Cole puts the ‘e’ in 100,000 good reads

STEPHEN Cole still remembers the moment he decided his future lay in electronic books – it was January 1 1997, and Mr Cole thought he would become a billionaire in six months.

Like most internet businesses, Mr Cole’s Ebooks Corporation has since been on a fairly wild rollercoaster ride, but now has annual revenue of $13 million and partnerships with some of the world’s biggest publishing houses.

Mr Cole spent the initial three years raising capital, mastering the technology and signing publishers, using connections established over 15 years as the owner of Lane Books in Claremont.

Online digital bookstore store eBooks.com launched in 2000, just before the dot.com crash, but the public wasn’t ready for the revolutionary change it brought, with Mr Cole describing the first few years as a “nuclear winter”, with 320 similar retailers failing.

“Thank goodness we registered the domain name (eBooks.com),” he said.

“That’s what drove attraction to the site.”

The business achieved 50 per cent annual revenue growth for most of the past decade, but was hit last year by the rising dollar, the GFC, which hit library budgets, and rising competition.

‘‘The good news is that, for the 2011 year, our revenues are back over 50 per cent up on the previous corresponding period,’’ Mr Cole said.

Ebooks Corporation now operates two core businesses – eBooks.com and EBL, an academic library service with more than 100 university clients.

It has also recently ventured into the provision of marketing services and advice to publishers and retailers.

Mr Cole sees his company’s multifaceted approach as one of its key strengths, combining the traditional relationship-based nature of a service business with the low-cost base of online retail.

He believes the ebook industry has matured, helped by the popularity of smart phones, iPads and other devices for reading digital books, to the point where he says there are no more sceptics left.

But with mainstream interest has come global conglomerates like Google, Apple and Amazon.

Mr Cole said his strategy was to find successful niches.

“Amazon is a force of nature and a wise navigator does not argue with a force of nature,” Mr Cole told WA Business News.

“Our role is to find opportunities within that environment, and we are doing that.”

This includes Amigo Reader, the company’s recently launched social networking site.

Mr Cole said the site, which combines a book’s actual text with interactive links to live chats, author interviews, reviews and a live Twitter stream, was a way of making reading a social activity.

“For 500 years reading has been a solitary experience, and our aim is to change that for ever. We start with the idea of the book being at the centre of its own field of ideas,” he said.

Mr Cole’s current focus is on negotiating with Australian publishers, who have until now been reluctant to enter an industry they saw as risky. He recently signed deals with Random House and Macmillan to distribute their titles on eBooks.com and is confident more publishers will follow.