According to one of the activists in the publishing industry, our technologies in the field of electronic book readers are old and date back to 20 years ago.
According to IDEA‘s report, the lack of electronic book reader and audiobook programs is considered one of the most significant challenges in the book economy. In fact, the market for electronic books has a very small share of the overall book market. The Research Center of the Parliament has recently focused on researching the issues within the field of the book economy. In this report, challenges in the book industry’s economy have been identified through field research and the input of stakeholders in the industry, with the ultimate goal of providing solutions.
According to the Research Center’s report
A significant increase in inactive publishers, the weakness of electronic book reader programs, book smuggling, and the uneven distribution of the publishing industry in different parts of the country are among the most important challenges identified in this industry.
The report also states that by the year 1402, over 1,700,000 book titles have been acquired and published by the Book House Shapak, while only 100,000 electronic book titles have been published, with the majority belonging to the private sector. For example, the Fidibo e-reader has 62,000 e-books.
According to data from the Research Center’s report, in 2019, the global e-book market registered $18.3 billion in e-book sales. It is worth noting that in 2018, this figure was $13 billion, showing a growth of 40% in just one year. Additionally, according to statistics published in 2019, 9% of global book market sales are attributed to e-books. In Iran, the financial turnover of the e-book market was approximately 20 billion tomans in 1396, which increased to 250 billion tomans in the past year. The use of e-books has experienced a two-fold annual growth rate, which has quadrupled during the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, the demand for e-books has roughly doubled each year. However, according to the Research Center of the Parliament, the most significant problem in this area is the lack of domestic publishers entering the electronic publishing market. For example, there are only about 30,000 e-book titles available on one of the platforms, while the number of published books exceeds 1,700,000 titles.
The Research Center’s report also identifies weakness in audiobooks as another challenge in this field. According to this report, 89% of publishers have stated that they are not active in producing audiobooks. Based on the data published in 99, the percentage of new content in PDF, audio, and EPUB formats in that year was 64%, 14%, and 22%, respectively. Furthermore, 88% of publishers collaborating with this software have focused solely on publishing textual content, 3% on audio content, and 9% on both textual and audio content.
As mentioned, the weakness of electronic book reader programs is one of the other economic challenges in the book market, as stated in the Research Center’s report. According to statistics, there are at least 23 Iranian e-book reader applications, with Fidibo, Ketabrah, and Ketab Sabz being the most commonly used among them. However, the shortcomings of these platforms pose a serious challenge to this field. Furthermore, according to one of the publishing industry’s activists, our technologies in this field are very outdated.
In conclusion, the Research Center of the Parliament has not proposed any solutions for the problems related to the field of electronic books, unlike the solutions offered for other challenges.
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