At long last, Australia’s small independent bookstores are set to enter the ebook fray.
ReadCloud’s social reading ebook retail platform for independent bookstores will be launched on Wednesday, November 9, at Pages & Pages bookstore in Mosman, Sydney.
Pages & Pages’ Jon Page, who is also president of the Australian Booksellers Association, tweeted this week about how excited he was to be laying out the store’s ebook site home page.
At a launch event featuring television personality Steve Liebmann, Page and his staff will demonstrate their new ebook website and instore kiosk (for browsing and purchasing ebooks), and introduce their own colour ereader, the Cumulus.
More than 200 booksellers signed with Australian start-up ebook player ReadCloud earlier this year. Some, like Pages & Pages, will sell the Cumulus device in a bid to compete with the Amazon’s Kindle, the Kobo, Sony’s Reader and Apple’s iPad.
Many of the booksellers had expressed their frustrations at the lack of an Australian Publishers Association-managed “white label” ebook solution.
The APA committed in October 2009 to offering such a solution in the first half of 2010, and reiterated that commitment at the Australian Booksellers Association conference in July – but with a later deadline, obviously, this time stating their platform would be available by Christmas this year.
Many booksellers felt they couldn’t wait any longer, and committed to ReadCloud or another Australian start-up, Booki.sh (Gleebooks, Readings and Books for Cooks are among the Melbourne outfit’s partners), to ensure that they could offer ebooks to their customers in time for Christmas.