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“Publishers need to create their own format,” Ms Rarin said. “Don’t just wait for the writers to come to you. You have to know what the market needs and then commission your team to create the content. Amarin created a book series called Survivor because we saw a need for people who travel and can’t communicate with the locals. The little books conveyed basic con- versations with karaoke transcriptions to help readers speak the local lan- guage, and 300,000 copies of the se- ries were sold. And we are developing this content into a mobile phone appli- cation to make it more convenient to access. When you have this kind of content, you can package it in e-book formats and sell it to organizations that provide books for their employees.”The emergence of digital platforms also brought about new types of content distributors. Scribd, Oyster or Amazon Kindle have emerged ase-libraries. Scribd, for example, provides 1,000,000 electronic, audio, comic and documentary books and grants users unlimited access through a US$9 monthly subscription.Trip Adler, Scribd’s co-founder and CEO, was invited to the panel and elaborated on the trend of digital readership. “Publishers in digital are in the consumer model. We’re now taking the next step where consumers pay for access to an entire library of books and they just read whenever they want. And the publishers will be paid by the actual reading habits.”Scribd has given consumers a unique experience of reading where they can browse titles and freely sample them in e-libraries. Even the subscription and book access process was designed to be done in a few clicks, before customers’ attention turned to other websites.The new platform has createda different reading pattern. Scribd subscribers tend to read books that are recommended to them by the website or social-media friends. Consumer behaviour is more personalized than in the past. Content providers now provide a list of books that match consumers’ interests.Without developing digital distri- bution, conventional publishers and bookshops will struggle to remain competitive in terms of price and diversity of titles. Independent book- shops in the UK and most developed countries are being beaten by online shops and many are closing down. The disappearance of physical bookshops has worried readers who are losing places where they can explore books. Then they are being subtly guided on what to read by a few online giants. In the US, for example, Amazon was discouraging customers from purchasing titles from Hachette Books24 Elite+