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24symbols Update! March 2016
Hi <<First Name>>,
Welcome again to our newsletter, with all things about 24symbols. A few months have passed since our last newsletter. The reason? Easy enough, we were working on many business and technical projects, and everytime we thought of sending a newsletter, someone would say: “but, if we wait two more weeks, we will also be able to announce X and Y!” And here we are! So bear with us, this newsletter is full of stuff!!!
New service in Germany with Klarmobil
We are really making the most of our german language courses! We have thousands of new Mobilcom Debitel users in Germany every month. But that's not enough, and we have now strengthened our position in this country by partnering with Klarmobil, a service discount company for mobile users.
With this, and new publishers on board with exciting new titles, our german service becomes our strongest per region, having doubled our number of subscribers in less than 3 months.
And now, COMIC BOOKS!
Many people here in 24symbols love comic books, and it was long due to add proper support for fixed layout titles. This enables reading children’s books with illustrations, comic books, academic books, and whichever text that because of its visualization complexity cannot be properly rendered in flowable formats. We are launching this for our web-based service, and then we will roll out the new reader on our iOS and Android apps.
For publishers and authors: a primer on how to increase the visibility of your ebooks
We believe there are other ways to increase the reach of our authors’ and publishers’ titles. And that’s why we have written a small guide for ebook visibility with 24symbols, full of ideas for our partners to set into action.
On a related note, we have a new way to increase discoverability of ebooks in our iOS app, by adding tags to each category. As we carefully curate which category each ebook belongs to, we also take some key metadata info from your ONIX feeds to enrich each category with “tags”, that ease how users browse the categories to find the books they want. Why don’t you give it a try? Now available for iOS and Android!
And, moreover, we gave an incredible innovation for our authors. Social marketing experts say you need to go where your customers are. And they are, mostly, on Facebook. So we have created a 24symbols Reader for Facebook, that the author can embed on his/her Facebook page to increase engagement with the readers.
We have been constantly adding new publishers and distributors during the last months, and many more that are waiting (hey, we’re human after all 😉 ). Great distributors like Draft2Digital in the US, PublishDrive in Europe, Faber Factory in the UK, or Digitaliza in Brazil. Publishers like Ediciones Era and SM in Mexico, or SAGA Egmont in Germany.
Thanks again for relying on us as your partner, we keep on working very hard to give you as much value as possible!
More about our presence in internet.org's Free Basic Services
The growth has been fenomenal. We see over 10% of our traffic generated from Free Basics. Since becoming a global partner in September supporting 25 countries and 4 languages we have seen a 5x increase in the number of monthly average readers. Free Basics is helping us drive our investments in different markets by allowing us to understand where strategic opportunities existed, including developing more educational content, since 60% of traffic comes from 13-24 year olds. Seeing how people enjoy ebooks like La Regenta for the first time, or how kids learn to read with Romeo and Juliet by using 24symbols, makes us feel we are making this little dent in the universe. We are really proud.
Events we have been to
Of course, we attended the usual suspects: Frankfurt, Guadalajara, … where we closed some key agreements. But that was not all. We were also invited to teach at the prestigious Paju Editor School, in South Korea, where we spent at week teaching, talking and discussing about the role of ebooks in the South East Asian markets. You can check the presentation we gave there.
We also had the pleasure of attending the European E-Commmerce Conference, one of the most important events about e-commerce in Europe. Held in beautiful Bilbao, in Spain, 24symbols’ Alex Fernandez, Senior Publisher Relations, discussed with HarperCollins’ Eloy Sasot, Director of Big Data, Pricing and Analytics, the whereabouts of publishing when we mix new business models and the ability to analyse readers and market data. The results can be amazing, as you can watch in the video (in spanish).