In the first half of 2013, book sales in Germany saw a slight growth of 2.5% (Branchen Monitor Buch, July 2013). However, for the preceding two years, German book sales shrank to 9,520 million Euros (from 9,601 million in 2011), according to the annual statistical report of Börsenverein, the German publishers’ and booksellers’ association. (Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen 2013) Hardest hit were the traditional book chains, with a loss of 3.7% (buchreport, January 10, 2013).
Ebooks meanwhile, developed into a sector of significant growth. Overall, the market share of ebooks has been estimated at around 10% by mid-2013, representing frequently even 8 to 10% and more for new releases. 84% of all German publishers currently offer ebooks or plan to do so soon (according to a survey from Börsenblatt, June 7, 2013).
An in-depth analysis of the survey findings point at a widening gap between the struggling traditional chain book stores on the one hand and the leading online platforms, which account for an estimated 16% of all book sales, on the other hand, with those online platforms also in control of ebook downloads.
Amazon is estimated to own roughly half of the German ebook market, followed by the Tolino alliance of the two largest book chains, Thalia and Weltbild-Hugendubel at 34%, and Apple at 10% (according to Libreka’s CEO Ronald Schild, in an estimate for this report). As a result, 90% of German publishers consider the consolidation to pose a risk to the entire traditional book business (quoted from the Börsenverein and GfK survey in buchreport).
The role and impact of Amazon and its market force in Germany was at the center of several debates in both professional and general media in the country. In Bad Hersfeld, at Amazon’s largest logistics center in Germany, unions and the management clashed several times throughout 2013 over wages, resulting in several strikes, as well as Amazon’s policy of avoiding taxes in large European markets by transfetring profits to European headquarters in Luxembourg were critically discussed in German media (Der Spiegel, July 20, 2013, and FAZ, July 12, 2013).
Independent booksellers as well as chains responded with several initiatives of their own. A “buy local” campaign has found support from over 90 retailers and was broadly echoed by the media (Börsenblatt, March 13, 2013).
The two largest book chains chose to attack Amazon with their own reading device, branded the Tolino. The consortium made of the book chains Thalia, Weltbild-Hugendubel, together with Bertelsmann’s Club and Deutsche Telekom, as technology partners introduced their first device in March 2013, taking aim at Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite. At €99, the Tolino sold clearly below Amazon’s €129 device. Backed up by a catalogue of 300,000 titles at Thalia, and 500,000 at Weltbild, the declared goal for 2013 is a market share of 36% in the German device market, a mark that reportedly should be met by the end of the year (Buchreport, June 17, 2013).
Competition over ebooks and devices was however only part of the opposition to Amazon, chain stores, and independents in Germany in 2013.
Thalia had put significant efforts into a restructuring plan to cut down on its losses from its overall business, while earlier efforts by mother company Douglas to sell off the book arm did not bear fruit. Altogether, it cut down its sales floor by 8,000 square meters to 239,000 by March 2013. (Buchreport, May 15, 2013)
At Weltbild, earlier turbulences over the group’s strategy and future among its owners -a consortium of Catholic dioceses in Southern Germany- erupted again by late summer, with rumors of serious financial strains reported in the media (FAZ, September 10, 2013; for more details on the companies of Thalia and Weltbild, see below at Earlier developments in 2012 and 2011).
Selfpublishing has taken off in Germany recently both in popularity among authors and in recognition as a valid way to release professionally works of various formats, segments, and ambitions. Several dedicated platforms could extend their scope and reach, including epubli, owned by the Holtzbrinck group, and independent Xinxii. Numerous service providers have also started to enter the widening market niche (for an overview see Buchreport, July 19, 2013).
In 2012, Amazon announced a first title (authored by Jonas Winner) to have sold over 100,000 copies in the German Kindle Store, and new bestselling titles continue to emerge from its Kindle Direct Publishing author service.
For an overview of new specialized ventures go to Dedicated ebook publishers and distributors in Germany.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €9,520 million | Börsenverein (Publishers and Booksellers’ Association), 2012 |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 91,100 | Börsenverein (Publishers and Booksellers’ Association), 2012 |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 1,138 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | ca. 200,000 EPUB | Estimate by Libreka |
Market share of ebooks | 5% (mid 2013) | (2012): 2.4% (Börsenverein) |
Key market parameters | Fixed book price for printed books; VAT 7% for print, 19% for ebooks | Börsenverein lobbying for extended fixed pricing for ebooks. |
The situation is also evolving rapidly with regard to the number of titles offered. The first half of 2012 has seen ebook sales worth some €7.83 million (plus an additional 3.24 million free downloads, or 41%), equal roughly to all sales in 2011 (Media Control, buchreport; September 11, 2012).
In recent years, most notably in 2012, market developments in both German print fiction and, as a consequence, in the emerging ebook sector, have been driven by a few blockbuster bestsellers, notably Susanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy in the first half of the year, E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey in the second half, and Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred Year Old Man (translated from Swedish), throughout the entire twelve months (buchreport on the annual bestsellers for 2012, December 31, 2012).
The massive impact of just a few megatitles points to the growing fragility of a market that, in Germany, has traditionally relied on a broad and diverse mix of successful midlist titles for its stability. The old balance seems to be giving way to a new unpredictability in the market. As a result, a debate has opened regarding how to best stabilize the German book market as it stands today and prepare it for major shifts driven by a variety of forces, including changes in consumer habits and new entrants to the market. Nevertheless, Germany can still be seen as a haven of relative stability and calm compared to many other international book markets.
Two works of fiction in particular may have helped bring ebooks to a wide reading audience: Susanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, which hit German movie screens in early 2012, and E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, the wildly popular fan-fiction and self-publishing phenomenon from Random House. Other books that drove the German reading market in 2012 figure prominently in the top digital sales positions, such as Ken Follett’s Century of Giants, J.K. Rowling’s Casual Vacancy, and the most popular examples of crime fiction, be they translated (such as Jussi Adler Olsen from Danish) or home grown (Nele Neuhaus).
The boost from ebooks comes primarily from the three market leaders in German publishing —Random House, the Holtzbrinck group, and Bonnier (with their Ullstein and Piper imprints)—and a few midsized publishing houses such as Oetinger (publishers of the Hunger Games trilogy) or Lübbe (with 1,500 ebook titles available, who succeeded in spearheading the market in genre fiction, notably with digital editions of their decade-old Perry Rhodan science fiction series). Romance and fantasy books also constitute a significant share of ebooks, allowing some small niche players to broaden their presence in the market. A number of publishing companies have started to create special departments for ebooks, entertainment (Lübbe), or epublishing (Aufbau, Gräfe, and Unzer).
Digital reading devices were a highly popular gift at the end of 2011, and ever more so in 2012, followed by a widely recorded surge in subsequent ebook downloads in January of each year according to strong anecdotal evidence from distributors (no exact figures have been made public). Tablets have also broadened their presence (by 142% across Western Europe in the first half of 2012, according to GfK) and can be expected to be used for reading in the most media-savvy consumer segments. Moreover, retail prices for many devices have come down significantly since the end of 2011, with E-Ink devices dropping below €60 (e.g., Weltbild, which is arguably Germany’s second-largest online platform for books behind Amazon.de, promotes the Kindle from €79), and with the range of tablet devices offered broadening rapidly. Summer 2012 saw the advent of Android platforms on a larger scale (including Google’s Nexus 7). And in the fall, Kobo introduced its next generation of devices, as did Amazon (notably its Fire), bringing the barrier of entry for tablets under the threshold of €200. Weltbild’s Tablet PC4 even sells at €179.99.
As reading devices increase in popularity among German readers, research also shows a strong divide between those migrating their reading at least partially to screens and a majority that, for the moment at least, claims to read only printed books. According to a 2012 survey by BITKOM, the German association of ITC and new media (www.bitkom.org), 14% of the German online population access ebooks, with 7% prefering dedicated ereaders, 5% opting for tablets, and 2% using both. Another 24% plan to explore these devices in the future. Yet 55% of the online population claim to never read ebooks, and another 8% say they don’t read books, regardless of the format (BITKOM and Deloitte: “Die Zukunft der Consumer Electronics”, 2012, page 18).
The broader debate in the public and most media however in 2012 and earlier was focused not on ebooks, but several entirely different topics.
Most remarkably, the issue of copyright infringement in the first half of 2012 developed from a niche topic into a mainstream issue, producing headline news in early summer and drawing almost as much attention as the Euro crisis and Germany’s role in preventing the continent’s economies from drifting apart (see the discussion of piracy in eBook piracy in Europe: The example and debate in Germany, and related findings for a detailed account).
In retail, the traditional chain and independent stores found themselves on a steady downward path, having lost some 8% in sales over the past decade. Professional media for the book community found their defining moments when arguing over how the two largest book chains have been running into ever deeper trouble since late 2011.
