 Thanks a lot great to be here Especially proud since it's my hometown and I was raised in Malmo and I said when I came in the last time I was here in this place. I was not a very I was not very smart. I was probably a lot more intoxicated than I am now So hopefully I learned a thing or two on the way so Great to be here and I'm here to talk a little bit about the e-book industry and especially how we consume books in this kind of new digital age and I come from a company out of Berlin called read mail. So, yeah, as I said raised in Malmo So I'm this is especially nerve-wracking for me to stand on this stage. I think I've done a lot of different things, but all of them has kind of gravitated towards this amazing city, which is Berlin and I went there specifically to build this team Which it's a team of 13 people now from six different nationalities And we came together to build Something that would change the way we read books On digital devices and on screens and we call that thing read mail So if we jump forward to two and a half years We're now available on a range of different devices with hundreds of thousands of users spending Millions of minutes reading on these devices in our apps every month but There was a big question when we started like what's what's gonna happen with reading What's gonna be the device? Where people are gonna read books going forward? The when we started in 2011 The e-reader has been had been out for a couple of years, especially people were focused on the Kindle The iPad had just been released and the iPhone obviously was the phone that everybody was talking about But there was this Feeling that when you're talking to e-book people everybody was like yeah the the the e ink reader the e-reader That's that's where everybody's gonna spend time reading books going forward But we always thought they were wrong. We thought it was something different that turns out that we were wrong as well So let's see what actually happened. So The rate of change in the book industry has been really tremendous over the last couple of years I mean the book is Over 2,500 years old, right, but it's only in the last 25 years We've seen a lot of the big milestones as being passed that has changed the industry forever The paperback for example 150 years old Then we saw Adobe's portable document format come along which was a big milestone is still one of the leading formats for publishing today and Then obviously 10 years ago e-reader came along for the first time and then just four years ago we saw apps and When we launched our product there was over 28,000 e-book apps in the Apple App Store only for iPhones and and iPads which I think is quite astonishing So what's happening with the market then what's what's happening to e-books are they taking over? The short answer is yes, they are taking over Print and and audiobook sales has been in steady decline since 2008 Whilst e-books has been an impressive growth curve I think that in the US now e-books account for 20 percent Of the global trade book market, which is like 3 billion out of a 15 billion dollar market So it's quite impressive what happened over the last couple of years and What about the e-readers they're going through the roof as well, right? Well, it looked like there were in 2011. Everybody was crazy about the Kindle Everybody was crazy about the choices that were out there and Everybody was like wow, it's so good. I can sit on it and I'm not this disturbed by anything else I can just spend time reading but Something happened in 2012 there was actually a huge a jaw-dropping drop in sales Actually so much as 36 percent People are usually saying like oh, yeah, it's because of the update frequency You know, there's not so many more features that are brought out and things like that So I don't have to upgrade every year or every second year as we do with phones and tablets and things like that But I actually think there is more to that story than just that thing so If we take a look at the growth of e-readers over the last three years And compare that with tablets we can easily see that wow, okay wait They started in 2010 Approximately in the same ballpark, but what happened 2011 and 2012 is crazy, right? Now there are tons of more tablets available and people are buying them a lot faster than they are doing e-readers And this is quite crazy because I mean the price point for a tablet is actually still quite high when the iPad was introduced It was I think four ninety nine dollars Whilst the Kindle the cheapest model was one thirty nine dollars So there's kind of a big of a difference, right and they're also seemingly less choice in tablet market I mean there are kind of Samsung galaxies. There were blackberry tablets, but none of them were specifically popular The iPad was kind of The one that people were buying so from this graph we can definitely see that iPad is eating Kindle for lunch basically But there is obviously a third category of devices that would put both of these growth numbers to big shame and That's phones Smartphones, I mean the growth has been just tremendous. I think nobody could see the amount of growth that we've seen in that market Just for reference in 2012 there were five times as many tablets shipped as there were E-readers and there were 40 times as many phones shipped in 2012. So Very very very big difference But why am I talking about phones? Nobody reads books on phones Or do they? When if somebody would have asked me three years ago like oh, what do you think about like? e-book apps for iPhones and Android phones, so I would have said like yeah, I don't think so But things have happened since then especially on this When you're talking about screens and and especially when we're talking about pixel density So the amount of pixel that are pixels that actually fit on the screen with the current iPhone the latest model There's five times as many pixels on roughly the same screen that was in the previous model so the amount of pixels that fit on the screens has really gone through the roof and It might not seem like a game changer when you're talking about like features for phones How many pixels there are on the screen but for reading it definitely is when you're spending tons of time with your eyes Flicking up and down on the screen. It matters a lot But let me take a local example For those of you that don't know what this building is. This is croon prinsen It was the skyscraper in Malmo when I was growing up like before they built that twisted thing and down in the harbor and It just so happens that it's built out of small squares or pixels as you can see in the top left corner and You can also see that the building has kind of a nice gradient very few