrate media and social networking," according to one expert.
In
Singapore, a homegrown e-book reader called the KeyReader may be late
to the party, considering the predominance of the iPad and the Kindle,
but it has one big plus going for it: free access to over 900,000 e-book
titles in the collection of the National Library Board.
By contrast, Malaysia seems to be running late in the e-book
department; as of mid-2010, it had yet to have an online e-book seller,
and a Chinese-made e-book reader was just being brought in by a media
company.
In
Thailand, not only are many English titles on Thailand now available in
e-book format; a Thai-language e-bookstore is now in operation,
carrying around 1,000 titles — a figure the publisher expects to
increase exponentially to 100,000 by the end of 2011. In three months
since the site's launch, it had 50,000 downloads. The site expects to
turn a profit in 2012.
Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport boasts of the world's first
public e-book library, where (as of March 2010) passengers could browse
through 400 titles on 30 devices — still not much, but it anticipates
what could happen to public libraries in the future.
PHOTO - DIGITAL SANSKRIT
In Indonesia, an e-book retailer called Papataka ("bookworm" in
Sanskrit) offers more than 150,000 titles submitted by around 100
Indonesian and foreign publishers. There are over 100 online Indonesian
book stores — this is a country that produces 13,000 new titles every
year — so the growth trend is there, limited only by the affordability
of e-book readers.
Also in Indonesia, the country's largest media conglomerate,
Kompas-Gramedia, has gone into developing digital content. Working with
the cellular operator Telkomsel, Gramedia now offers about 100 so-called
"m-books," mostly young adult fiction and cookbooks, downloadable by
Telkomsel customers, chapter by chapter, on their mobile phones.
[PHOTO - Publishers in Japan were quick to see the potential of putting cellphone novels into print.]
In Japan — ironically for what was a technology innovator in the 20th
century — reports suggest that publishers have responded more slowly
and more cautiously to the onset of digital publishing. Faced with
falling sales and growing inventories, Kodansha International, the
country's and the world's most important source of Japanese books in
English, simply shut down last April, coursing what was left of its
sales to a US subsidiary.
Here in the Philippines, digital publishing has definitely arrived —
but it will take time to settle in, to become popular, and to actually
turn a profit, which is important if it is to become a social
game-changer rather than just a format option for affluent readers.
Many
of our major literary and academic publishers — Anvil, UP Press, and
Vibal Publishing — have gone into digital publishing. A company called
Flipside, to which Barnes & Noble used to outsource the digitization
of its books, has now opened its doors to local material, and has put
up an online e-bookstore at Flipreads.com. Some Filipino authors, myself
included, can also now be found on Amazon.
Compared to the rest of the region, these are still baby steps — our
bestsellers remain in the dozens of copies rather than even the
hundreds. The obstacles are clear, though not insurmountable: the
skepticism, resistance, and ignorance of both authors and publishers;
the historically small market for books of any kind; the expense of
e-book readers; and the finetuning and operationalization of the
business model for digital publishing.
Digital publishing comes to the Philippines with a special urgency.
Like the Internet itself, it is seen — perhaps too optimistically for
now — as a great democratizer, which is something of an irony where
digital access still separates one class of citizen from another.
Unrealistic though they may be, the hopes placed on the Internet and
on digital communications cannot be unfounded. Many societies in the
region are still in need of greater freedom and transparency in many
aspects of public life.
Facebook
will change Asian societies in its own way, but the real revolutions
are taking place in such fields as distance learning, and even in
electronic procurement, which is an important step in many places toward
minimizing government corruption. In the Philippines, we have already
brought governments down partly through the efficacy of text messaging.
Granted, it's a long way from reading a text message to reading an
e-book, but you can imagine the quantum leap in social and political
transformation if we were able to afford South Korea's investment of a
tablet in the hands of every child and a computer for every citizen.
Chief News Editor:
Sol Jose Vanzi
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