The market leader in brick-and-mortar book retail, Thalia (owned by the perfume and drugstore chain Douglas, which was acquired in 2012 by the private equity group Advent), fell behind its old owners’ expectations—particularly in its online performance, which despite being the strongest part of the company failed to compete with either Amazon or Weltbild. At Thalia, profits declined from €30 million in 2010 to €5 million in 2011, and sales for the fourth quarter of 2011 underperformed in comparison to the overall market. At the same time, online revenue at Thalia grew by 20%, casting even darker shadows over the group’s brick-and-mortar performance. Online sales accounted for 14% of Thalia’s revenues. By early fall 2012, it was decided that the entire Douglas group was to be sold to a US investor, Advent International; its bookselling arm is undergoing severe restructuring, which might involve the closing of up to 50 locations (buchreport, September 5, 2012).
A similar trend in favor of online sales occurred for Weltbild, a chain store that is the second-largest online bookstore after Amazon.de. But Weltbild turned these developments to their advantage by heavily promoting its own E-Ink readers and tablet computer starting in late 2011, making these the “absolute top-selling products” for Christmas 2011 (Weltbild digital head Klaus Driever, buchreport, January 12, 2012). On December 25, 2011, Weltbild recorded 17,500 customers buying ebooks, compared to an average of 10,000 before Christmas (buchreport express, 51 and 52, 2011; buchreport, December 21, 2011). Amazon reported similar sales. At Hugendubel —which is, together with Weltbild, part of DBH, the Deutsche Buch Handels group— revenue from ebooks for the first time accounted for more than 10% of all online sales by the end of 2011 (buchreport express, 51, 2011).
Weltbild’s trouble came not from poor business performance but from conflicting strategies set by their owner, the Catholic Church, which, in a surprise announcement, said in late fall 2011 that it would sell the successful company, seeing no reasonable way to harmonize the bookseller’s business ambitions with the church’s ethical standpoint. Indeed, a controversy had raged on its board over some erotic and esoteric literature in its catalog. In June 2012, the board decided to instead have a foundation take over the commercial enterprise, in part to secure its compliance with moral standards —a decision announced ironically only two weeks before the launch of the erotic megaseller Fifty Shades of Grey in a German edition, which will account for a significant share of the group’s 2012 results (interview with Weltbild CEO Carel Halff, Börsenblatt, June 29, 2012).
The pattern of online growth could be seen in various other segments of the German book market in 2011. At the end of 2011, Amazon.de announced that its Kindle reader, introduced in a localized German version in September 2011, had been the bestselling product since the start of the holiday season on November 1, 2011; the bestselling product on Cyber Monday, December 12, 2011; and the top-selling product of 2011 (press release from January 4, 2012).
Libreka, the German trade association’s ebook distribution platform, announced in January 2012 that sales in 2011 showed “exponential growth,” driving Libreka’s income from €50,000 in the first quarter of 2011 up to €150,000 in the second quarter, €420,000 in the third quarter, and €1.5 million in the fourth quarter. Forecasts for 2012 indicate a continuation of this trend: in the first two weeks of January alone, sales of €400,000 were recorded (buchreport, January 19, 2012).
In November 2011, Germany’s largest wholesaler of books, Libri, at its online platform libri.de claimed revenues from ebooks that were for the first time higher than from any other book format. End-of-year holidays in 2011 appear to have marked an even more fundamental watershed moment in ebook and ereading developments for Germany, as reflected in a comment by trade magazine buchreport: “The signal is unambiguous” (buchreport express, 52, 2011, December 2011); notably, ereading devices and tablet computers were the drivers behind the trend, and ebook downloads were widely expected to follow the expansion of device sales. Only half a year earlier, in summer 2011, various media reports estimated that in Germany ebooks accounted for about 1% of the book market. In March 2011, Börsenverein released a study based on a 2010 survey by market research firm GfK identifying an ebook market worth €21.2 million for 2010 or 0.5% of the market of book consumers (the estimated share of books bought by readers in retail). In 2010, 2 million ebooks were sold to 540,000 ebook consumers, according to the study. In October 2011, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, market research company GfK published a survey on the first half of 2011, reporting ebook sales of €13 million—already equal to 60% of overall revenue in 2010, which is significant, as book sales in December alone represent usually around 18% of a year’s sales.
At the end of 2011, the German book market recorded a significant acceleration of the previously experienced change in the book industry, and digital developments accounted for the momentum in this shift.
Pricing
eBooks are generally sold at a retail price about 20 to 30% lower than the lowest-priced printed edition. The trade association Börsenverein is strongly lobbying to extend the German regulatory framework of fixed book retail prices to ebooks. Another major concern is that, under European policies, the reduced VAT rate of 7% on books cannot be applied to ebooks, as they—being categorized as a service, not a product—fall under the normal rate of 19%.
Early 2013 and 2012also saw the emergence of a remarkable number of startups, notably aimed at publishing and self-publishing.
Dotbooks, was founded as a digital-only publisher in 2012 by Beate Kuckertz, who previously had a 20-year career in traditional publishing, notably at Droemer. (Here a media report).
Microtext, was launched in early 2013 by author Nikola Richter, specializing in short fiction.
Sobooks, is a project of blogger and online activist Sascha Lobo, due for launch in the fall of 2013, aimed at browser-based ebooks.
A number of domestic actors compete—and cooperate—in the distribution of ebooks. Among the leading global actors was Amazon, the first to launch a dedicated German website for its Kindle reader in April 2011, with 40,000 commercial (or copyrighted) German-language ebook titles available by summer 2011 (and almost 1 million titles overall). Kobo followed in July 2011 and also announced a collaboration with Libreka. As a rule of thumb, almost all commercially distributed titles come with DRM, with a few limited experiments with social DRM (e.g., watermarking). As file formats, ebooks are predominately offered as PDF or EPUB, except those for Amazon’s Kindle, which are Mobipocket.
Libreka is a platform launched by Börsenverein in 2006, offering ebooks since 2009, with a September 2011 catalog of about 530,000 ebook titles, of which 57,000 are in German. Libreka claims to be the largest German distributor of ebooks. Owned and run by Börsenverein, Libreka has recently announced several partnerships —such as with Kobo in July 2011— to position itself as a link between retail platforms and publishers, thereby strengthening its strategic position after facing internal challenges, notably from domestic wholesalers, over competition issues.
The market research firm of Media Control has launched its own ebook distribution platform ceebo in 2011, promoting it as a “neutral” platform.
Libri, the largest wholesaler for printed books —and claiming to be the lead seller of ebooks— offers a catalog of 600,000 ebook titles as of year-end 2012, which includes a majority of titles in languages other than German and 80,000 titles in German, as well audio books, used books, and DVDs. Libri re-branded Libri.de as eBook.de in October 2012. Libri has an ongoing partnership with Sony for their ereading devices.
Ciando is a Munich-based independent retail platform for ebooks, with 250,000 currently available titles from about 1,800 publishing houses, including both independent (e.g., Hanser, Campus) and corporate (e.g., Random House, the Bonnier group) as well as international (e.g., Pearson Education, Wiley, O’Reilly) publishers.
Sony Readerstore: In December 2012, Sony opened its own dedicated ebook store after having partnered exclusively with traditional book retailers in Germany.
Txtr, based in Berlin, offers a broad range of distribution services on various platforms, notably for retailers, usually in the form of white label shops under their customers’ brands. In 2011, Txtr won an investment from 3M to extend their international strategy. Txtr currently distributes 700,000 ebooks from over 3000 publishers, mostly in EPUB and PDF formats.
Bookwire (not to be confused with www.bookwire.com, a service of the US bibliographical service Bowker) is a Frankfurt-based aggregator offering small- to medium-sized companies easy access to the ebook market. Bookwire is serving all relevant German dirtibuting platforms and is offering DRM-protected as well as watermarked files.
KN Digital, a branch of the distributor KNA, is a “full-service provider for digital media” (company statement), which includes digital distribution, ecommerce solutions, print on demand, conversion, digital warehousing (or hosting), and marketing services for ebooks. KNA has provided these services for printed books to a broad customer base for many decades, particularly for various small- and medium-sized publishing houses.
Skoobe is a consortium led by Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck that specializes in lending ebooks as a “mobile library” via an app in the Apple App store or from Google Play. Launched in February 2012, Skoobe is currently lending 25,000 ebook titles from over 400 publishers at a monthly fee of €9.99.
Other lending platforms in Germany include Amazon.de, the already mentioned distributing platforms ciando and Libreka, and PaperC, which specializes on educational materials.
Ebooks evolve in a complex and challenging context in France. At €2771 million worth of net sales for publishers, France is home to the second largest domestic book market in Europe, second only to Germany, yet the overall book market has been declining slowly for several years (-1.2% against 2011 and -0.3% in the first half of 2013). Books are by far the most popular cultural format among French consumers, with a value of 4,130 million in 2012, or 52.7%, compared to video (movies, at 16.8%), music (9.4%), and games (21.1%), with books declining less than the overall cultural sector (-3% 2012, against 2011), (SNE, Les Chiffres Clefs de l'édition 2012, and Livres Hebdo, August 27, 2013).
Relatively upbeat statements by publishers about the solid resistance of books in difficult economic times are a clear contrast to the continuous turbulences that is notably shaking several of the largest actors in retail. The leading operator of chain stores for books and other media and content, Fnac, is undergoing deep structural change, and an IPO on the Paris stock exchange in June 2013 was lukewarm at best, and the half-year results echoed a decline of 5.8% in revenues for the group, and 3.9% for its French holdings. The Virgin Mega Store, which had highflying plans for digital media, before filing for bankruptcy in 2012, had to be shut down altogether in 2013, as no buyer could be found. (Livres Hebdo, June 11, 2013), and Chapitre, the second largest book chain, had to announce significant closures of outlets, and major restructuring (Livres Hebdo, April 9, 2013). Overall, French publishers have been sufficiently concerned about the challenges of book retailers to offer an unseen initiative to support independent bookshops notably with a one-off payment of €7 million (Livres Hebdo, June 3, 2013).
