"EZ Book Land!" is yet another interesting looking service from Japanese mobile provider AU. The service revolves around the purchase of real books based o­n "sample contents" from electronic books, where all purchases and viewing of electronic books is conducted by mobile phone. Inside we have the low-down o­n this new service, set to launch o­n April 21st in Japan.

In cooperation with Maruzen from the bookstore industry, KDDI and Okinawa Cellular will open the "EZ Book Land!" portal site allowing for downloading of electronic books and purchase of real books o­n EZweb.

"EZ Book Land!" is a portal site that will handle all aspects of books. In addition to being able to download electronic books (hereafter, "e-books"), the site allows for purchaing books o­nline. The system will allow for same day shipping of all 450,000 books offered through Maruzeni, where items are chosen from book title or publisher, at which point they can be settled by credit card, COD, or applied directly to the au phone bill through. Shipping costs for anywhere in Japan are 260 yen, and handling charges are 315 yen.

The service itself consists of "EZ Book Land!" at the top level, which will introduce new works and popular titles. From there, the service branches off into "EZ Book" for handling e-books, and "au Books" for handling the purchase of books.

Available inside of "EZ Book" are "sample" contents (translator's note: Rather than the Japanese word for "sample," the original Japanese article uses the word "tachiyomi." This literally means "standing and reading." Go into a Japanese book store and you'll see what this means. For our purposes, "sample" will work fine), and readers will automatically be forwarded to the corresponding product page in "au Books" when they are finished reading. Because of this, au has said that the system is made so that "users can be sure of the book's contents via e-books, then purchase them if they want to." In the "sample" corner, the initial run of e-books includes sample contents from the EZweb "Comic Shogakukan," offered in cooperation with Shogakukan.

Because the size of the e-books themselves is quite large, o­nly CDMA 1X WIN handsets can use this service, where fixed data plans are recommended. If the handset is a CDMA 1X WIN unit purchased after last summer, because the copyright protection is based o­n phone number, changing to a new handset means the contents can be transferred over.

On the 19th, KDDI and Maruzeni held a press event in Tokyo. o­n stage was the head of KDDI's Contents/Media Division, Mr. Makoto Takahashi. He explained: "Earlier, we had created portals for ringers and games; the usage of these is o­n the rise. E-books, however, have had somewhat sluggish expansion with PDAs and PCs. We believe there is room for growth in mobile phones. So, that's why we decided to create au's third portal, 'EZ Book Land!' With an e-book trigger, we would like to connect it with the vending of books." He also said that following after music and games, this is another reason for people to use au.

He enthusiastically continued: "As a mobile carrier, we can find out what sort of users like what sort of books. We want to give start to a new marketing and purchasing style with mobile phones."

As for plans in the future, there are plans to offer Western books and stationary for purchase. When asked for some more concrete details regarding the launch schedules for these, Mr. Ikuo Hamada, Senior Executive Manager of Maruzeni Stores responded, "because of the large amount of subjects in the stock of Western books, it will be quite some time before they will start. o­n the other hand, we are selling stationary via our company's own website, and after investigating the demand and delivery know-how, will probably be able to offer these earlier than Western books."




Inspired by:
http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/article/news_toppage/23540.html

Press Release:
http://www.kddi.com/corporate/news_release/2005/0419/