Jakarta. Bookmate, a social e-reading subscription platform, launched its mobile reading service in Indonesia in August last year.

Bookmate made its debut in the Asia-Pacific market through a partnership with Singaporean telco Starhub. The Russian-based company then partnered with Indosat in 2015 to offer digital books to Indonesian readers. In Indonesia, the service launched under the brand name Cipika Bookmate and began with 4,000 titles in Bahasa Indonesia and 650,000 titles overall.

The subscription-based service is available on all devices and operating systems. It features free, standard and premium monthly subscriptions. It also offers one month free trial for new users.

On the eve of Bookmate’s partnership anniversary with Indosat, managing director Andrew Baev tells the Jakarta Globe about the growing digital book business and how Bookmate hopes to support local authors.

What sets Bookmate apart from other leading digital book services such as Kindle and iBook? 

These days, people are more likely to go for what is most convenient for them. It’s a hassle to bring your iPad or Kindle, and even more so with physical books. Bookmate offers you access to books you love in our ever-growing catalogue that you can easily pull up from your phone. It’s great because you have all the things you need already in your phone, whether it’s your email, Whatsapp or music, and now you can add books to that list. 80 percent to 85 percent of our users read on their mobile phones. The app is also available on computer and tablet. This is how people spend their time when they commute, or when they are in line for coffee. We have also integrated the social aspect of reading into the app, it allows you to share books with friends and do reviews and ratings.

Your services rely a great deal on publishers. How has Indonesian publishers been responding to Bookmate? 

We started with 4,000 Indonesian titles. Now, publishers are starting to get up to speed with digital content, they are finally trying to digitize more. It’s different from before because back then they don’t see the point of publishing ebooks because there were no platforms to sell it on. There’s no Amazon, Google or iBooks in Indonesia. Publishers are now more eager to work with us, as many Indonesians are using smartphones and have more access to mobile apps.

Why did Bookmate choose to partner with telcos?

We have been looking quite aggressively to develop our business in Southeast Asia because the markets are ready, but for us it’s a question of having the infrastructure to go forward. Partnering with a local telecommunication network allows us to tackle two things: we need to be thinking of payment options, providing our users with convenient ways to pay for the services is very important. With Indosat, we have Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) that is integrated in the app. It allows you to automatically charge for subscriptions using balance-reduction on your SIM card. Second, partnering with telco provides us with a rather unusual marketing strategy for ebook services. While we still do our own marketing, the telco partner allows us to reach people that we can’t reach otherwise.

This also benefits the publishers. With the utmost respect and care for privacy laws, our app allows us to understand how the readers are responding to the books, the demographics of the reader, if people actually finish the book they start reading, as well as their preferred genres.

What are some challenges you have encountered in developing your business in Indonesia? 

The payment option, as I have mentioned. We are aware that not everyone uses credit cards, so we offer convenient options for our users. It’s  also a matter of developing a decent reading catalogue to attract customers. We need to constantly push the publishers, and now they understand better that what we have is a legitimate business model.

What does Bookmate offer aside from mobile reading services? 

Whenever Bookmate comes to a market, whether it’s Bolivia or Kazakhstan or Indonesia, our goal is to do localization. It’s not only about adaptation to the local language through the application, but also promoting local content. We want to help local authors have better reach, and we do this through featuring these authors on our app, social media campaigns and promoting them through the telecom network.

In Indonesia alone, we just signed an agreement with Storial.co, we’ll be working on something really cool with them. The idea is that writers will write a part of their story and upload it, have that work exposed to readers so that we can track their reaction and see how they want it continued. After looking at the reaction, the writer then write the next chapter. The main purpose is to promote local authors. It’s extremely hard to get the attention of big publishers, especially for those who are just starting. So we want to offer an online platform that allows them to garner public audience so that they can later get the attention of publishers.

How has the Indonesian market been responding to Bookmate?

I would say it’s responding as it should be. Every market we have come to, the publishers tell us that nobody read books in their market. But as we see how people react to Bookmate, we know that people do read. The only difference now is that the convenience of reading has been lost as technology progresses. Mobile reading is what’s going to change that. Ebook services have only been growing for the past two years, and we see that 90 percent of people who start using Bookmate usually go on to read using the app.