Kyobo Book Centre and Samsung Electronics have jointly launched an e-book reader SNE-60K to help kick-start the nascent e-book market. (Kyobo Book Centre)

Korea's biggest bookstore Kyobo Book Centre and Samsung Electronics Co. have joined forces to kick-start the fledgling e-book market by jointly launching a new e-book reader amid renewed interest in the digital book market in recent months.

Kyobo began to promote Samsung's new e-book reader, the SNE-60K, by installing a separate booth at its 16 offline chains where customers can browse and test its key functions such as e-ink display, newspaper reading and touch screen.

"There is certainly customer need for e-books, but we didn't have enough e-book readers yet," said Lee Han-woo, director of online business at Kyobo in an interview with The Korea Herald. "Samsung's new e-book reader has a wireless connection that allows people to easily download e-book titles from Kyobo's digital library."

Kyobo's move is drawing keen attention as the book chain is the frontrunner both in offline and online book sales markets. Kyobo's strategy toward the e-book is said to affect the nascent e-book market in a way that offers a guiding direction to other booksellers, solutions developers and manufacturers.

Last July, Kyobo and Samsung jointly launched the SNE-50K, but sales stopped short of about 3,000 units, failing to spur the market. One major consumer complaint about the first e-book reader from Samsung was the absence of wireless connection. Amazon.com's e-book reader Kindle, in contrast, is outfitted with the wireless function, making it easy to download e-book titles.

Kyobo and Samsung face two major obstacles in their concerted efforts to get the e-book market taking off at a faster pace: the dearth of available e-book titles and the still burdensome price of e-reader devices.

Although Kyobo's digital library is the biggest in Korea, the number of available e-book titles is just 65,000, and many of the popular bestsellers are yet to be reconfigured into the digital format due to authors' lingering skepticism about the new format that they suspect are susceptible to illegal piracy on the internet.

The SNE-60K is sold at 429,000 won, a price tag that appears to be fairly high given that the E Ink-enabled device is designed primarily for e-book reading, though it comes with other multimedia features such as MP3 playback, dictionaries and handwriting on the touch screen.

US-based Apple is set to introduce its high-profile iPad in late March. The tablet computer functions as an e-book reader among others, and has a price range of US$499 to $829.

Samsung's e-book reader rival in the domestic market is Story from iriver, which does not have a wireless connection but adopts the same E Ink technology for a smooth and comfortable digital reading experience. Story, capable of handling more file formats than Samsung's 60K, is sold at 359,000 won on iriver's official online store.

Kyobo's Lee said the market needs more time to move forward. "The e-book market is still in its infancy, and the devices are still not widely available, which is why the digital format of books is favored only at universities and public organisations," Lee said.

The major turning point will come when the consumer market begins to grow with mainstream book lovers warming up to the idea of storing their favorite titles in digital devices.

Kyobo's 60K model bears the company logo and offers a preinstalled Kyobo online store. The initial batch comes with complimentary six-month subscription of two daily newspapers in a digital format, hinting at the possibility that the e-book reader could be used as an alternative channel for newspaper delivery in the near future.

Lee said Kyobo aims to sell about 15,000 units of the 60K model by the end of this year, and Samsung expects the total sales including the Kyobo model to reach 50,000 units.

Kyobo is taking steps to provide its e-book titles on smartphones such as iPhone within the first half of this year, Lee said.

Amazon.com's Kindle is unlikely to enter the Korean market any time soon, but local e-reader manufacturers such as Samsung is mindful of the impact Apple's iPad will have on the e-book market here, Lee said.