Line Appeals to Bookworms With New ‘Line Novel’ E-Books Portal

The Line juggernaut continues today with the app’s makers, NHN, adding free e-books within the social messaging app. While this doesn’t yet represent a threat to Amazon or Apple’s trade in e-books in Japan, it might evolve into something larger in future.

For now, as detailed in Line’s announcement (in Japanese), Line has three free e-books available that are being serialized in the app. More will be added in due course. Line’s users in Japan – about 30 percent of its 160 million registered user-base – can follow the Line account @linenovel to see new titles as they’re added.

Line has connected with Japanese publishing house Kodansha for these e-books. They seem to be new novels in the popular fiction genre aimed at younger readers.

In addition, Line is encouraging users to submit their own literary creations in a contest, running until August 15th. The winner will be published by Kodansha and may well appear with the Line Novel bookstore.

The messaging app launched its Line Manga store in April this year. It’s possible that Line Novel will eventually grow into a fully fledged e-bookstore to challenge the e-book biz giants in the country, such as Kobo.

Rival app KakaoTalk has also moved into the publishing sector recently, though it opted to launch KakaoPage as a digital marketplace for all kinds of self-published content.