By Kwon Mee-yoo
Kim Sang-hyeon, an office worker in his 30s, reads books on his e-book reader on his way to and from work. He has some 20 stored in digital format on the mobile device with subjects ranging from marketing and self-improvement to best-selling novels.
Up until a month ago he read newspapers or got the news on his smartphone, but he bought an e-book reader out of curiosity and it is slowly changing his habits.
"I sometimes read applications on my smartphone, but this wasn't suitable when reading for a long time. When I saw this 99,000 won e-book reader, I thought it was worth a try," he said.
Kim likes how it is lightweight and has a long-lasting battery. "I can have more than one hundred books at my fingertips and the battery lasts for several weeks," he said. "I am also attracted to the charm of e-ink. It is somewhere between analog and digital and I am more absorbed while reading than when using my smartphone."
What Kim bought is the Story K, a 99,000 won e-book reader co-developed by Kyobo Book Center and iriver.
iriver said that it has sold about 10,000 Story K readers since it was launched in mid-January.
The e-book industry estimates that about 60,000 e-book readers were sold in Korea since they were introduced in 2009. Story K has increased the size of the market by 20 percent in just a month, which could be a breakthrough for the devices in Korea.
Previously, e-book readers were priced at around 300,000 won, but Story K chose to concentrate on a single purpose ― reading. So it took out the fancy MP3 and other features and only provides reading and dictionary functions.
Though Story K has Wi-Fi, it can only connect to the Kyobo Book Center to browse and buy e-books that are sent directly to the purchaser.
"Males in their 30s make up the largest share of purchases on Story K, the early adopters of new technology. We are seeing this as a bridgehead to the general reading public," Kyobo Book Center spokesman Jin Young-kyun said.
Encouraged by the success of Story K, Interpark offered Biscuit Lite, a Wi-Fi only model of its e-book reader Biscuit, through social commerce site Ticket Monster at an even lower price of 64,500 won ― its full 3G model is priced at 398,000 won. Interpark sold 4,000 of the new readers in a week, fueling the affordable e-book market.
Kyobo expects e-books will soon become popular among those in their 20s. "When we introduced e-book content through smartphones and a tablet application, it was adopted first by males in their 30s and then females in their 20s and finally the public at large. We anticipate a similar trend for e-book readers as well," he said.
Statistics also show more people reading on e-books. In a survey of 1,000 office workers’ reading habits in 20111, Kyobo found each read 16 books a year on average. About 31.6 percent of them used e-books, and they read 19.7 books.
The survey also said 32.2 percent of office workers read books while commuting and one third of them used the e-book device.
Still, the lack of content is the biggest problem in the expansion of the e-book market. According to the Korea Electronic Publishing Association, the size of the content industry was around 325 billion won in 2011, a 2.5-fold jump from 132 billion won in 2009.
Kyobo said it has some 110,000 e-book titles and is expecting more books to be published electronically.
"Currently, about 90 percent of best sellers are new books and about half of them are published in hard copy as well as e-books," Jin said. "As e-book readers are becoming more common, more material will also be published to meet that trend."
Amazon.com's Kindle, the leading e-book reader in the world, is competitively priced compared to other devices. It was first introduced at $399 in November 2007, but the price went down to $79 last November. Amazon diversified the e-book reader to simple, read-only cheaper ones below $100 and color tablets at $199.
The company also has a broad range of content from literature and music to movies and television programs which add up to 19 million options in total, showing it is concentrating more on selling content than devices.
Few people use the Kindle in Korea as there are no Korean books or content for it.