After aggressively selling its new way of life social media platform Lemon8 within the U.S., ByteDance seems to be brewing one other content material app for its largest abroad market.
Lemon Inc, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has submitted a trademark utility for a spread of e-book publishing services and products, in line with a submitting posted on the USA Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO). The trademark, which is known as “8TH NOTE PRESS,” gives an attention-grabbing glimpse into ByteDance’s obvious e-publishing ambitions.
The trademark submitting was earlier reported by Enterprise Insider.
The record of services and products registered with 8TH NOTE PRESS contains an app to learn, obtain and talk about fiction ebooks in a web-based group; retail bookstore providers; ordering books in audio, printed and digital codecs; publishing ebooks, audiobooks and bodily books; in addition to offering on-line, non-downloadable fiction and non-fiction books.
Firms register logos on a regular basis in anticipation of growth into new verticals sooner or later, however they don’t specify timelines or maintain the registrants to any obligations, so the transfer to trademark 8TH NOTE PRESS doesn’t essentially imply ByteDance is taking any materials steps into the publishing world but.
However e-book publishing and distribution do sound like logical subsequent steps for ByteDance given TikTok’s success in attracting e-book lovers to share below the #BookTok hashtag on the brief video platform. Although ByteDance posted a report revenue final yr as a complete, TikTok itself suffered widening losses, the Monetary Instances reported. ByteDance is probably going keen to seek out new methods to monetize its lots of of tens of millions of customers abroad.
The trademarking effort is “not associated to TikTok” however ByteDance is “at all times exploring new alternatives,” in line with an individual with data of the matter. That’s anticipated given the bite-size nature of brief movies doesn’t sq. with long-form reads that require an extended consideration span.
TechCrunch has reached out to ByteDance for remark.
It gained’t be stunning to see ByteDance rolling out a standalone e-book app the place customers can, because the trademark registration suggests, learn, obtain, purchase and speak about books.
Whereas TikTok won’t be straight distributing books, it will possibly definitely assist drive customers in direction of the potential e-book app — because it has carried out for Lemon8 by recruiting influencers to advertise the lifestyle-focused social media platform.
The mountain of consumer information and perception that TikTok has gathered could possibly be used to determine what folks prefer to learn, and the identical sorts of content material suggestion algorithms that counsel movies on TikTok could possibly be used to introduce new books to learn on a separate app.
If ByteDance does wade into e-publishing, the query is the way it plans to compete with the trade’s large, Amazon, on publishing and distributing books. And the place it could match into what has formed up in any other case to be a reasonably fragmented market within the lengthy tail.
There are scant information on on-line publishing and Amazon has by no means revealed a lot concerning the operation’s revenues and in circumstances when it does, it’s famously imprecise about these metrics. It’s additionally an insurmountable job to trace all of the books self-published by way of Kindle not least as a result of not all of them have their worldwide identifiers, or ISBN numbers, as analysis group Wordsrated factors out.
Amazon’s place as a preferred writer, distributor and {hardware} participant (by way of the Kindle), nevertheless, seemingly offers it an outsized place in that market. Business pundit Benedict Evans estimated on the finish of 2019 that Amazon had “50% or extra of the U.S. print e-book market, and at the very least three quarters of publishers’ e book gross sales.”
ByteDance’s edge in books clearly lies in its sprawling social media empire the place authors and followers can join straight and readers can share their ideas with others.
That function is, successfully, nonetheless up for grabs. The closest that Amazon has come to fostering a web-based group for its readers is the acquisition of the social studying website GoodReads a decade in the past.
The combination of GoodReads with different Amazon properties has been restricted at finest, with WiFi-connected Kindle readers often seeing GoodReads highlights and GoodReads making Kindle the default buy possibility. However the 16-year-old e-book overview website appears to be nonetheless going robust with 125 million “members” and three.5 billion books cataloged, in line with the corporate.
ByteDance is not any stranger to e-books. In 2020, information got here that it would purchase roughly 11% of the publicly-traded Chinese language e-book reader Yuewen (the deal went by way of). It additionally operates one in all China’s hottest internet novel apps, Tomato Novel, letting readers learn without spending a dime however with advertisements or have them pay a month-to-month subscription payment for an ad-free expertise. In 2021, it dabbled in operating an English internet fiction app known as Mytopia that spanned the romance, horror and fantasy genres. It doled out rewards to draw novel writers, not in contrast to its giving money incentives to TikTok creators.
Earlier than Mytopia had an opportunity to develop meaningfully, it caught flak for launching erotica advertisements on Fb and Instagram. 8TH NOTE PRESS ought to know higher this time round.
