GBG Case Study

Google Play Books and Hungarian Pubify bring publishing into the digital age

About Pubify

• Pubify.com • Budapest, Hungary • Pubify is a complete service solution for e-books • 9 employees including co-founders • Founded in March 2012

Pubify helps publishers and self-publishers distribute e-books to international retailers like Google Play with a single click. Publishers can also use Pubify to edit e-books, carry out online marketing campaigns and monitor sales. The company was established when its founders picked up an e-book reader, searched for Hungarian language content and couldn’t find anything listed in any online stores. By entering the market, Pubify’s founders realized they could help Hungarian publishers move online. During the transition process, they are helping publishers avoid the mistakes the music industry made, while saving money and boosting sales. Today, Pubify works with 60 publishing houses and 30 stores, and focuses mainly on central and eastern Europe. And in Hungary, Pubify is currently responsible for 40–50 percent of total sales.

“We’re helping publishing houses embrace the Internet and survive the transition to digital.” — Kinga Jentetics, Managing Director, Pubify Google has played a major part in Pubify’s development and is the company’s long-term partner for e-book distribution. Inspired by Google Docs, Pubify built an e-book editing module where users can edit texts online and export them to a standard e-book format like EPUB. Google Play Books also enables Pubify to offer e-books to Android users: in Hungary alone there are three million smartphone users and 80 percent have Google Play Books pre-installed. Google AdWords helps Pubify find and market to clients and Analytics allows the company to track consumer behavior online. The Google search engine is the main platform for searching digital products—and appearing high up in the search rankings is the key to Pubify’s monetization model. Now, as Managing Director Kinga Jentetics explains, “Pubify is moving forward fast. We’re helping publishing houses embrace the Internet and survive the transition to digital. And we’re also talking to publishers in Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Turkey about helping them get into stores. We’re refining our product and offering new features to prevent illegal copying, which is an important issue. We’re adding new, more in-depth analytics tools so publishers can track results when they’ve sold a book or run a marketing campaign. But above all, we’re helping more people read books in their own language.”

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