tourists. It's very impressive skyscraper I have to say It just so happens to fill croon prinsen with pixels or with these squares. You need 1.9 million of them Which means that if you take off the sides and you only take the the frontal side on it It's about the same amount of pixels that's being used in an iPhone 5 So around 750,000 pixels So if you were if you could imagine these amount of squares to actually fit on One iPhone 5. I think that's quite impressive So if you want to read a book in the city, you should read it on croon prinsen. I think it will be the resolution will be amazing Okay, let's take a look at some more data Just to kind of set the set the stage a little bit that read me. Let's not like some crazy company where we are Very big in some country that don't have phones or don't have tablets or something like that. We considered slightly more popular on tablets We have a 60 40% male female split 35% of users are 25 to 34 and we're biggest in the US 25% of our users are from the US and then Germany is Following up after that. So it's kind of a normal demographic I would say but if we compare The engagement across tablets and phones on read mail today a Pretty weird picture emerges. I think If we start by look we have tons of signals for engagement on our platform, right, so I'll go through them one by one Let's start with use frequency So people use their phones much often for reading then they do the tablets and It's kind of a no-brainer, right? I mean you carry the phone with you all the time and like it's it's there. It's convenient, right? So not a total no-brainer People also spend more time in the phone than they do in the tablet And I mean since you carry with you all the time. It's yeah, of course, you will also spend more time Phone users also spend more time reading per book so it actually takes them a little bit longer to finish the book than it does on the tablet which is also kind of Fair enough. It's smaller screen. It takes maybe a little bit longer to read on it But then when then it starts getting really really interesting and this is something that caught us by total surprise Phone users have more books in their library. They share more quotes They write more comments They start reading more books. They finish reading more books. They have more they follow more people They have more followers The only thing that they're actually doing less than tablet users is spend time on the web and For us The only thing that kind of stands out here is the amount of time that people are spending More time they're spending in the book so compared to phone and tablet But it's actually not that big of a difference only kind of a 10% difference So if you're spending five hours in the book, it's not that much more time to finish it on a phone Since you can use it more often will probably lead to you finishing books In a faster pace calendar time, which we'll come back to so How unlikely it might seem There seems to be a clear winner here for us Which is the phone something that we could have never guessed two to three years ago on second place definitely the tablet it's growing like wildfire and Third runner-up. Well e-reader. Sorry. You're out better luck next year One really good thing about the two winners is that they have amazing platforms platforms where you can build apps upon apps That can let you track user behavior over time So how do we actually read books or when do we have dinner in Germany because we can see that quite clearly So the first graph is people actively reading Across a day and the bottom graph is the amount of time they're spending So there are a few things here that really fast stands out. First of all There is no explicit dinner time in the US or we know exactly when Germans have dinner It struck us by total surprise that it seems to that Americans have a you know a sandwich in the mouth And reading all through dinner time. It just increases until they go to bed the second Funny thing is like the two bumps in the big beginning of the German graph on the top graph if anybody can guess what that is No wild guesses We think it's a commute There is two bumps one at 7 a.m. And one at 10 a.m. And we'll see more proof that this probably is the commute later on and Last but not least it seems like Americans go to bed or start going to bed earlier or at least to do something else before they go to bed Then reading so obviously everything else more boring If we drill down a little further we can see more proof that this is the commute, right? We can see mobile taken off or phones taken off really fast in the beginning of the day and then kind of they grow At the same pace and then tablets taking over in the evening Which kind of fits the mental model of tablets, right? You have them at home and you sit on your couch and reading some So it fits the mental model But mobile is much bigger Much bigger if you compare it to the US where there are a lot more tablets And here we actually see a commute bump as well, but only on phones So this also strengthens the case that like tablets. It's nothing you bring along Maybe on the subway or something like that Hopefully Americans don't read and drive. I think that would be a bad idea And then we can see them grow kind of similarly Until like tablets eclipse for a short while at 8 p.m. Where maybe you sit in the couch and like Have a glass of wine and read a book and this romanticized picture So Lastly, I just want to show you one more thing which is a question that we get asked a lot how long does it take for the average person to actually finish a book and Are we faster than the Americans or not? Okay, average Americans takes about a month to finish a book calendar time, right? They're slightly faster on the phone actually Then on the tablet and this is calendar time not effective time So since they're reading a lot more often on the phone well, then They can finish books faster. So million-dollar question. No, we're slower than the Americans. It's terrible, especially on tablets So actually if you look at this graph Americans have the time to finish one more book a year Which is definitely not good. We need to shape up We definitely to shape up and read more or as you can see phones are exactly similar So we just scrap tablets in in Germany in general and just go with phones so this was just a little scratch on the surface of Data that we can generate and we can analyze in how people are consuming books and how their reading behavior looks like and It's super exciting to play a very very small part in making the publishing industry a little bit more data-driven So if you want to check out read me and see what we do and try out our apps check us out on read me calm Thank you so much