Against the backdrop of such harsh economic conditions, there seems to be little room for digital experiments, while anecdotally, the general media not only paint a picture highlighting the “resistance” of the French public to reading on small screens but discuss this in the more fundamental terms of a French “cultural exception”, or a specific national preference for cultural traditions over the (US American) notion of culture and entertainment as an industry and a business.
For 2012, the French Syndicat National de l'édition (SNE, the French publishers’ association) attributed to ebooks 3.1% of all of French book revenues (up from 2% in 2011), worth €81.76 million (SNE, “Edition numérique 2012”, and Livres Hebdo, June 27, 2013; a much lower estimate for ebooks to account for just 2.1% of all trade sales by GfK is due to a much narrower definition of which revenues are included - for a detailed discussion see the blog of Aldus2006).
Much of the resulting media coverage was in line with coverage from a year earlier, when, in early summer 2012, the “French exception” hit the headlines of the cultural pages in New York and London. “The French Still Flock to Bookstores”, stated The New York Times (June 20, 2012), and they are “shunning the ebook,” according to The Guardian (June 4, 2012). Voices from within the Paris establishment of the French book industry joined the skeptical choir by emphasizing that sales of ebooks were still limited in their country, with a market share estimated for mid-2012 at perhaps 2%.
However, in summer 2013, some observers started to caution their readers by adding questions to their headlines: “Paper Resists: Why Ebooks Are Not Landing (Yet)” (L’Express, July 3, 2013).
The reason to see France as being more and more in line with the digital developments in other markets across continental Europe derives from various surveys who, in their majority, are consistent with findings in other European countries, when it comes to analyzing the dissemination of devices, or reading habits and the overall consumption of online content. In addition, both the traditionally leading organizations of the French book industry, as well as a growing number of startup ventures, propose an ever expanding infrastructure and offer reading materials as well as points to access this content conveniently.
By the end of 2013, French consumers are expected to own some 6 million tablet computers and half a million e-reading devices. One French in five has already read an ebook (Livres Hebdo, February 25, 2013), and a consumer panel showed that many consumers who already own a device expect to expand its usage. For fall 2013, several of the largest general retail chains are expected to launch their own series of devices, which will further broaden the penetration among consumers.
The most popular sector for digital reading is literature (at a share of 60% of all sold ebooks), with genre fiction (notably erotic, fantasy and science fiction) being particularly popular. Leaders of the segment include the independent French houses Bragelonne and Le Bélial, as well as Canadian Harlequin in a joint venture with Hachette. Surveys indicate that half of the consumers reading genre ebooks have not read similar books on paper (“La littérature de genre en numérique”, SNE, Assises du livres numérique, March 2013).
Several major French publishers, notably Editis, Gallimard-Flammarion, La Martinière, Actes Sud - yet not Hachette - have launched a pilot to directly cater their ebooks to libraries. Another experiment concerned the bundling of heavily discounted ebook editions with the purchase of a printed book. The offer will be introduced to the market at a large scale in 2014 by the ebook distributor Eden, who also will add audiobooks for download. (Information provided by Gallimard for this report, one of the consortium members of Eden.)
Throughout 2013 in France, the political debate continued on how to sustain or even defend its domestic culture in the context of globalization and the impact of global players on its heritage and specifics. In a report for the government, a number of measures have been proposed, notably to introduce specifically targeted taxation on smart phone and other digital devices, as well as to secure the collection of local taxes from global conglomerates to foster the creation of original French content. (For a summary of the “Rapport Lescure” see Le Monde, May 13, 2013; the complete report is available online from the French government).
In response to debate on how to act against pirated ebooks, the French publishers´ association has signed an agreement with their British homologues to adapt their Copyright Infringement Portal in a French version (see also ActuaLitté, August 5, 2013).
For an overview of dedicated ebook ventures and distributors go to Selected distributors and new ebook ventures in 2012 and 2013.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €4,534 million | 2011 Syndicat National de l’Edition (French Publishers’ Association, SNE) |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 86,295 | SNE (figure for 2012) |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 1,340 | French National Statistics Institute |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | ca. 126,000 | From publishers |
Publisher revenue share of ebooks | ca. 2.1% of trade (GfK), 3% (SNE) | Estimates GfK, SNE |
Key market parameters | Fixed book price; VAT of 7% for print, audio books, and ebooks |
It had come as a surprise to some that readers in the country of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Batailles, and Catherine Millet could fall for a clearly less-sophisticated version of eroticism imported from America. And yet 900,000 printed copies plus another 40,000 ebooks had been picked up in the French translations, which again made it to the pages of the New York Times (January 16, 2013).
Despite the boom, one major retail channel for all forms of media content, Virgin, which in 2012 had started to get serious about ebooks, went bust. The fifth-largest retail chain for books, according to Livres Hebdo, with a turnover of €280 million, of which €80 million came from books, and a market share of 2 to 4% of the French book market, declared bankruptcy in January 2013 (Livres Hebdo, January 14, 2013).
Overall, 2012 was a flat year for bookselling, as were the years before (Livres Hebdo, January 11, 2013). Although exact numbers are not yet available, interviews by the trade magazine Lives Hebdo with various retailers reflect almost unanimously on a difficult end for 2012 sales. According to estimates, even at Amazon growth seems to have slowed down in 2012, but at a high level of some 60% market share for online sales of primarily printed books. But overall, online sales are believed to account for just around 10% of the entire retail market for books, which is small when compared to Anglosaxon countries or neighboring Germany.
However, consumers have started to embrace digital devices that can be used for reading: In 2012, some 3.6 million tablet computers plus another 300,000 dedicated ereaders were sold in France (compared to 145,000 in 2011). This should trigger growth in ebooks by some 80% at least (Livres Hebdo, May 3, 2012, and Livres Hebdo, January 11, 2013, print edition, page 17).
Perhaps even more conclusive is research commissioned by the French publishers’ association SNE in March, and then updated in September of 2012. In spring, a mere 5% of the French population over 18 admitted to having read an ebook. Another 5% considered doing so. A staggering 90% said flatly “Non,” as they could not see themselves exchanging paper for a screen. Only half a year later, 14% of the adults had in fact read an ebook at least in part, plus another 8% would give it a thought at least. As in most countries, the strongest segment of the reading population has started to embrace digital first. The tablet seemed to gain forcefully over the ereaders. Remarkable shifts may be under way, if a tendancy regarding the prefered locations for downloads solidifies: The share for general Internet platforms such as Amazon, the Apple Store, and Google grew from 38% to 41%, while the share of specialized book platforms such as Fnac or Virgin declined from 30 to 28%. But this snapshot may be too random to identify it as a trend (Sofia, SNE, SGDL: “Baromètre des usages du livre numérique,” Vague 1, March 2012; Vague 2, September 2012).
SNE had earlier started to systematically track the emergence of an ebook market on an annual basis. It has recorded ebook downloads worth €35 million for 2011 (against €17.9 million in 2010), hence doubling an albeit modest stream of revenue in an overall market of €4587 million (“L’édition de livres en France, Repères Statistiques 2012,” données 2011). Together with digital sales of physical supports worth another €21.5 million for 2011 (down from €35 million) this accounts for a market share of 1.2%. More importantly, the figure illustrates a shift from distribution by CD/DVD or flashdrive to Internet downloads.
As hinted, the overall temperature among French book professionals with regard to ebooks was far below the boiling point as of mid 2012, an assessment which is well in line with Bowker’s “Global eBook Monitor” consumer survey. Hachette, by far the country’s leading publishing group and arguably the world’s largest trade publisher, considers the French ebook market as “embryonic” (comment for this report) and returned ownership of its ebook distribution platform Numilog to its founders press release (June 13, 2012).
At Editis, the second-largest French house and an arm of Spanish Planeta, the “ebook evangelist” Virginie Clayssen admits that she “feels discouraged or saddened by the schism that exists between traditional publishers and those who work in a digital world and are impatient with the former” (Publishing Perspectives, March 13, 2012), even as she sees France in a fundamentally similar development with regard to digital as Germany (interview for this report).
Gallimard, France’s third-largest publishing group, which just expanded significantly by acquiring Flammarion from Italian RCS, sees “a lot of movement” (comment for this report). But it’s likely that all of these primary observations fall short of the overall story, which is clearly more complex. A survey sponsored by several trade and related organizations (SNE, SGDL, and Sofia, released in March 2012) showed that only 5% of French adults have ever read an ebook (with 2% having consumed an entire digital book and 3% having consumed just parts).
Many separate indicators point to a serious build up of infrastructure, regulatory and market framing efforts, new relevant impulses from the outside, and a quiet, yet pervasive formation of a market ready to embrace digital, against heavy odds from local tradition and routine.
