Despite headquarters in London, Bookmate is probably best known as a Russian ebook subscription service, but in fact its reach is much wider, and it includes audiobooks and podcasts in its portfolio.
Bookmate recently expanded its presence in Azerbaijan with a new package, Bookmate Plus, in partnership with the country’s leading telco Azercell.
Bookmate has been in Azerbaijan since 2015, and marked its third year with the new Bookmate Plus package, launched in October 2019, offering a catalogue of one million titles to Azerbaijan consumers, although it’s not clear how many of those titles are in the Azerbaijan language.
This summer Bookmate partnered with telco Telenor Serbia to expand its presence in the country. Bookmate has been in Serbia since 2017, but the new deal with Telenor brings 1 million ebooks and 60,000 audiobooks into play, although at this time only 3,000 titles are in Serbian.
This week comes news of another Bookmate partnership, this time with Telenor Bulgaria.
With just 200 Bulgarian language titles Bookmate and Telenor will both be relying on the value of the English and Russian content to pull In subscribers.
A small country like Serbia isn’t going to add massively to Bookmate’s bottom line on its own, but with Bookmate targeting strategic partnerships with telcos to maximise reach in small markets, the cumulative impact of Bookmate is telling.
While territorial restrictions means not all countries and territories have access to all titles, Bookmate fields a catalogue of 12 million books (ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, comics) across 15 languages and claims to have 6 million readers.
