TikTok’s mum or dad ByteDance eyes a brand new chapter, in guide publishing

After aggressively selling its new lifestyle social media platform Lemon8 within the U.S., ByteDance seems to be brewing one other content material app for its greatest abroad market.

Lemon Inc, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has submitted a trademark software for a variety of guide publishing services and products, in line with a filing posted on the US Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO). The trademark, which known as “8TH NOTE PRESS,” presents an attention-grabbing glimpse into ByteDance’s obvious e-publishing ambitions.

The trademark submitting was earlier reported by Enterprise Insider.

The checklist of services and products registered with 8TH NOTE PRESS contains an app to learn, obtain and focus on fiction ebooks in a web based group; retail bookstore companies; 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 guide publishing and distribution do sound like logical subsequent steps for ByteDance given TikTok’s success in attracting book lovers to share below the #BookTok hashtag on the brief video platform. Although ByteDance posted a document revenue final yr as an entire, TikTok itself suffered widening losses, the Monetary Occasions reported. ByteDance is probably going keen to search out new methods to monetize its tons of of thousands and thousands of customers abroad.

The trademarking effort is “not associated to TikTok” however ByteDance is “all the time 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 received’t be stunning to see ByteDance rolling out a standalone guide app the place customers can, because the trademark registration suggests, learn, obtain, purchase and speak about books.

Whereas TikTok may not be immediately distributing books, it could definitely assist drive customers in direction of the potential guide app — as it has done for Lemon8 by recruiting influencers to advertise the lifestyle-focused social media platform.

The mountain of person information and perception that TikTok has collected may very well be used to determine what individuals prefer to learn, and the identical sorts of content material advice algorithms that counsel movies on TikTok may very well 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 business’s large, Amazon, on publishing and distributing books. And the place it might match into what has formed up in any other case to be a fairly 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 Kindle not least as a result of not all of them have their worldwide identifiers, or ISBN numbers, as analysis group Wordsrated points out.

Amazon’s place as a preferred writer, distributor and {hardware} participant (by way of the Kindle), nonetheless, probably 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 guide market, and no less than 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 immediately 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 reading site GoodReads a decade in the past.

The combination of GoodReads with different Amazon properties has been restricted at finest, with WiFi-connected Kindle readers sometimes seeing GoodReads highlights and GoodReads making Kindle the default buy choice. However the 16-year-old guide overview web site appears to be nonetheless going sturdy with 125 million “members” and three.5 billion books cataloged, according to the company.

ByteDance isn’t any stranger to e-books. In 2020, information got here that it would acquire roughly 11% of the publicly-traded Chinese language e-book reader Yuewen (the deal went by). It additionally operates one in every of China’s hottest internet novel apps, Tomato Novel, letting readers learn free of charge however with advertisements or have them pay a month-to-month subscription charge for an ad-free expertise. In 2021, it dabbled in running an English web fiction app referred to as Mytopia that spanned the romance, horror and fantasy genres. It doled out rewards to draw novel writers, not not like 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.