Mobile newsstand SCOOP dramatically increases title selection, launches web store

Indonesia’s Scoop, a mobile newsstand app, announced today that it has signed an exclusive deal with Gramedia Book Publishing Group that will see over 10,000 local books and novels from the publisher make its way into SCOOP’s web store, which has also just launched.

The collection adds to Scoop’s existing cache of 9,000 books, magazines, and newspapers. Gramedia is a prolific book publisher in Indonesia that pumps out over 50,000 local books a year, with a tenth of them being new entries.

Users can now proceed to the web store to make purchases. Their items can then be shared with up to five devices, all of which will require the Scoop mobile app to view the book or magazine. The web store is offering discounts of up to 91 percent and will throw in a free second-year subscription for every annual subscription made to a title.

Already a leading digital publisher in Indonesia, Scoop’s new web store can eventually increase its reach in Indonesia and beyond since purchasing on the web is easier than doing so on a smartphone with its limited screen real estate.

“As we grow our library, our users require more channels to discover our partners’ content. The web store gives us this flexibility in term of user interface, content discovery and fast deployment,” said Willson Cuaca, CEO of Apps Foundry, the company behind Scoop.

Right now, 85 percent of Scoop’s revenue comes from iOS and the rest from Android, and the monthly average revenue per paid user for iOS is 60 percent higher than for Android.

The service has some 500k downloads so far, with 92 percent of its readers coming from Indonesia.  For now, Scoop is keeping monthly active user figures close to its chest.

Willson anticipates that 2013 would be Android’s year in Indonesia and therefore expects revenue from that platform as well as the web store to rise.

The company is expanding on two fronts by increasing the depth of its collection and growing its geographical reach. Its recent partnership with Ookbee, a dominant e-publisher from Thailand, is aimed at widening its inventory since collective bargaining results in better deals with bigger publishers.

It’s also working on partnering with publishers beyond Southeast Asia. Scoop isn’t really to announce anything at this point, but we’ll be sure to update this article when it is.