Vowing to offer readers a wider range of book selections, the nation's largest online bookstore, books.com Co (
The new section boasts a collection of more than 800,000 titles from 60,000 foreign publishers, Cheng Jan-min (鄭健民), a company official in charge of the foreign language section, told a press briefing yesterday.
Within three years, the company plans to expand the lineup to 2 million titles supplied by 100,000 publishers, Cheng said.
He said that foreign language bookstores have long been plagued by a low turnover rate and inventory pressure, forcing publishers to follow the "80/20 rule" (in which 80 percent of a store's sales come from just 20 percent of its titles), and focus on importing new and bestselling titles, while neglecting the needs of readers in the minority.
Taiwan imported US$14.5 million in books from the US last year, ranking it 14th in such imports, behind Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China and Hong Kong, Cheng said, citing a US survey.
South Korea, which ranked seventh on the list, saw its import volume of US books grow by 44.6 percent from 2004. In stark contrast, Taiwan's figure dropped by 9.4 percent during the same time.
Books.com.tw aims to offer a platform where readers can choose from a range of titles at competitive prices. The publishers will deliver books to the online bookstore twice a week, which will be available for pickup at the more than 4,000 7-Eleven convenience stores nationwide within a week, company president Terry Chang (張天立) said.
Books.com.tw and the 7-Eleven chain are both owned by Uni-President Enterprises Corp (統一企業).
Currently, local readers usually place orders for non-Chinese language books through online bookstores run by Kingstone Bookstore (金石堂書店) and Eslite Bookstore (誠品書店), but delivery can take up to two months.
Books ordered through the international site of amazon.com usually incur shipping costs of at least 30 percent of the book price.
Claiming that books.com.tw would remove these obstacles and launch an English interface in the fourth quarter of the year, Chang was confident that the company can snatch 30 percent of the market share in one year and 50 percent in the long run.
Taiwan's foreign book market, excluding textbooks and exam books, is estimated to be worth between NT$250 million (US$7.6 million) and NT$300 million per year, according to the company.
Eslite Corp (誠品公司), which runs Eslite Bookstore, the nation's largest bookstore chain, welcomed the new competition, which it says should heat up and expand the overall market. But it was skeptical about books.com's "rather ambitious" goals.
"As we're also working with the same supplier in the US, I doubt whether the speed and supply stability they promise can be maintained," said Lee Yu-hwa (李玉華), Eslite's assistant manager of public relations.
She said that Eslite would be able to offer lower-priced books due to their larger quantity of imports. Eslitebooks.com expects revenues of NT$20 million from foreign language books through online transactions this year, she said.
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