Ozon Holdings, one of Russia’s most established e-commerce players, has announced that it acquired a stake in LitRes, the leader in Russia’s fast growing – though still embryonic – domestic e-book market.
Neither the size of the stake nor the amount of the transaction has been disclosed.
Ozon presented the deal as a way “to further develop its digital content offer, to strengthen LitRes’s leading position on its market, and to consolidate efforts to develop a legal e-book market in Russia.”
LitRes offers more than 400,000 e-books in Russian and other languages. The company distributes e-books and audio books through its website, as well as through mobile applications, Smart TV platforms and an extensive network of partners.
This past October, LitRes received a $5 million capital injection from the Russian Internet Technology Fund (RITF).
The Russian e-book market reached approximately $15 million last year, RITF told East-West Digital News. This represents less than 1% of the overall Russian book market, while e-book sales account for 25% of the total book market in the US.
While online sales of printed books continue to grow – despite the stagnation of Russia’s book market – more and more Russians are reading books in electronic formats.
Therefore, the e-book market could reach approximately $100 million, or 5% of the overall book market by 2017, according to RITF. The tightening of the country’s anti-piracy legislation is also likely to favour legitimate industry players like LitRes.
This article first appeared in East-West Digital News, the international online resource on Russian digital industries.