France has become one of the key markets targeted by global players such as Google (by quietly settling its legal confrontations with French publishers and related stakeholders) (Livres Hebdo, June 6, 2012), Amazon (by announcing its new generation of low-cost devices), and Sony (by signing a cooperation agreement with online distributor Chapitre.com).
New domestic initiatives have also emerged. In Lyon, retailer Decitre has launched a new TEA “The Ebook Alternative” service.
Meanwhile, traditional strong arms such as the omnipresent chain of Fnac have produced headlines showing similar trouble in finding their place and strategy —between bricks and mortar and online as well as digital— as is its German peer Thalia, with revenues declining by 1.1% to a still lavish €1.77 billion, yet with profits going down by some 7.5% (buchreport, August 1, 2012). Still, Fnac is way ahead of its direct competitors. But with new entrants and new games to be played, its once singular position has become everything but comfortable.
French book professionals still feel that they are having a hard time getting what they want or what they deserve from the digital world. Eric Marbeau of Gallimard argues about shortcomings in the representation of their ebooks in the catalogs of Amazon and Kobo, in adjusting metadata standards, and coming to agreements on digital rights and retail prices (interview for this report).
Several serious issues need to be sorted out with regard to regulating a market that barely exists, but which everybody seems to be preoccupied with, which at least indirectly hints at how seriously the broader perspective is thought to be.
The European Commission has started investigations into pricing arrangements and is expected to look very closely into the procedures of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) with regard to the American “agency model,” and the dealings of French publishers with regard to support of an extension of the fixed price system for ebooks.
The gap of VAT on printed and digital books has been brought down from 19.6% for ebooks to the print level of 5% in 2012, and will probably further drop to 5.5% from January 2013.
For the second half of 2012, a serious dynamic with regard to reading devices, and notably all sorts of tablets, is expected, which could result in a surge in ebook downloads after the year-end holidays. All actors, notably in distribution, are expected to spend heavily on related marketing.
Developments in 2011
Although no exact figures have been released for ebook sales at the end of 2011, a number of indicators point to strong overall development, with a strong drive from all the major domestic actors (in retail and publishing) and the entry of Amazon and Kobo with localized actions.
Publishers as well as retailers strongly promoted ebooks and reading devices in the pre-holiday period, with anecdotal reports of a sizable increase of purchases of ebooks. Bestselling titles included the Prix Goncourt_–winning novel _L’art français de la guerre by Alexis Jenni, La delicatessen by David Foenkinos, and the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson.
Perhaps more definitively for the overall trend, devices (both ereaders and tablet computers) saw a substantial increase in sales; the market research firm GfK predicted figures of 1 million tablets purchased by users in 2011 and 3 million for 2012 (Livres Hebdo, January 9, 2012). According to an article from Les Echos, 1.45 million tablets were sold in 2011, 450,000 in December 2011. Notably, in the fourth quarter of 2011, strong promotional campaigns accompanied the launch of Amazon’s dedicated French Kindle store, the respective entry of Kobo into the French market (by introducing its ereading device and entering into a partnership with the largest French online retail platform, Fnac, which claimed to have sold 50,000 Kobo readers between mid November and the end of December 2011).
Not everybody found the path to a winning strategy, as shown by the failure of Virgin, which filed for bankruptcy in January 2013 after having promoted ebooks with great enthusiasm, with a catalog of 150,000 titles and ereaders (notably the Cybook Odyssey of the French manufacturer Bookeen at €129). Virgin also concluded a deal with Amazon for distributing the Kindle Fire tablet in France (Reuters, November 8, 2011) and was considered to have thus instantly become the second-largest online retail platform in France, after Fnac.
Also in 2011, legal action was taken to facilitate the emergence of a stronger ebook market by extending the reduced VAT from printed works to ebooks. In reality, this turned into a rollercoaster, introducing at first a reduced value of 5% VAT —instead of the normal rate of 19.6%— which was then increased to 7% effective April 1, 2012 (Livres Hebdo, November 7, 2011) and brought back to 5% by January 2013. However, the alignment of VAT for printed and electronic books was immediately challenged by the European Commission (Livres Hebdo, January 18, 2012). The procedure at the European level is still pending in early 2013.
Earlier in 2011, the law regarding fixed book retail prices (“Loi sur le Prix Unique du Livre Numérique”) as defined by the publisher was rendered effective for ebooks as of January 1, 2012.
As a result of the lowered VAT and general market developments, some publishers —notably Gallimard, but also Denoël and Mercure de France_— lowered ebook prices in December 2011, followed by _Hachette titles in spring 2012, which resulted in ebooks being sold at prices around 30% less than the print edition of the same work (see Ebook Bestsellers and Ebook Pricing Strategies in Europe).
The surge in the digital segment coincided with an overall flat market in France for 2011. Although overall sales in December appeared to have been strong, the months between January and November 2011 saw a drop of 1.5% compared to the same period in 2010 (Livres Hebdo/I+C). A much stronger drop of 3.2% in revenue for 2011 hit the largest media (and book retail) chain, Fnac, as it announced plans to eliminate 500 staff positions, including 310 from its operations in France (Livres Hebdo, January 13, 2012).
The ebook (or livre numérique) faces an environment in France that is characterized by various factors from politics, culture, and trade.
France —through its National Library and its national digital library, Gallica (which currently has 1.5 million digital documents on display)— has gotten an early start on the digitization of its book culture. France also has a strong tradition of national politics spearheading the digital dissemination of its legacy and of creating institutional frameworks for such ambitions, including the European digital library project Europeana.
French publishers, while setting up the infrastructure for an emerging ebook market, started to confronted Google regarding its library digitization efforts, citing infringement of works under French copyright.
The industry trade association SNE, together with the French government, regularly stands up to defend French culture and its national book industry against what are seen as challenges from global market forces and players. This controversy —which was fostered from the very beginning by Hachette Livres, among others— did not hinder what is by far the largest publishing group in France from actively seeking Google’s cooperation in digitizing its vast catalog of up to 50,000 titles —or 70% of the group’s backlist— in a landmark agreement that was approved in mid-2011, despite significant opposition from other French publishers. In August 2011, publisher La Martinière also signed a digitization agreement with Google, and in September 2011, Albin Michel, Flammarion, and Gallimard (whose publisher, Antoine Gallimard, is also president of the French SNE) dropped their charges against Google, at least for the moment (Livres Hebdo, September 7, 2011). By mid-2012, all of these legal controversies had been settled.
To strengthen copyright nationally, legislation to protect rights on the Internet (Loi Hadopi, based on the creation of a “Haute autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet”) was introduced in 2009. Hadopi was designed mainly for music and video.
Defending a diversified cultural infrastructure —notably, a tightly knit network of bookstores— resonates in various media reports and political actions.
Clearpassion is an online library of 2000 titles specialized on erotic literature and founded by a former executive of Hachette.
YouBoox is a streaming service created in 2011, which could expand its services and its capital in summer 2013.
PhoneReader is a new online community platform for readers and reader marketing.
Distributors
So far, online book sales have been dominated in France by local platforms, notably Fnac. Amazon operated a dedicated French-language online retail platform, but a localized Kindle store with a broad offering of French-language titles for the Kindle only opened in October 2011, while Kobo entered into a partnership with Fnac in November 2011.
The French book industry has a long tradition of its leading publishers also owning significant distribution operations; from the very beginning, this tradition has shaped the distribution of ebooks as well.
Numilog was launched in 2000 and acquired by Hachette in 2008 but was returned to its founder in June 2012 (press release by Hachette). The distributor claims to be the “reference library” for ebooks in France, with 34,000 commercial titles and 130,000 free books available, of which 22,000 are supposedly French titles (status at year-end 2011; no current update is available). Similar to the German market, most ebooks are offered in the PDF or EPUB format. In spring 2013, Numilog and ePagine (see below) launched a cloud service for consumers to organize all of their personal digital libraries online. Numilog has also relaunched its white-label ebook shop solution for booksellers, ClubReader, in 2013.
Eden-Livres is a joint venture of the independent publishing houses Gallimard, La Martinière/LeSeuil, Actes Sud, and Flammarion, offering a catalog of over 5,000 titles in various formats, mostly EPUB. The technical service provider Canadian De Marque has received additional financing of 3 million Canadian dollars from three French publishers: Gallimard, Flammarion (later in the year acquired by Gallimard), and La Martinière. A catalogue of 1500 French canadian ebook titles has been cleared for distribution in France through Diffusion Dimedia, in a cooperation with Volumen and Eden Livres in 2013.
Epagine —which also has a Dutch branch— is a general-solutions provider founded in 2008 for (currently) 177 publishers and bookshops specializing in ebooks.
With Decitre, a new platform for ebooks, branded as “the ebook alternative,” or TEA, was launched in March 2012 from Lyon-based retailer Decitre, which is based on an open access model for all interested stakeholders, offering direct ebook distribution to all interested retailers (Livres Hebdo, March 18, 2012).
Since 2013, Uculture is distributing a catalogue of 120,000 ebooks and 650,000 printed titles, based on the catalogue of Decitre.
Eplateforme is a hub controlled by the publishing arms of Editis, which has reached distribution deals with Média Participations, and Michelin (more details here).
The catalogs of the three largest distribution platforms— Numilog, Eden Livres, and Eplateforme— have been integrated since May 2010.
