Report: Apple iBookstore Coming to Japan

When Apple launched its e-books app called iBooks a couple of years ago, users in Japan, a country with one of the highest literacy rates in the world at 99 percent, were left out of the innovation party. Japanese readers could access the app, but were only greeted with free, public domain books, a byproduct of the reluctance on the part of Japan's major publishers to embrace the new, foreign platform.

According to a new report, however, Apple is now set to introduce an e-book service in Japan.

Japan's financial news service the Nikkei claims that Apple will launch an e-book service sometime this month in partnership with leading Japanese publishers, including Kadokawa, Shogakukan, and Kodansha. While publishing companies in the U.S. and much of Europe have slowly transformed into ebook-friendly markets with aggressive campaigns designed to push consumers ever faster into a paperless book world, Japan's publishers steadfastly held onto their tradition of paper newspapers, magazines, and books, unwilling to relinquish their stranglehold on distribution in the face of digital disruption.

Nevertheless, as tablets have taken off and quickly established themselves as one of the most popular new reading formats, Japanese publishers have gradually been forced to reconsider their fixation on paper products. However, those familiar with the idiosyncrasies of domestic Japanese business understood that the absence of Japanese titles from iBooks was likely more about giving up control to Apple, and other foreign firms, rather than an inability to embrace innovation. Various local experiments were launched in an attempt to preserve the exclusivity and control of Japanese titles within the domestic market, most notably an effort from global advertising giant Dentsu called Magastore, a digital magazine app available on iOS, Android, and now Windows 8, which has received mixed reviews since its release a few years ago.

Only in recent months has the Japanese book publishing industry appeared ready to truly open the e-book floodgates by allowing in outside players. In the waning months of 2012, Amazon and Google announced new Japanese e-book initiatives, an early sign that the absence of Japanese-language bestsellers on Apple's iBooks store might finally be coming to an end. The long-awaited introduction of commercial titles to the Japanese iBooks store will almost certainly mean an immediate revenue boost for Apple in one of its most profitable countries. According to the Nikkei, Apple will introduce roughly 80,000 Japanese-language titles upon the store's debut.