Digital Reading Trailblazer

Ebook seller Readmoo is a digital evangelist that has successfully persuaded many passionate readers to switch from print to ebooks. Its methods include the more than 100 online and offline reading-related lectures and book expos it has hosted every year since its founding, and its curated monthly book selections. The company also launched its own ebook hardware in 2017, enabling readers to keep their entire ebook collections at hand on cloud-based “bookshelves.” Readmoo’s years of hard work and focus have laid the foundation for Taiwan’s world-leading position in digital reading.

Your local ebook store

In 2012, seven people with backgrounds in publishing, bookselling, and telecommunications came together to found Readmoo as a digital publishing website. Even though ebooks accounted for less than 0.1% of Taiwan’s book market, the seven fervently believed in the potential of digital reading. “We hoped that EPUB would become a universal format for ebooks—just as the MP3 format is for music—enabling readers to use any ebook reader of their choice to read wherever and whenever they want,” says Readmoo co-founder and CEO Sophie Pang.

Readmoo uploaded its first ten traditional Chinese books in the EPUB format to its website in late 2012. With that, the company, which had previously only hosted books in the PDF format, became an online ebook store. Readmoo’s early expansion of Taiwan’s digital reading options has made it a leader in the Chinese-language ebook-store space. In fact, Taiwan’s largest online bookstore, books.com.tw, didn’t begin selling ebooks until 2017, and the world’s largest online bookseller, Amazon, only began offering ebooks in tradi­tional Chinese in May of 2019.

Recognizing that readers often find that the blue light and flicker of a cellphone screen tire their eyes, Readmoo launched its mooInk ebook reader, an eInk-based device, in 2017. The move prompted Canadian ereader maker Kobo, which first entered Taiwan in 2016, to hurry its updated ereader, the Forma, to the Taiwan market in 2018.

With a current catalog of 130,000 volumes in traditional Chinese, Readmoo is Taiwan’s largest ebook store.

Made in Taiwan

Readmoo first offered the mooInk ereader as a presale and quickly received 1000 reservations. “We put the offer online at 8 p.m. and reached our fundraising target just three hours later,” recalls Pang. The launch was the culmination of five years of hard work, and the Readmoo offices erupted into celebratory cheers at the outpouring of support it received.

The first mooInk highlighted Taiwan’s techno­logical and manufacturing capabilities: not only did it util­ize E Ink Holdings’ ePaper technology, but it was assembled by Netronix. “It truly was made in Taiwan. In fact, Taiwan­ese companies OEM all of Amazon’s ­Kindle ereaders, too. Our pride in Taiwan’s manu­factur­ing prowess is well justified,” says Pang.

With a current catalog of 130,000 volumes in traditional Chinese, Readmoo is Taiwan’s largest ebook store.

Readmoo’s advantage

mooInk’s biggest advantages over other ereaders such as Amazon and Kobo’s devices lie in how well it displays traditional Chinese text and how many traditional Chinese books it offers.

Readmoo designed its device to be able to display Chinese text in columns, and to switch between hori­zontal and vertical text flow at the press of a button. Vertical text is a particularly attractive feature for readers of Chinese-­language fiction. Readmoo also paid special attention to how Chinese punctuation marks display in both horizontal and vertical text modes, striving to keep them as true as possible to their print counterparts.

Taiwanese readers were disappointed with the ­ereaders’ lack of a system for inputting the Chinese language, so Readmoo introduced one in 2018. The update also allows readers to choose to display text in any of six Chinese fonts. “Because we are a local company, deeply rooted in Taiwan, we understand both traditional Chinese’s unique structure and its reading context. We also have a firm grasp of Chinese-language readers’ needs and use habits,” explains Pang, who previously served as editor-in-chief of Business Next magazine.

Unlike print books, ereaders can be connected to devices like Bluetooth keyboards, which allow users to read while they eat, turning pages at the press of a key. They can also include a footnote function that allows endnotes to be displayed at a touch, without the need to flip ahead to the end of the chapter or the book.

Ereaders not only enable users to underline text, search for items, make notes and export data, but also allow them to interact and share with social media communities. Readers can even report typos and problems with the layout of the text.

Zoe, the moderator of the publishloser forum and a huge fan of mooInk, observes: “I’m the kind of person who buys nearly every book she sees. Readmoo lets me keep them all on a little reader.”

Readmoo CEO Sophie Pang is an ebook evangelist who personally read 59 books in 2019 and has read over 40 so far this year.

Promoting reading

The Readmoo site offers 130,000 ebooks, more than any other traditional Chinese ebook platform.

It also promotes reading by holding monthly online book expos on different themes, organizing lectures, and interacting with readers through many other channels.

Marketing director Leslie Ho adds that the company has been promoting “reading marathons” since 2013. These curated events, which encourage the company’s subscribers to broaden their reading horizons, offer participants game-like achievement “badges,” and have attracted the enthusiastic participation of loyal readers. They also sell a lot of ebooks, generating extra revenues for the company.

Readmoo’s annual reader reports indicate that ebook publishing and sales numbers are growing rapidly. The reports also show that the time spent reading ebooks on its platform has been growing at a rate of 150% per annum, and reached over 50 million minutes in 2019. Even more impressively, the 2020 figure surpassed the 50-million-­minute threshold in August, shattering the myth that people no longer read.

Pang says that Readmoo is currently assessing the feasibility of a “family plan” type of subscription, planning to expand its catalog still further, optimizing its ereaders’ functionality, and getting ready to launch a new device next year. Even as brick-and-mortar bookstores close and sales of print books fall, Readmoo continues to forge ahead, a brilliant star blazing its own path through the world of books and expanding digital reading.

One of the ways Readmoo promotes digital reading is by organizing occasional real-world talks on reading. The photo was taken at a talk given by baseball commentator Tseng Wen-cheng.

(above) One of the ways Readmoo promotes digital reading is by organizing occasional real-world talks on reading. The photo was taken at a talk given by baseball commentator Tseng Wen-cheng.

Retailers such as Eslite Bookstore and Syntrend offer people the chance to handle ebook readers for themselves.

Readmoo’s mooInk ereaders are the first devices to target the needs of readers of Chinese. Users can reflow text horizontally or vertically at the touch of a button.

Ereaders are like portable bookshelves that let users read anywhere.