Fnac, founded in 1954, is the largest chain bookstore, also selling music and movies in France, with revenues of €4,473 million. Fnac has additional ventures in Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Taiwan, and Brazil. Fnac offers a catalog of 82,000 ebooks (with no breakdown available for the percentage of French titles), of which 75% are in PDF format and the rest primarily in EPUB. Fnac introduced its own dedicated ereader, the FnacBook, in October 2010. In 2010, Fnac.com hosted 120,000 ebook downloads (versus 60,000 in 2009), with 130,000 in the first quarter of 2011 alone—half of which, however, were free titles (LeMotif).
French online bookshop Chapitre has started a partnership with Sony for distributing its ereaders and tablets, starting in September 2012 (buchreport, August 22, 2012).
For the library market, British academic book supplier Dawson runs a branch office out of Paris that is dedicated to serving France and other French-speaking markets.
Bookeen is, according to one of its founders, Laurent Picard, “primarily a site for book lovers. A 100 percent digital library where the Internet user can be well served,” with a current catalog of 42,700 titles, of which 1,300 are free of charge and without DRM, the others including works published by Gallimard, Flammarion, P.O.L., Bragelonne, and Publie.net. The two largest French publishing groups with their digital platforms are “the big voids” (company statement). Bookeen was founded in 2003, after the first wave of enthusiasm in electronic reading devices had collapsed, and produces its own reading device. In summer 2011, Bookeen opened its digital library, Bookeenstore.com, to ereading devices other than its own.
Two important aspects in French ebook publishing are the particularly strong national culture and the large fan base for both domestic comics —notably Japanese-style manga— as well as other graphic novels, which are also forming a digital niche market, with platforms like www.kaze.fr (and its German spinoff, www.kaze-online.de) and Digibidi offering the catalogs of 30 publishers. And the US graphic novel platform CimoXology has launched a French language A catalogue of 1500 French canadian ebook titles has been cleared for distribution in France through Diffusion Dimedia, in a cooperation with Volumen and Eden Livres in 2013.[platform].
The Spanish publishing market —and, as a consequence, the ebook market in Spain— is shaped by several paradoxical parameters. With a population of 47 million inhabitants, Spain is a medium-sized European market, closer to Poland than to Germany. However, Spanish is the primary language for 650 million people worldwide, including a significant number of Spanish speakers in the US. Spanish publishing revenues were strained recently by shrinking consumer prices over several years, from €3,110 million in 2009 to €2,772 million in 2011, with more titles published than ever (88,349 in 2012) but each selling fewer copies than before. No final numbers are available for the economic development of the book market in 2012. Predictions projected a decline of some 8%.
Most of Latin America is served by Spanish publishing enterprises. However, when the economic crisis of 2008 hit Spain, exports witnessed a severe drop from €490 million in 2007 to 384 million in 2009. Although Spain has recently started to recover some of this lost terrain —exports were worth €430 million in 2011— the overall market environment as well as protectionist politics in several Latin American countries point to a difficult path for the years ahead (according to statistics from the publishers’ association GFEE).
The Spanish domestic publishing sector, though populated by small- and medium-sized publishing houses, is increasingly defined by three big groups: Planeta, Santillana, and Random House/Mondadori (a former joint venture, with Random House taking over full control in 2013).
In this challenging, yet dynamic context, the government has canceled the reduced VAT rate of 4% (versus the normal rate of 21%) being applied to ebooks —as well as theater, music, and movies— with only printed books being exempt. Publishers are concerned that the measure will “slow down sales in a newborn market that had just started to give signs of acceleration,” according to Ernest Folch, the editorial director of medium-sized and highly regarded Ediciones B and its digital arm, B de Books (Julieta Lionetti, “Spain Hikes E-book VAT to 21%, Likely Slowing Growth,” Publishing Perspectives, July 19, 2012).
In 2012, ebook downloads accounted for €12 million, up from only €2 million in 2011, and grew by over 100% in the first half of 2013 (according to market research by GfK, presented by Actualidad editorial, June 6, 2013). Various surveys by GfK, as quoted in this overview, point at the considerable base of 5 million devices (tablets and ereaders combined) acquired by Spanish consumers and a particularly high penetration of smartphones.
However, the recent expansion of the ebook market segment faces a general reluctance of consumers with regard to ecommerce, as well as a high level of piracy. Still, respondents to a questionnaire for this report, targeted at Spanish book professionals, estimate the market share of ebooks by mid-2013 at around 3% (up from just 1% in 2012), and for new fiction at around 8%, with expectations that 15% of revenues will come from ebooks by 2015. Fiction titles account for some 70% of ebook sales. As for the digital catalogue available to readers, estimates vary between 30,000 and 50,000 -probably depending on the inclusion of selfpublished books and non-commercial items.
Ebook bestsellers are largely identical with those in print, including globally influential authors like E.L. James or Ken Follett, as well as specific Spanish bestselling books, including La verdad sobre el caso Harry Quebert by French Joël Dicker, El maestro del Prado by Javier Sierra or Misión olvido by María Dueñas.
Some indicators hint at a recent expansion of book reading, notably by the lending of books at public libraries (see details in The Independant, July 17, 2013). This is also the context of the new subscription platform Nubico, launched in September 2013 as a joint venture by Planeta’s Circulo de Lectores with mobile operator Telefonica (see below for details).
The economic crisis may be at least partially responsible for an exceptional dynamic evolution on the digital end, as readers may find ebooks at lower prices, on average, than in print. That aspect was specifically highlighted by Amazon’s Spanish head of content, Koro Castellano, in an interview as he summarized the first year of the online retailer’s localized Spanish platform by saying: “I can say we do not suffer from the crisis.” (“Los 365 días de Kindle,” in El Cultural, December 18, 2012). Dwelling on Amazon’s internal data, Castellano emphasized that half of the Spanish Kindle catalog offered ebooks at an average retail price of €4.55, while a growing number of shorter books priced at €0.99 or €1.99 were added at the same time. In just one year, Amazon was able to expand its list of Spanish ebooks from 22,000 to 48,000 titles (industry organizations had estimated that a mere 10,000 Spanish commercial ebooks had been available to readers at the time of Amazon’s launch in November 2011).
Amazon’s assessment is in agreement with a much broader study by Bowker, “Global eBook Monitor” (GeM), a survey with online consumer interviews conducted in January 2012 in ten countries. Spain is portrayed as a “second-wave country,” with ebook adoption on par with Germany, France, and Japan: “Spain has similar proportions of the total population who had bought an ebook in the six months prior to interview (8%) as Germany (10%) and Brazil (7%). This was around half that seen in the more mature markets such as the UK and the USA (16%-17%), and equates to 13% of the Spanish online population.” Interestingly, with 9% of interviewees considering it to be “very likely” and another 21% as “likely” that they would buy an ebook in the following six months, the penetration of ebooks in Spain has been even stronger than in France, with 6% “very likely” and 12% “likely” to opt for ebooks. The forecast for the following six months predicts a rather higher growth rate in Spain than for other European countries (“Global eBook Monitor 2012,” excerpts and data interpretation provided by Bowker for this report). This is ever more remarkable, as traditionally, France had always been on top over Spain in terms of Internet penetration as well as book reading.
For an overview of selected local players go to Distribution and specialized ventures
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €2,772 million | 2011 (Publishers Association FGEE; no 2012 available) |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 88,349 | 2012 (Publishers Association FGEE) |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | ca. 1,872 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | Between 30 and 50,000 (various estimates) | |
Market share of ebooks | above 3% (trade) | FGEE (mid 2013); |
Key market parameters | Law on fixed ebook prices; VAT of 4% on printed books and 21% on ebooks | Reduced rate of VAT canceled for ebooks in 2012 |
With the launch of localized ebook shops by Amazon (in December 2011) and Apple (in October 2011), a significant promotion of ebooks and reading devices by the leading retailers (notably Casa del Libro and Fnac) for the end-of-year holiday sales, and a substantial rise in the presence of both ereading devices and tablet computers, Spain started in the second half of 2011 on a similar trajectory to that of Germany or France.
Articles in the general media commented on the advance of ebooks in Spain in terms of “gigantic leaps,” with Amazon’s market entry seen as “triggering the avalanche” (El cultural, November 25, 2011).
In May 2011, Kobo launched a Spanish platform, and Google Editions is also now available to readers in Spain.
2012 has seen several initiatives by publishing and econtent organizations to improve the infrastructure of the publishing industry, including a sales-tracking service (DILVE) as well as a joint effort with other econtent distributors to fight piracy (read more here).
The report “La digitalización del libro en España,” released in November 2009, argued that “the digitization of books will be one of the most strategic decisions that publishers will have to make in the next years,” yet the report also notes that paper and electronic will coexist in the future (“The emergence of ebooks in Spain,” Emerald Group Publishing LTD, 2010). Almost half of the publishers polled for this study expected that even in 2020 print would still be their main source of income. Another report, by the Federación de Gremios de Editores in collaboration with the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruiperez and published in February 2010, polled 254 publishers, of whom 80% planned “actions in the digital area during the period of 2009 to 2011,” including parts of their backlist, with 19% expecting to have their full catalog of titles digitized by the end of 2011. According to that report, small publishers showed —at least for the moment— a higher predisposition to digitizing their backlists than the market leaders; even by 2011, the large groups have implemented considerable efforts in that respect as well, offering growing digital catalogs of their titles.
