Vietnamese illustration ebook collection of historical stories and fairy tales has been officially distributed on prestigious book retailing channels in the world including iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobobooks etc. and libraries in the USA. This highlights an important milestone of the cooperation between Viettel Telecom and Kim Dong Publishing House in Vietnamese Cultural Export project.

With the effort of following transformation strategy from providing telecom services to value-added services, Viettel finally archieve one important milestone of being the first distributor in Vietnam who successfully introduce Vietnamese Culture Library comprising 30 colored illustration books of Vietnamese history and fairy tales on over 140 retail channels and library channels in American and European regions, including:

-   Kings of Vietnam collection

-   Warriors of Vietnam collection

-   Vietnam Legendary collection

-   Vietnam in old tales collection

-   Dear Hanoi collection

Vietnamese historical Comics on Google Play Store

Understanding readers’ demand for more original contents to satisty their curiosity of other countries, Viettel targets to provide ebooks to more than 4 million people of Vietnamese communities around the world and the Asian communities with identical culture and lifestyle.

Upon the reasons of choosing books to be the pilot service of digital content business, Mr. Mai Tri Dung – Director of International Business Center, Viettel Telecom – explained: “Vietnam has already been well-known country of tourism, traditional cuisines, and world heritages. Now, Viettel wants to bring another angle of view of the country to international customers through the exciting journey of books.”

In the publishing industry, digitalising publications has been accelerating trend around the world recent years. In Vietnam, service providers are keeping up with this trend offering gradually diversified services and advanced technology. However, the standards of domestic e-books are still not integrated with global requirements. Therefore, many distributors including Viettel are facing difficulties in making an effort to distribute digital content outside Vietnam.

Selling one digital content product requires a lot of tasks needed to be done. One clear example is format conversion which provides the compatible outcome to multiple devices and e-readers. Global partners already own advanced conversion solution with certified standard. However, this is still quite a challenge for Vietnamese suppliers.

Be well-awared of this situation, Viettel coordinated and developed the automatic conversion technology in 05 languages (Vietnamese, English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese) from PDF to customized EPUB 3.0.2 with reflowable layout for multi-screen and multi-device. Moreover, Viettel also pay close attention to metadata management of ebook following ONIX 3.0 standard from International Digital Publishing Forum – IDPF.

Digital comics viewed on iBook application

Culture export, especially books, should be seen as one of critical elements in global competition and “soft power” contributing to the promotion of Vietnam’s image to the world, and this highlight will be the crucial support of Viettel’s digital content business which is not strategically exploited abroad.