Online shopping biggie Flipkart has decided to stop selling e-books on the platform, 3 years after it had launched ebooks, a landmark decision considering Flipkart had launched 7 years ago as an online book seller.
Flipkart has already removed ebooks listing on the website and existing orders will be serviced by the Canadian ebook supplier Rakuten Kobo, Livemint has reported.
“The Indian book market is overwhelmingly dominated by physical books and this is a market that is growing at a fast clip. Flipkart will continue to be a leading player in the overall books market in India,” the company said in a statement. “In its overall strategy for books, Flipkart does not see the e-Books service as a strategic fit and hence the decision of transitioning the e-Books service to Kobo.”
This news comes in while on the other end of the spectrum, rival Amazon is aggressively promoting its flagship ebook reader Kindle with a new campaign that hit the TVs a while back.
Flipkart is India’s biggest etailer that started as an online book store – also like Amazon – and has been since focussing on high value merchandise like electronics, mobile phones etc. over the past 2-3 years. It shut down its digital music service Flyte in May 2013, and payment gateway PayZippy.
It’s also focussing a lot of new technology such as image search, a mobile webapp, and recently launched the “e-thesaurus”, a seemingly fun, interactive feature aimed at audience engagement and boosting the shopping app.
Flipkart recently clocked a gross loss of Rs.2000 crore according to the latest financial statement, while its overall revenue has more than trebled since the last year.