After aggressively selling its new life-style social media platform Lemon8 within the U.S., ByteDance seems to be brewing one other content material app for its greatest abroad market.

Lemon Inc, a subsidiary of ByteDance, has submitted a trademark utility for a spread of e-book publishing services and products, in response to a submitting posted on the USA Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO). The trademark, which is known as “8TH NOTE PRESS,” presents an attention-grabbing glimpse into ByteDance’s obvious e-publishing ambitions.

The trademark submitting was earlier reported by Enterprise Insider.

The checklist of services and products registered with 8TH NOTE PRESS contains an app to learn, obtain and talk about fiction ebooks in an internet group; retail bookstore providers; ordering books in audio, printed and digital codecs; publishing ebooks, audiobooks and bodily books; in addition to offering on-line, non-downloadable fiction and non-fiction books.

Companies register logos on a regular basis in anticipation of enlargement into new verticals sooner or later, however they don’t specify timelines or maintain the registrants to any obligations, so the transfer to trademark 8TH NOTE PRESS doesn’t essentially imply ByteDance is taking any materials steps into the publishing world but.

However e-book publishing and distribution do sound like logical subsequent steps for ByteDance given TikTok’s success in attracting e-book lovers to share below the #BookTok hashtag on the quick video platform. Although ByteDance posted a file revenue final 12 months as an entire, TikTok itself suffered widening losses, the Monetary Instances reported. ByteDance is probably going keen to search out new methods to monetize its a whole bunch of tens of millions of customers abroad.

The trademarking effort is “not associated to TikTok” however ByteDance is “all the time exploring new alternatives,” in response to an individual with information of the matter. That’s anticipated given the bite-size nature of quick movies doesn’t sq. with long-form reads that require an extended consideration span.

TechCrunch has reached out to ByteDance for remark.

It gained’t be stunning to see ByteDance rolling out a standalone e-book app the place customers can, because the trademark registration suggests, learn, obtain, purchase and discuss books.

Whereas TikTok may not be straight distributing books, it may well actually assist drive customers in the direction of the potential e-book app — because it has accomplished for Lemon8 by recruiting influencers to advertise the lifestyle-focused social media platform.

The mountain of person knowledge and perception that TikTok has amassed could possibly be used to determine what folks prefer to learn, and the identical sorts of content material advice algorithms that recommend movies on TikTok could possibly be used to introduce new books to learn on a separate app.

If ByteDance does wade into e-publishing, the query is the way it plans to compete with the trade’s big, Amazon, on publishing and distributing books. And the place it might match into what has formed up in any other case to be a fairly fragmented market within the lengthy tail.

There are scant knowledge on on-line publishing and Amazon has by no means revealed a lot in regards to the operation’s revenues and in circumstances when it does, it’s famously imprecise about these metrics. It’s additionally an insurmountable process to trace all of the books self-published by means of Kindle not least as a result of not all of them have their worldwide identifiers, or ISBN numbers, as analysis group Wordsrated factors out.

Amazon’s place as a well-liked writer, distributor and {hardware} participant (by way of the Kindle), nevertheless, possible offers it an outsized place in that market. Business pundit Benedict Evans estimated on the finish of 2019 that Amazon had “50% or extra of the U.S. print e-book market, and at the very least three quarters of publishers’ e-book gross sales.”

ByteDance’s edge in books clearly lies in its sprawling social media empire the place authors and followers can join straight and readers can share their ideas with others.

That function is, successfully, nonetheless up for grabs. The closest that Amazon has come to fostering an internet group for its readers is the acquisition of the social studying web site GoodReads a decade in the past.

The combination of GoodReads with different Amazon properties has been restricted at finest, with WiFi-connected Kindle readers often seeing GoodReads highlights and GoodReads making Kindle the default buy possibility. However the 16-year-old e-book evaluation web site appears to be nonetheless going sturdy with 125 million “members” and three.5 billion books cataloged, in response to the corporate.

ByteDance is not any stranger to e-books. In 2020, information got here that it would purchase roughly 11% of the publicly-traded Chinese language e-book reader Yuewen (the deal went by means of). It additionally operates one among China’s hottest net novel apps, Tomato Novel, letting readers learn without spending a dime however with adverts or have them pay a month-to-month subscription charge for an ad-free expertise. In 2021, it dabbled in working an English net fiction app known as Mytopia that spanned the romance, horror and fantasy genres. It doled out rewards to draw novel writers, not not like its giving money incentives to TikTok creators.

Earlier than Mytopia had an opportunity to develop meaningfully, it caught flak for launching erotica adverts on Fb and Instagram. 8TH NOTE PRESS ought to know higher this time round.