Deep Linking in Ebooks: Buk Attempts to Fill the Market Gap

The Hot Sheet Newsletter (2017 September 20 issue)

Since the advent of the Kindle, if not before, the digital publishing community has discussed the inevitability of — but also the seeming impossibility of — deep linking into an ebook. Deep linking means sharing or saving a link to a specific page or paragraph in an ebook (rather than, say, taking a screenshot). Hugh McGuire wrote elegantly in 2010 about the things you cannot do with ebooks — and argued this would eventually change because there is such massive value in having ebooks connected to the internet.

Well, here we are in 2017, and we’re not any closer to the vision McGuire expressed. Perhaps the closest we’ve ever come (and it’s barely comparable) is Amazon Kindle’s notes and highlights features. While reading in Kindle, it’s possible to annotate or highlight a passage, then share on social media. People who click on the shared link will be taken to the highlighted passage and a book preview. (Here’s an example using Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.) Up until recently, you could also follow someone else’s public notes and highlights on Kindle, but this feature was removed; Amazon now directs you to Goodreads for that type of social activity.

While Amazon’s tools can get the job done, what if you wish to avoid the walled Kindle garden?

Enter Buk, established in March 2016. Buk allows publishers and authors to share ebooks socially by creating deep links, or permanent URLs, out of any content. Here’s an example that uses Twitter to share. The publisher/author must first upload the EPUB file to the Buk platform, as well as set a price, which means that Buk’s business model is ebook retailer — a risky proposition when your competition is primarily Amazon. Publishers and authors earn 70 percent of every sale.

Buk works with 200 Korean publishers and so far about 10 English publishers. We asked Minsu Kang, the CEO and founder of the company, whom they see as their market in the US, and he told us he sees independent authors as Buk’s key audience because the platform is very simple to use.

Bottom line: We found Buk’s interface indeed very simple to use, and if you are looking for a way to easily share attractive snippets of content — through social media especially — Buk is a good tool to have in your back pocket. However, even though Buk ebooks can be read on the web and through its app, it seems unlikely that most readers will be willing to buy and read ebooks through a new platform.