The Hungarian Ebook Market

When Hungarian ebook store Adamo Books launched in June of 2009, co-founders Peter and  Attila hoped that the Hungarian market would soon explode. Well, that "explosion" is yet to  come - e-reader sales are still tiny and so are the number of paid ebook downloads.    

Ereader sales

According to some estimates, about a couple of thousand ereaders have been sold so far - mainly Koobe devices.  It's interesting that hundreds of ereaders have been sold to Hungarian enterprises - which shows how important business users are in the local market. In the past months, however, Amazon's Kindle 3 has become a dominant player. According to unofficial on-line reports, hundreds of Kindles are shipped into the country every month - forcing local ereader distributors to cut prices.


A new player in the Hungarian market
 
Ebooks were not taken seriously when Adamo Books was launched on June 15, 2009. Still,  co-founders, Peter Pavuk and Attila Lukacs had high hopes that they could turn ebooks into a money-making machine. A gold mine. Weeks before the launch of their ebook store, Attila even sent an article about Adamo Books to Paul Biba, the editor of Teleread. Mr. Biba published the following article:

"It is exciting to see ebooks catching on around the world. I just received this email Attila Lukács (LucassoScan):If things go as planned, Hungary's e-book store Adamo Books will launch in May 2009. The website is focusing on selling password-protected PDF files and allows customers to read its titles on different platforms as well. Adamo Books (www.adamobooks.info) signs up authors who write science-fiction, romance and other genres and plans to offer various content (i.e. e-magazines and e-newspapers) for download. The website will offer ebooks by Istvan Nemere (one of Hungary's most successful science-fiction and romance writers). Although most downloadable ebooks will be in Hungarian, Adamo Books seeks foreign language works in different languages foreign authors as well. Their website is up and this is the link to the English version. Good luck and keep us informed about how things are going."