November 2007

Dymocks, Australia’s second-largest bookselling chain, this week unveiled a new Digital Books initiative that offers customers a choice of over 120,000 digital e-book titles, as well as more than 30,000 audiobook titles.Dymocks CEO Don Grover told Bookseller+Publisher, the initiative was partly a response to demand but that the chain also wanted to lead the way in educating consumers about how to use digital books.

‘We believe the relationship with customers is with the retailer and we need to be able to show customers how [digital books] would work,’ he said. ‘We can show customers how to interact with the product and how to use it.’

Currently e-book titles are available in Adobe, Microsoft and Mobipocket formats, ‘but that will evolve over time,’ according to Grover, who was not waiting for books to have their so-called ‘iPod moment’. ‘The devices are already there,’ he said. ‘We need to take a lead.’

The new audiobook range will be offered via a partnership with online US audio book retailer Audible. Audiobook titles will be priced in US dollars, with the transaction processed by Audible. The audio book range can be downloaded ‘onto over 250 AudibleReady devices,’ including iPod, certain mobile phones and several GPS devices and can also be burned to CD or streamed through customers’ computers.

Publisher response
Grover said the response from publishers to the digital books initiative ‘was one of “Wow, how can we work with this?”‘ ‘I’ve had some conversations with a couple of publishers who are very excited and working feverishly [to digitise their lists],’ he said, adding that Dymocks wanted to ‘make sure we have a lot of Australian content’ but that many publishers were waiting for the go-ahead from their parent companies before launching fully into digital books. Grover hopes the Dymocks initiative will drive this digitisation process in Australia. ‘We thought we’ll build it and hopefully they’ll come,’ he said.

Grover said that while educational titles were obvious candidates for digital book sales, the products on offer would reflect the chain’s broad range. ‘We’ve got children’s and nonfiction and fiction-it’s a very good range,’ he said.

Grover also said he believed the chain’s bricks and mortar stores ‘give us a competitive edge over the purely online retailers.’

Digital Book ‘kiosks’ to be rolled out in stores
As the system works currently, Dymocks customers can download digital books from its website and must be members of the chain’s Booklover loyalty program to do so.

Kiosks, which have been installed in the chain’s flagship Sydney store, will be rolled out to other stores in the coming year, according to Grover.

The kiosks feature touch screens that ’allow customers instant access to information about … the availability of digital and audible book titles which they can then download at home.’

However, while Grover believes the strength of its website is the backing of the chain’s bricks and mortar stores, and vice versa, he admitted that it was not yet possible for individual stores and franchises to collect revenue for digital book sales, which will all be processed through the Dymocks website. ‘One of the difficulties is the way in which publishers are wanting digital rights to be managed–there’s no technology in the world to enable us to download in the store,’ he said. ‘There has to be some consolidation of thought on how rights will be handled.’

‘You’ll see a lot of packaging and marketing opportunities coming to bear in the next year,’ said Grover, of plans to offer e-book and physical book combinations.

‘We’re going to crawl before we walk, before we run,’ he admitted but said he believed his company’s initiative was a world first. ‘A lot of big US chains are saying they’re going to do it but they haven’t … and now we’ve done it here in Australia.’