In the past five years, the survey has also analyzed digital book formats, and in this segment, the real growth in publishers’ sales revenue has been 158 percent. And yet—although the digital market is currently behaving in opposition to the print market—audiobooks and ebooks still represent only 8 percent of Brazilian publishers’ revenue.
With this in mind, some Brazilian companies have developed a new way to expand access to digital content and bring ebooks and audiobooks to millions of Brazilians through an unusual partnership—with telecommunications companies.
Skeelo’s Meinberg: ‘Part of Everyone’s Daily Life’
Founded five years ago by entrepreneurs Rodrigo Meinberg and Rafael Lunes, Skeelo is the best example of how this new way of rethinking the digital segment has succeeded.
When it entered the market, Skeelo operated on a B2B2C digital book business model, providing literary works at no additional cost to millions of users through partnerships with major Brazilian telcos and companies from different sectors.
In this business model, if a person has a plan featuring bundled services, they automatically have access to more than 250,000 digital-format titles without having to pay anything extra. These are ebooks, audiobooks, digitally presented comics, and “mini-books,” which are defined by Skeelo as “stories divided into short volumes so you can read them even if you don’t have much time.”
Today, Skeelo has 108 clients, including telcos and other service providers such as Sem parar (Non-Stop) and Uol, offering books distributed by the platform to a base of more than 150 million end-users. Additionally, there are more than 20 million apps installed and at least 114 million minutes consumed in books on the app.
Of these, 84.2 million minutes are consumed through reading and 29.8 million through listening.
The big breakthrough here lies in the expansion of access and distribution: Brazil has an average of 2.2 cell phones per person, according to the 34th edition of the FGVcia Annual Survey, and 50 percent of people who read digital books do so on their cell phones. Claro and Vivo, two of Skeelos main telco partners in Brazil, have more than 100 million customers in the country each.
Rodrigo Meinberg
Rodrigo Meinberg, Skeelo’s CEO, tells Publishing Perspectives, “Having created the model in which we operate—and in which we’re market-leaders today—helps to address two main historical challenges of books: distribution and access. Through the app on smartphones and the B2B model we established with major companies, we can bring books to more and more people.
“By betting on a distribution channel that’s not only on cell phones but also uses companies that are part of everyone’s daily life,” he says, “distribution is solved. And because it’s a model in which the person does not pay anything extra, access is solved.”
Meinberg says that the company continues to invest in the app, its engagement, and its user experience to stay relevant and up-to-date.
“With this,” he says, “we can always have a high rating in app stores and very positive reviews. We also recently conducted a survey with responses from more than 95,000 users. The study showed 98-percent satisfaction among these users, the result of this continuous work. And of course, our content is also a great differentiator. We have partnerships with the major publishing houses in Brazil, allowing us to offer the best titles from the best authors in the palms of our users’ hands.”
Since its creation, Skeelo reports seeing double-digit growth year-over-year and anticipates repeating that result in 2024.
Bookwire’s Gioia: ‘A New and Important Source of Revenue’
On the platform, distribution is facilitated by Frankfurt-based Bookwire, which supplies the platform’s store and represents hundreds of publishers in Brazil.
Marcelo Gioia, managing director of Bookwire Brazil, says, “This new business vertical, commercializing and consuming digital content, presents some interesting aspects.
Marcelo Gioia
“The first is the opportunity for publishers to have a new and important source of revenue. The second is the broad reach that the model provides—distributing digital books to consumers who apparently are not traditional buyers or readers—so there’s a significant expansion of the reader base.”
In May this year, Gioia presented a panel at Madrid’s Readmagine from Luis González, FGEE managing director José Manuel Anta, and Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez (FGSR).
There, he highlighted the fact that there’s room for growth in the digital book market in Brazil and he cited sales from telcos among three key verticals.
More Service Providers: Campsoft and EXA
For publishers, the telco model has become increasingly relevant, mainly because of its broad distribution of reading and its ability to cultivate new readers. At Skeelo, for example, the company says that publishers are remunerated for each copy distributed and sold to client companies.
Similar to Skeelo’s approach, companies in the Brazilian marketplace including Campsoft and EXA have platforms interacting with telcos and distributing ebooks and audiobooks to those operators’ users in the framework of data and voice packages.
Campsoft is an integrator and distributor of value-added services for the Internet service providers market with more than 300 clients.
It offers a range of applications that encompass education, entertainment, culture, health, and safety. In the first half of 2023, the company increased the number of clients by 40 percent and surpassed 2 million users served by partner providers. In its catalogue, the company lists more than 60,000 ebook titles and 3,000 in audio formats, in addition to e-commerce and distribution through partner platforms, among them, Audible and others.
Ricardo Camps
One of the products created by Campsoft is Tocalivros, an audiobook platform that’s been in the market for 11 years. It has also been configured as an app offered to services that can provide it as an option to their clients.
Ricardo Camps, the director of Campsoft, says, “We believe that the business model with telcos increases access to digital books, as part of our content distribution.”
Since it’s something new in the publishing market, there’s still little research that can definitively indicate a trend or expansion of this telco-driven model, but it’s being watched carefully for progress in coming years.
At the moment, the challenge is to ensure that a widening base of users have access to various ebooks and audiobooks through the convenience of their devices.
More from Publishing Perspectives on digital publishing is here, more on distribution is here, and more on the Brazilian market is here.
