After aggressively promoting his new Lemon8 lifestyle social media platform In the US, ByteDance appears to be crafting yet another content app for its largest foreign market.
Lemon Inc, a subsidiary of ByteDance, filed a trademark application for a range of book publishing products and services, according to a presentation published in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The trademark, which is called “8TH NOTE PRESS,” offers an interesting look at ByteDance’s apparent electronic publishing ambitions.
The filing of the trademark was earlier reported by Business Insider.
The list of registered products and services in 8TH NOTE PRESS includes a application for reading, downloading and discussing fiction e-books in an online community; book retail services; book orders in audio, print and digital formats; publishing of e-books, audiobooks and physical books; as well as providing non-downloadable fiction and non-fiction books online.
Corporations register trademarks all the time in anticipation of expanding into new verticals in the future, but they do not specify deadlines or bind registrants to any obligations, so the change to the 8TH NOTE PRESS trademark does not necessarily mean that ByteDance is taking whatever material. steps into the publishing world yet.
But publishing and distributing books sounds like the next logical steps for ByteDance given TikTok’s success in attract book lovers to share under the hashtag #BookTok on the short video platform. Although ByteDance posted a record profit last year as a whole, TikTok suffered increasing losses, according to the Financial Times. reported. ByteDance is likely eager to find new ways to monetize its hundreds of millions of users abroad.
The trademark effort is “not related to TikTok,” but ByteDance is “always exploring new opportunities,” according to a person with knowledge of the matter. That’s to be expected given the bite-sized nature of short videos that doesn’t mesh with longer-form reads that require a longer attention span.
TechCrunch has reached out to ByteDance for comment.
It won’t be surprising to see ByteDance launch a standalone books app where users can, as the trademark registration suggests, read, download, buy, and talk about books.
While TikTok may not distribute books directly, it can certainly help drive users towards the potential books app: as you have done with Lemon8 recruiting influencers to promote the lifestyle-focused social media platform.
The mountain of information and user data that TikTok has amassed could be used to figure out what people like to read, and the same kinds of content recommendation algorithms that suggest videos on TikTok could be used to feature new books to read in an app. separated.
If ByteDance does venture into e-publishing, the question is how it plans to compete with industry giant Amazon in book publishing and distribution. And where would it fit into what has otherwise formed to be a fairly fragmented market in the long tail.
There is little data on the online posting and Amazon has never disclosed much about the revenue from the operation and, in the cases where it does, is very vague about these metrics. It’s also an insurmountable task to track down all self-published books via Kindle, especially since not all of them have their international identifiers or ISBN numbers, as research group Wordsrated says. points.
However, Amazon’s position as a publisher, distributor, and player of popular hardware (via the Kindle) probably gives it an outsized place in that market. Industry expert Benedict Evans My dear at the end of 2019, Amazon had “50% or more of the US print book market and at least three-quarters of publishers’ e-book sales.”
ByteDance’s advantage in books clearly lies in its growing social media empire where authors and fans can connect directly and readers can share their thoughts with others.
That role is indeed still up for grabs. The closest Amazon has come to fostering an online community for its readers is the acquisition of social reading site GoodReads a decade ago.
GoodReads’ integration with other Amazon properties has been limited at best, as Kindle readers connected to Wi-Fi occasionally see GoodReads highlights, and GoodReads makes the Kindle the default purchase option. But the 16-year-old book review site appears to be still going strong with 125 million “members” and 3.5 billion books catalogued. according to the company.
ByteDance is no stranger to eBooks. In 2020, the news came that would acquire approximately 11% of Chinese publicly traded e-book reader Yuewen (deal closed). It also operates one of China’s most popular web novel apps, Tomato Novel, which allows readers to read for free but with ads or have them pay a monthly subscription fee for an ad-free experience. In 2021, he ventured run a web fiction application in english called Mytopia that spanned the genres of romance, horror, and fantasy. It doled out bounties to attract first-time writers, similar to the cash incentives it gives to TikTok creators.
Before Mytopia had a chance to grow significantly, trapped bulletproof for launching erotic ads on Facebook and Instagram. 8TH NOTE PRESS should know better this time.
—————————————————-
Source link