In 2009, an effort to digitize major works took place in both Spanish and Latin American literature under the headline of “Palabras Mayores”; the first selections are commercially available in both Mobipocket and EPUB (with DRM) at the platform Leer.
The first emergence of an ebook market can be dated to 2010, with the launch of the dedicated B2B (business-to-business) ebook distribution platform Libranda. The venture is the initiative of a consortium of the three largest publishing groups —Planeta, Santillana, and Random House/Mondadori_— with 15 publishers initially contributing titles and eight online stores serving the consumers. By 2012, _Roca Editorial, Grup62, and Grupo SM, as well as Grupo Wolters Kluwer have joined the group of owners of Libranda. The platform distributes titles in the EPUB format with Adobe DRM protection. By the end of 2012, Libranda had signed up 128 publishers, representing more than half of the Spanish book market, plus distribution agreements with over 100 retailers in Spain and an “indirect distribution agreement” with Barnes & Noble in the US. By September 2011, Libranda’s catalog contained 5,133 titles and was expected to expand to 10,000 titles by the end of 2011.
A number of both global and local platforms are offering ebooks to the consumer. Estimates for this report regard Apple as the market leader with a share of ca. 40%, followed by the localized Kindle store of Amazon at 30%.
The strongest local brand is clearly Casa del Libro, with its dedicated ebook section offering a current catalog of around 50,000 titles (commercial and others combined) and an estimated market share in ebooks of 15% (down from initially around 45%). Through its Tagus library, Casa del Libro has started a broad offer of ebooks without DRM protection.
The Spanish branch of French retailer Fnac as well as El Corte Inglés, Europe’s largest general retailer, whose online offerings include a media section with books and music, own each another estimated 5% of the Spanish market.
A perhaps totally new page in bringing ebooks to Spanish consumers has been opened in September 2013, with Nubico, proposing a combined ebook subscription with the participation at a digital reading community at a flat rate of €8.99 per month. The platform is co-owned by Planeta’s Circulo de Lectores and the market leader in mobile communication, Telefonica.
However, Nubico is not the first subscription service for ebooks in Spain, as the model has been pioniered by 24Symbols with a current collection of 15,000 titles.
Libranda, the leading ebook distributor with an estimated market share in B2B of 70%, is controlled by a consortium of seven leading publishers. As of June 2011, Libranda started operations in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. Plans exist to include English titles in the Libranda catalog.
Publidisa offers a wider set of services, as an aggregator and distributor as well as print on demand service provider focusing on both Spain and Latin America, with an estimated market share in Spain of 15%. Publidisa has offices, aside from Spain, in Protugal, Mexico, Argentina and Columbia.
Aggregator Leer-e has recently teamed up with the Germany based aggregator Bookwire.
Amabook is a platform with strong ties with several Latin American markets, including Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.
In December 2012, Roca Editores launched a new platform for self-publishing: Rocautores. Roca Editores also announced a partnership with Jane Friedman’s Open Road Integrated Media, to prepare an English-language ebook series with its “Barcelona Ebooks” spin-off (read more here).
B de Books was launched in November 2011 as a spin off of Barcelona-based Ediciones B to become Spain’s first digital-only book publisher to experiment with new approaches for the book business in several regards, including competitively low pricing of its titles (between €1.99 and €9.99) as well as publication without DRM, to make reader convenience a clear priority (“Libros digitales desde 1,99 euros y sin protección anticopia,” El Pais, November 15, 2011).
Grupo Planeta, Spain’s largest publisher, also launched two ebook imprints with a similar pricing strategy, from €0.99 to €4.99: Zafiro (romance) and Scyla (science fiction) ebooks (press release). In early 2012, Planeta announced a partnership with the leading telecom company Telefonica to jointly organize an ebook platform to challenge Amazon’s impact on the Spanish market (Bloomberg, March 1, 2012).
In 2012, the Italian book market was facing a difficult economy, resulting in a hefty decline in sales of 7.8% in value and 7% in volume. However, this overall number must be considered a slight improvement from 11.7% year on year in March and 8.6% in September 2012. As in other European book markets, children´s (at –6.1%) and young adult books as well as fiction (–5.2%) showed relatively better performance (data from Nielsen BookScan released in December 2012 and in May 2013 at Giornale della libreria).
Another indicator of this difficult environment was the announcement in November 2012 that the French bookstore chain Fnac had sold its Italian arm to the Luxembourg-based Orlando investment group (similar to its shutting down their arm in Greece) (La Stampe, November 29, 2012).
By May 2013, 60,589 commercial ebook titles have been available to Italian readers, equaling 8.3% of the total available catalogue, with some 44% of new titles released in digital format, aside from print, resulting in a market share of 2.1% of trade publishing in all of 2012 (up from 1.1% in 2011). By June 2013, ebooks had gained 8.3% of trade (Source: Ufficio Studi AIE (=Research Office of the Italian Publishers’ Association)).
In 2012, Italian consumers purchased some 2 million tablet computers (up 379%). By May 2013, the average retail price for an ebook had fallen by 6.6% to €10.44 (from €11.07 in 2011), indicating much higher pressure on pricing compared to print (at an average retail price of €18, down only 1.9% from 2011) (all data from Dentro all’e-book, in Giornale della libreria, 2013).
Ebooks with social DRM (ca. 42%) outnumber those with hard Adobe copy protection (35%, information provided for this report by Informationi Editoriali).
For an overview of secialized local actors go to Distribution and specialized ventures
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €3,072 million | Publishers Association |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 63,800 | Publishers Association |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 1049 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | 60,589 | March 2013 (up from 31,416 in March 2012; Informazioni Editoriali and Publishers Association AIE) |
Key market parameters | Fixed book price, yet with possibilities for discounts on print books of around 15 %, notably in PR campaigns, newly introduced in 2012. VAT is 4 % on printed books, against 20% on ebooks. |
ebook sales in Italy had shown strong growth since early 2012, but from very modest beginnings, to €12.6 million, or a market share of 0.9% in trade by fall 2012 (announcement by AIE at the Frankfurt Book Fair, quoted in The Bookseller, October 11, 2012).
Yet the update reflected significant growth of 740% from 2011, when the Italian Publishers Association had estimated the ebook market at €3.7 million at cover prices, or 0.2% of the overall book market (Giornale delle libreria, March 3, 2012). At some trade publishers, revenue from ebooks accounts for up to 2% (information provided by GeMS for this report.)
The low overall penetration may hide complex dynamics in the Italian marketplace.
The European financial crisis put the book market under severe pressure. Recent years have been characterized by significant changes in the performance of the largest publishing groups. The Mondadori group maintained its leading position, but RCS saw its presence diminishing, including the model of part-time works—distributing books together with popular magazines at kiosks—diminishing, and even affecting its strongly branded French arm, Flammarion (to Gallimard in 2012). The Grupo MauriSpagnol, rebranded as GeMS a few years ago, expanded its reach. Both Mondadori and GeMS spearheaded digital developments, each by setting up distribution platforms: Mondadori for its own purposes and GeMS by forming a consortium (eDigita) with Flammarion and Feltrinelli.
The catalog of available titles was expanded significantly to over 30,000 by mid 2012. Almost 20,000 were available as of the end of 2011, up from 1,600 by the end of 2010. eBook sales, even though they cannot compensate for declining print revenue, are expected to rise significantly, as is the penetration of reading devices. According to the Italian publishers’ association AIE, as of the end of 2011, Italy has seen an installed base of 533,000 ereaders and 858,000 tablets (Editoria Italiana 2012, fact sheet, made available for this report by AIE).
In terms of reading devices, Italian readers greatly prefer tablet computers over dedicated ereaders, which may add momentum to ebook evolution, as all major players—notably, the international market leaders such as Amazon, Apple, and Google, as well as others—roll out new, cheaper devices. Recent years also included a boom in online bookshops (with sales increasing by 24.5%). In 2011, online sales accounted for 9.7% of the total book trade.
All of the major publishing houses have invested in their ebook catalogs. As of the end of 2011, Mondadori, with an estimated catalog of 2,900 titles, had the largest ebook catalog, followed by RCS/Rizzoli (2,337 titles), GeMS (1,274 titles), and Feltrinelli (1,048 titles) (Informazioni Italiani).
The average retail price for an ebook in 2012 is €11.07 (compared to €11.18 in 2011) (AIE, provided for this report).
A study by AIE for 2010 recorded an average ebook price of €11.38, with a discount of 45% compared to hardcover editions, implying an overall decrease in the average retail price for ebooks. The VAT on ebooks was raised from 20% to 21% in 2012, compared to 4% for printed books, which reduced the revenue of ebooks versus printed editions.
The more broadly defined digital publishing market, notably including revenue from databases and various sources of Internet-based sales, accounted for revenues of €150 million in 2011 (up from €125.6 million in 2010), with database sales and related services increasing significantly (AIE).
The emerging ebook market may confront an additional challenge from piracy, according to the publishers’ association AIE, which found in February 2012 that three out of four bestselling titles were also available in pirated editions. Overall, the organization’s research found approximately 20,000 pirated titles on 100 illegal sites.
