reading books on the phone
Another great interview from Pacific Epoch, this one from a company called Byread that’s developed a service for downloading and reading books for handsets, with content from over 200 Chinese publishing houses.
Long awaited 3G licensing should expand what is now available to mobile Internet users in China. In the meantime, a host of companies are developing services in anticipation.
excerpt:
Byread’s mobile reading solution has different versions that can
support a range of low-end to high-end handset models. Fifity to 60
high-end smart handset models and almost all basic Java handset models
can use our platform. Different handset models require different
solutions and will include different services. For example, for
high-end handset models our mobile reading solutions can offer audio
and video effects when users are reading our books while versions for
low-end handsets will not include the special effects.
Some Southeast Asian companies have contacted us about possible
partnerships, which we are considering. I do not think expansion will
be a short term goal because if we go outside of China, the lack of
content will be a big challenge because Chinese content is quite
different from content in other languages. This is the same reason that
large companies such as Adobe, which has a similar mobile reading
solution, have not yet been successful in China’s mobile literature
market.