At TechinAsia, Nhat Nguyen Hung, the founder and CEO of Biitbook talks about the launch of his digital Vietnamese digital publishing platform. In just eight months the company has attracted some 46,000 users and had more than 2 million visitors. In all, it offers some 20,000 titles and documents, of which 10,000 are in Vietnamese, with the rest appearing to be in English. Currently the company is focused on catering to mobile users — something Wattpad has had success with in the past — but plans to ship desktop apps as well.

In a developing market like Vietnam, credit cards are not widely available, so Biitbook has come up with their own means of coping. as TechinAsia writes:

As far as getting payment, Biitbook only collects money via PayPal and, interestingly, their own payment method called Bcoins. Bcoins allow users to pay by credit card as well as SMS by accumulating credit into their Bcoins account to buy e-books. Publishers will get 70 percent of the cut. The first 100 publishers (or authors) get a 75 percent cut for signing up for the first year on Biitbook’s platform. Hung notes that it’s a C2C e-book marketplace.

Other competitors in the ebook space in Vietnam include Alezaa and Sachweb. Nevertheless, the market is still nascent and still represents less than 1% of total sales.