Since 2011, ebooks and ebook distribution have received high visibility in professional debates, media coverage, and promotions at major book fairs such as the Salon in Torino, while ebooks have overall been considered less of a threat to the book industry than was the case in other large European markets, notably in Germany.
The localized platform of Amazon is seen as the leading consumer venue for ebooks, followed by Apple, Kobo and IBS, with the global platforms accounting for some 80% of market share. (Estimate by Messagerie, for this report)
The relevant domestic distribution platforms include (in alphabetical order) Bookrepublic, Edigita, Mondadori, and Stealth (Simplicissimus Book Farm), while a number of domestic platforms also operate online bookstores, notably IBS, Bookrepublic, Bol, Feltrinelli, Mediaworld, Ultima Books (Simplicissimus Book Farm), Hoepli, webster.it, torrossa.it, sanpaolostore.it, and others.
eDigita
Three publishing companies —GeMS/Messaggerie, Rcs, and Feltrinelli, representing a combined market share of about 30% of Italian trade publishing— took the initiative in May 2010 and joined forces to create a consortium platform for the distribution of ebooks, branded eDigita, which claims to offer a solution “from publishers to publishers, for the emergence and development of books in digital formats.” eDigita serves a broad selection of Italian online retailers, including Mondadori’s bol.it site. In its announcement, eDigita stated that it expected the Italian ebook market to grow to a volume of €60 to €70 million by 2015.
Mondadori (and Telecom Italia)
Mondadori, Italy’s largest publishing group, sparked the emerging market by announcing a distribution agreement with Italy’s Telecom in October 2010, with Telecom and its ebook store Biblet, adding some initial 1,200 titles from Mondadori imprints (800 backlist plus 400 new titles, from Mondadori, Einaudi, Sperling & Kupfer, and Piemme). Biblet offers ebooks in EPUB and PDF format, with DRM protection. With retail prices under €12 to €14 for many trade titles, and many offers even lower, the venture shows a remarkably competitive approach to pricing. In May 2011, another agreement was announced, bringing together Mondadori with Vodafone Italy for the creation of a “digital tablet kiosk.” With Italians being strong early adopters of Apple’s iPad (reportedly 300,000 units were sold in Italy by October 2010, according to the online journal Publishing Perspective, October 2010), the open question of reading platforms —between tablets and E-Ink–based reading devices— is crucial for Mondadori, which has significant revenue from magazines and newspapers as well as book publishing.
Further distribution services include BookRepublic, Simplicissimus Book Farm, and the mutilingual primarily academic full text and jounrnal distribution platform Casalini Libri Torrossa.
Together with the leading Italian online platform for books, IBS, several international players compete for the Italian ebook market. Amazon set up a localized Italian platform in December 2011; Google then followed suit. Kobo started a partnership with Mondadori in October 2012, and Barnes & Noble is expected to set up a branch in Italy as well.
Since 2011, several local innovators have also started to operate in areas such as publishing, distributing, and promoting ebooks, like DigitPub. Founded in 2011 in Milan by former Harlequin Mondadori president Marco Ferrario, the group comprises the ebook store BookRepublic and two ebook publishing ventures: 40k, specializing in short digital-only books, both fiction and essays, most released in several languages, including Italian and English; and Emma Books, catering to a female readership, similar to Canadian Harlequin.
In addition, DigitPub also launched Zazie, a social network specializing in books and reading, and IfBookThen, a conference format that expanded in 2012 from Italy to Sweden and Spain.
When it comes to books, Sweden has a strong reputation of differing from what observers expect to see in a highly industrialized and technologically advanced market and, at the same time, providing a model for a balanced society founded on civic and democratic values and a social welfare state. Swedish—and Nordic—literature became world famous and staggeringly successful due to serial murder novels and conspiracies by the rich, with outcasts such as young hackers or grumpy old police officers being the sole and last resort of law and order. As world-class industrial brands struggle for survival (Nokia) or are passed on to Chinese ownership, one Swedish publishing house (Bonnier) set out to become Germany’s third-largest publisher, and has so far successfully imposed its online platforms on the domestic market with a strong and almost paramount presence.
Sweden does not yet have an Amazon or Kindle shop. Despite being a nation of early adopters in new digital technologies—text messages (SMS), Skype, and Spotify were invented in Scandinavia, and Sweden has been an early market for those innovations—ebooks are still in their very early days there. Yet according to many indicators, in 2012 ebooks are showing strong growth in Sweden, but again, in a unique way: libraries, not booksellers, are at the forefront of the trend, as they account for about 85 percent of the ebook market today, according to identical statements provided for this report by the trade magazine Svensk Bokhandel and the leading Scandinavian ebook distribution platform elib. This strong role of libraries, and their popularity with many readers, has resulted in significant skepticism from publishers, on how to commercialize ebooks in meaningful ways. (Publishing Perspectives, 22 August 2013) In 2013, the launch of a specialized platform to bring publishers and libraries together has been started under the brand name of Atingo. (For details, see at Distribution and specialized ventures
Furthermore, the Swedish (print) book market has recently come under pressure with an estimated decrease of 5 percent in the first half of 2012 versus 2011, a trend that continued for most book chains into the second half of the year. However, the leading online book retailer, Adlibris, of the Bonnier group, recorded an increase in turnover in December of around 2 percent. 2011 had seen 5 percent overall growth of the book market, largely driven by a few particularly strong bestsellers, yet this growth came after a weak first half of the year and after four years of continuously dropping sales—a trend not seen since the 1970s, according to the Swedish Publishers Association (quoted in Svensk Bokhandel, September 2012, and updated in January 2013 for this report).
In Sweden, as in the other Nordic countries, the ebook market is only newly emerging. eBook sales have hardly any current market share, and their growth has so far been challenged by uncertainty in most key parameters, including pricing and availability as well as VAT of 25 percent for ebooks versus 6 percent for printed editions.
Still, 2012 has seen a significant increase in sales, from 10,000 in 2011 to over 34,000 in 2012 (data from Svensk Bokhandel for this report). Holiday sales greatly contributed to this development, with ebook sales largely mimicking print bestsellers, including crime novels, E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and local celebrity biographies in the lead (information from distributor eLib for this report).
These recent dynamics notwithstanding, the gap in ebook development between Sweden and the English-language market is still remarkable, given Sweden’s significantly high Internet penetration and the affinity of Swedish consumers for digital offers.
One important factor may be the absence from the Swedish market of direct pressure from major global players, notably Amazon; at this point, no concrete dates have been announced for global platforms there. Apple opened a Swedish iBookstore in January 2012. Local online shops prevail instead, with Adlibris as the market leader, which is owned by the country’s largest publishing group, Bonnier, followed by Bokus, which is owned by the Swedish KF (or “Coop” group). In December 2012, a new platform was introduced by a group of independent publishing houses led by Norwegian Schibsted.
Adlibris launched its own ereading device, Letto, in June 2012, but Apple’s iPad is still considered to be the most popular device among readers. Among publishers, promotion of ebooks is currently not a high priority, and only a selection of new titles is released digitally, with an estimated 500 new digital titles rolled out per year versus 3,000 for printed books. Even leading publishers so far have only a limited catalog of available ebook titles (Harlequin has around 400; Nordstedts, Bonnier, and Natur & Kultur have fewer than 400 each; Piratförlaged has around 200). With retail prices between 100 and 170 Swedish krona, ebooks sell at about 10 percent less than printed editions.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €783 million | Publishers Association |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 4965 | Source: Publishers Association |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 528 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | 4800 | Estimate |
Market share of ebooks | ebooks only starting to appear, lending more popular than buying | |
Key market parameters | Most ebook titles without DRM; no price regulation; 6% VAT for printed books; 25% for ebooks |
A new and so far widely successful approach was started by Novellix, a startup founded in May 2011 and specializing in the publication of short stories and other books with a limited volume of around 32 pages each, which are released in print, audio, and ebook formats. Novellix titles are available through all major online platforms for books in Sweden, as well as through Amazon. Novellix’s titles include one of the early ebook bestsellers in Sweden: Heder, by Jens Lapidus (Publishing Perspectives, July 30, 2012).
The publishing and bookselling arm of KF, Akademibokhandeln (which is also linked, through the umbrella of KF, to Norstadts Publishing), and Bokus were also early innovators, as they launched an integrated reading and bookselling platform branded as Dito at the Gothenburg book fair in September 2011, with an app available for both Apple and Android platforms. At launch, Dito offered 5,400 titles in Swedish as well as between 75,000 and 100,000 titles in English, in “all formats,” according to the KF release (quoted in Svensk Bokhandel, September 11, 2011).
In contrast to other European markets, DRM is not widespread in Swedish ebooks.
Scandinavia’s largest ebook distributor is Elib, founded in 2000 and owned by the Swedish publishing companies Bonnier, Natur & Kultur, Norstedts (of the KF group), and Piratförlaget. This producer and distributor currently distributes about 50,000 digital books per month to major retailers and libraries in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The relative success of Elib is connected with strong ties as a service provider to libraries, which greatly dominate the ebook market at this point. Elib is selling about 13,500 ebooks each month to retailers and about 85,000 to libraries.
