KT launches online e-book market

KT launches online e-book market
KT Corp., Korea’s No. 1 telecom provider, yesterday launched an e-book service promising to give users access over 100,000 titles on an array of digital gadgets.

The KT QOOK book café service is available through e-book readers, smartphones and personal computers from different manufacturers including Samsung and Apple, Seo Yu-yeol, president of the home customer group at KT, said at a new conference. 　

QOOK is KT’s highly-rated brand which has combined its telephone, internet and broadcast services.

Currently, there are 40,000 digitalized books available online, ranging from academic material, comic books and magazines to audio books and thesis papers. The writers of the books will determine the prices.

The country’s largest fixed-line telecom operator will also permit publishers and writers to sell their work using the system. It plans to release policies on the open market sometime in June.

“We’re also in the process of making the service available for overseas Koreans at this moment for them to easily download the digitalized material,” said Song Young-hee, head of home customer strategy at KT.

The firm plans to establish about 27,000 Wi-Fi zones, called QOOK and SHOW zones, mostly in the metropolitan regions by the first half of this year.

“Going ahead with a new business pushes us to change the trend in the industry … I’m confident that we could induce that change,” said Seo.

Earlier this month, the government announced it would support the digital transition move by devising a roadmap this year on how to develop the rapidly-growing electronic book industry.

Together with the education and culture ministries, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said they would encourage technological development as they project the digital contents market to grow to $8.9 billion by 2013, a sharp jump from $1.9 billion in 2008.

They also expect the number of mobile devices to increase to 77 million by 2018.