A Vietnamese Startup BiitBook Hunts for the E-book Publishing Market

In Southeast Asia, we’ve seen the compelling rise of Ookbee and Scoop, and chat app giants like Line and KakaoTalk are also getting into the digital publishing game. Of course, we’ve got a few interesting players here in Vietnam, as well. One of them is a small new company called Biitbook.

I had a quick chat with Nhat Nguyen Hung, the founder and CEO of Biitbook, who says the service hopes to:

Become a place for publishers, authors, and readers to come together. A place for people who really love reading. Where authors and publishers can take control of their copyright and publishing power.

Basically, the Biitbook team of three looks to build a platform for e-books that can be read on smartphones and tablets as well as web browsers. The company is also currently working on shipping desktop apps for PC and Mac.

After eight months of operation, Biitbook now hosts over 20,000 e-books (10,000 of which are Vietnamese), and has 46,000 users on the platform. Hung also noted that the site has over two million unique visitors. That’s a nice start for a company started with only three people.

Biitbook has been working with Vietnamese publishers to get their books online, training them with online tutorials and technical support through the process of scanning and uploading. But Biitbook is mostly targeted at authors themselves. The company can really be described as a self-publishing platform. This not only tackles Vietnam’s copyright issues, but also makes a play for the extremely nascent e-book scene. I mean, with e-books at one percent market share of digital goods in Vietnam, you can be sure it’s a hard battle that Biitbook is fighting.

As a big fan of Kindle and e-ink readers, I had to ask Hung if they’d support e-ink, but Biitbook is only looking to ship e-books to their Android and iOS platform.

As far as getting payment, Biitbook only collects money via PayPal and, interestingly, their own payment method called Bcoins. Bcoins allow users to pay by credit card as well as SMS by accumulating credit into their Bcoins account to buy e-books. Publishers will get 70 percent of the cut. The first 100 publishers (or authors) get a 75 percent cut for signing up for the first year on Biitbook’s platform. Hung notes that it’s a C2C e-book marketplace.

To say the least, Biitbook is operating under very difficult circumstances. E-books are not commonplace, books are extremely cheap, and very few people in Vietnam use Paypal. This is why I’m not surprised that Thai, Indonesian, and English are among the few languages Biitbook is offered in, aiming instead at more developed e-reading markets. But it’s really early to say, and we’ll have to wait until the end of the year to see if Biitbook really catches on.

It’s also worth mentioning that Alezaa, another Vietnamese e-book player, is also in this space.