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Alexander Royfe CEO Litres
Alexander Royfe, CEO of LitRes, is convinced that Russia has what it takes to surpass the USA in all things related to e-books. “Russia has very good technology at its command and does not restrict the user. While the USA is focused only on formats like PDF or EPUB, we offer everything here – and completely free of Digital Rights Management.” Royfe accepts the inevitable consequences that come along with this. “Pirated versions of our bestsellers are downloadable within three hours at the most – the number of pirates is too great to put up a resistance”. But embracing the concept of making everything as easy as possible for the users has worked well for Royfe thus far. A few weeks ago, he presented himself at the Frankfurt Book Fair as a winner of the Russian distribution debacle with www.litres.ru. “Distribution practically doesn’t exist in Russia and the Internet is the only solution for the book trade”, says Royfe. On top of that, print is expensive. It is simply too expensive for the average reader to buy the new Umberto Eco in hardcover for 500 roubles.
The website, which offers e-books are available in all formats and accepts all imaginable methods of payment, be it via SMS or credit card, now has 250,000 registered users. Readers can pay at special cash points in Moscow. The content being sold is multimedia in nature and the texts, audio and video files have their own editorial staffs. Just a week ago, games were added the list of offerings. Royfe believes that the recipe for success lies in the combination of 40 employees on his team: book people meet techies – and they even understand each other. Royfe himself is a trained radio engineer who worked for the Moscow magazine “Book Review” for years as a journalist before starting at publicant.ru, the pioneer in the e-book trade, and then moving to LitRes in 2008 as CEO. Today LitRes is Russia’s leading e-content retailer.
He especially uses the non/fiction book fair to communicate with his customers – the big names of the Russian book market like AST, Eksmo or Prosveshenie. LitRes provides them with technology services, like converting from print into e-book, and also with complete marketing services. Royfe also meets his authors here. LitRes’ portfolio boasts around three times as many agreements with authors as with publishers. The business model in this field is a traditional one: contracts, including author advances, are only concluded with the best authors.
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