Each ecosystem in a row – Newspaper Kommersant No. 221 (7422) dated 11/29/2022

Ecosystems integrate book services into their subscriptions. So, the new Stroky service will be included in the general MTS Premium subscription. According to Kommersant, Yandex has similar plans: it recently bought Bookmate technology (it is included in the register of foreign media agents) and will add the ability to read books in Yandex.Plus. LitRes, the digital book market leader, also plans to develop partnerships with ecosystems. For ecosystems, books are a way to attract a new audience, but they are in a stagnating segment, experts warn: specialized services are losing foreign novelties and suffer from the desire of the audience to save money.

MTS will include the Stroky book service in the MTS Premium ecosystem subscription, the company told Kommersant. It will be available to existing and new subscribers from December 1st. To gain access to the library, you will need to log in to the Lines service using a phone number that has an MTS Premium subscription. The latter is available to both MTS subscribers and users of the services of other operators, its cost is 249 rubles. per month. MTS launched Stroky at the end of September, investments in the project were not disclosed. The service purchases content from publishers, and also plans to release its own books.

Yandex has plans to include the book service in the subscription, Kommersant sources say. An Internet company buys the rights to use Bookmate technologies in the CIS (see Kommersant dated September 30). The Irish Bookmate Limited, which owns Bookmate, entered the register of media-foreign agents on October 28.

Forbes, citing a source, reported on November 10 that Yandex would launch a new book application, where it would offer users to go to Bookmate, which would cease to exist. But a Kommersant source claims that Bookmate will be included in the Yandex subscription in its original form, which will be announced in the near future. “The brand will remain, nothing will change for users. New tariffs with Bookmate will appear in Plus, ”the interlocutor of Kommersant clarifies. Yandex and Bookmate declined to comment.

LitRes (combines the services of LitRes, MyBook, Livelib and others, according to its own data, occupies about 66% of the market) also “plans to develop partnerships with major market players from other categories,” the director of promotion and commercial partnerships told Kommersant GK Mikhail Gorban. At present, GC services are not included in the ecosystem subscription, but certain special offers from the group, for example, discounts, are available in MegaFon (MegaFon Plus) and Tele2 (Tele2 Mixx) subscriptions, as well as in Tinkoff services (Tinkoff Pro ”) and VK (VK Combo).

Such integrations make it possible to expand the audience of digital books, says Mr. Gorban: “Many customers come for the usual video and music content, test the ability to read and listen to books and become regular users of book services and book buyers.”

For ecosystems, the inclusion of books in a subscription creates an opportunity to attract a new audience and increase engagement rates against the background of a decrease in the amount of available content in general, including audiovisual, against the backdrop of the withdrawal of major film studios from the Russian Federation, explains TelecomDaily CEO Denis Kuskov.

However, the market for digital books in Russia is stagnating, experts emphasize. In 2022, according to the forecast of LitRes, it will remain at the level of 2021: sales of electronic and audio books in the Russian Federation will amount to about 11 billion rubles. As Kommersant wrote on July 27, the reasons for the stagnation were problems with payments, the loss of some foreign novelties and the desire of users to save money.

The main threat to the e-book market and its new entrants is the reduction in consumer spending, says Vladimir Kharitonov, head of the Association of Internet Publishers: “Consumers are thinking about how much they actually spend on subscriptions, and are even looking for options to switch from subscription to retail.” In this sense, the expert believes, for LitRes, the emergence of new competitors on the market this year will be relatively mild – the entire content industry will suffer from the decline.

Valeria Lebedeva