Publit is Sweden’s second-largest ebook distributor and initially offered print-on-demand services. It was founded in 2006 and offered its first releases in 2008.
In 2013 Publit, together with the technology provider Axiell, has launched a service, branded as Atingo to bringing publishers together with libraries, working with more than 1000 public libraries and 3,000 school libraries throughout Scandinavia and the UK.
With a population under 5.5 million (yet in one of Europe’s most developed regions, located between Germany and Sweden), Denmark hosts a significant publishing industry, with internationally active groups such as Egmont and Gyldendal, as well as significant local branches of major players in both publishing and retail from other Scandinavian countries, including Swedish Bonnier. The majority of the highly educated reading audience is fluent in English, to the point where translations into Danish are significantly impacted.
Local publishers—notably, Egmont, Gyldendal, Lindhardt og Ringhof, Politikens Forlag, and People’s Press—have started to release ebooks and are extending their catalog to an expected list of 13,000 titles by early 2013. Distribution has been organized through a consortium-driven platform, Publizon, which was founded in 2005.
Publizon is a platform for distributing ebooks and electronic audiobooks, which are “sold by the affiliated retailers. Publizon handles the task of assembling the content from numerous content providers and distributes this catalog to the associated retailers who can be both Internet bookstores and brick-and-mortar retailers” (company statement). Publizon is currently focusing on PDF and EPUB formats. The platform releases a weekly top ten ebook bestseller list, which currently displays a significant share of Scandinavian fiction, including authors Jo Nesbo and Jussi Adler-Olsen but also internationally acclaimed writers such as Haruki Murakami.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | 4,000 million DKK (€540) | Bogmarkedet |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | ca. 9,619 titles | |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 1,275 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | 7,000 | 10,000 trade titles expected by January 2013 (Bogmarkedet) |
Market share of ebooks | 1% to 2% in 2011 | Bogmarkedet |
Key market parameters | No price regulation. VAT at 25% for both print and ebooks. |
Publizon also imports foreign language titles, aside from private imports by consumers, notably from Amazon UK.
The largest ebook retailers are considered to be Saxo, which launched its dedicated platform for self-publishing (Saxo Publish) in September 2012; the dedicated ebook platform riidr.dk; Adlibris (by the Swedish Bonnier group); and Danish Gyldendal’s g.dk. But Amazon also has a significant market presence through its British site www.amazon.co.uk, catering to the high percentage of readers who are fluent in English. Apple’s iBookstore is also popular with users.
According to the Danish book trade magazine Bogmarkedet, E ink–based reading devices have a limited presence in Denmark, while the iPad is “dominating the market totally.”
The average retail price for ebooks is between 99 and 179 DKR (Danish crowns), at a discount of 40 to 50 percent from the printed edition. There is no price regulation for printed books or for ebooks, and both formats are subject to 25 percent VAT, which is among the highest rates in Europe.
With a population of just around 5 million—yet a nominal GDP per capita of $97,254 (2011) and an economy benefiting from rich offshore oil resources—Norway is spending part of its fortune on significant subsidies to its culture. The country’s book market, which is worth around €800 million, is commercially embedded in the wider Scandinavian market, dominated commercially by publishing companies from Sweden (e.g., Bonniers) and Denmark (Gyldendal), yet with a local book production that is strongly supported by government funding, as it acquires 1,000 copies of every book that a Norwegian author publishes. Furthermore, every Norwegian author who is a member of the Author’s Union receives an annual grant of $19,000 (Andrew Goldstone and Lee Konstantinou: To Norway!).
Aside from state support, local Norwegian authors, such as Jon Michelet (En sjøens helt, The Hero of the Seas) and Per Petterson (Jeg nekter, I Refuse), are embraced by a large domestic readership. And they compete on par with international stars like E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey, with 420,000 copies sold of the combined three volumes in 2012) or Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which sold 440,000 copies).
Unlike neighboring Sweden, ebooks have made a significant impact on Norwegian readers. In 2012, 148,000 ebooks worth 10 million Kroner (€1.34 million) were sold (data provided by the Norwegian book trade magazine Bok&samfunn for this report). Some 3,500 titles are available as commercial ebooks.
All ebooks from Norwegian publishers are distributed by one central platform, Bokskya, a service provided by the industry information service Bokbasen (or Book Database), which is co-owned by major publishers, distributors, and booksellers in Norway (more details here). By the end of 2012, Bokskya had 100,000 registered users (up from 50,000 in August). The platform calls itself a “digital bookshelf which provides secure storage of all your e-books purchased in a Norwegian online bookstore. The books can be downloaded or read in the apps offered by Norwegian online bookstores,” with all major retail platforms being members. In addition, Bokskya also offers an HTML5-based app for offline reading in EPUB format.
With the ambition of creating a vast library of earlier Norwegian literature and making it digitally available to the country’s readers, the National Library of Norway has started a substantial digitization effort. In collaboration with Kopinor (the Norwegian collecting society that represents all domestic copyright holders through its 22 member organizations), 250,000 works are to be digitized by 2017, with 60,000 titles already available “to anyone with a Norwegian IP address” (read more here).
2012 was a tough year for the Dutch book market, as sales had declined by 6.3% in value and 4.3% in volume. (Information provided by the publishers’ association www.nuv.nl for this report). Earlier reports saw an even stronger decline for the first quarter 2012, of –15.4%, hitting top-selling titles particularly hard and resulting in the chain bookstore Selexyz’ filing for bankruptcy in March (buchreport, March 26 and August 2, 2012). The overall economic crisis is seen as a central factor causing the shrinking of the book market. At the same time, the Dutch ebook market saw a comparatively positive evolution, even though it does not yet compensate for the loss in print revenue. For 2011, the trade association NUV recorded ebook sales of about €7.6 million from a catalog of some 10,000 commercialized titles in the Dutch language. By mid 2012, the title catalog was estimated to have grown to 16,000 titles, with a market share of 3 percent, which may grow to as much as 7 percent by the end of the year (estimates by goodereader.com as well as by Jürgen Snoeren at the Futurebook blog).
Anticipating further rapid growth in ebooks, the largest Dutch ebook publisher, De Arbeiderspers | A.W. Bruna Uitgevers, has decided to use watermarks instead of hard DRM effective January 18, 2013, for its current catalog of 1,200 digital titles (more here).
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €1,174 million (Trade: 557m) | Publishers Association |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 23,300 | Publishers Association (NUV) |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 1,293 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | 10,700 | Estimate, Publishers Association |
Market share of ebooks | 2.2% | Estimate, Publishers Association |
Key market parameters | Fixed book prices for year 1 after publication; VAT of 6% for printed books versus 21% (from October 2012) for ebooks |
This recent development must be compared to an initially slow start in an ebook market that had been characterized by readers and consumers that showed little enthusiasm in migrating from print to digital, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) carried out among consumers and experts from the publishing industry in 2010. In addition, the survey concluded that iPads and other tablets had little use as reading devices. The ebook market in the Netherlands shows similar characteristics as Germany, with a conservative approach to digital publishing outside of science, technical, and medical (STM) publishing. In public professional debates, the threats—rather than the opportunities—are highlighted, such as the risk of lost print book sales.
However, the situation started to change in early 2011, when the trade magazine Boekblad reported that as many ebooks were sold in the Netherlands in the first half of 2011 as were sold in 2010 altogether. For January through June 2011, ebook sales totaled €3.4 million, with about 327,000 units sold. From there, the growth curve continues to go steadily up.
Momentum is building in the Dutch ebook market from the addition of several of the big global players. Apple, Google, and Kobo (partnering with the retailer Libris BLZ in the Netherlands) launched localized platforms in 2012, and Amazon is as well. Barnes & Noble is expected to follow before the end of the year—challenging the current market dominance of BOL.com. As ebooks are not subject to a fixed retail price, a war on prices is expected to begin (see this blog post at FutureBook by Jürgen Snoeren).
Further expansion of the ebook market will have the advantage of a reading audience that has already heavily embraced printed books in English.
Online media store BOL is the leading Dutch retailer, serving over 2.7 million customers, which makes it the market leader in the online sales of media products and the largest online media shop of the Netherlands. The store has a catalog of over 3.8 million products. As for ebooks, BOL has partnered with German distributor Txtr since 2010. In February 2012, BOL.com was acquired by the general retail giant Ahold (in full: Koninklijke Ahold N.V.) for €350 million (read more here). In January 2013, BOL posted solid growth, making it the main engine for Ahold’s performance in the Netherlands, with books increasing at a double-digit rate, according to BOL book director Petra Lubbers (Boekblad, January 11, 2013).
French-founded B2B distribution platform ePagine also operates a Dutch platform serving a broad list of publishers, including Artemis, Athenaeum, Kluwer, and Querido and retailers and wholesalers Boekhuis and Luisterhuis, as well as ePagine itself and the British Gardners Books.
Several other platforms have been launched to sell, stream, and lend ebooks, including Yindo and ebook.nl.
Reading Devices
In the Netherlands, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Philips, introduced ereaders at the end of 2008 and reported sales of just over 4,000 units by the end of 2009. Sales rose to 50,000 ereaders by mid year 2010, but this was not enough to prevent iRex from filing for bankruptcy protection in June 2010.
Several other ereader manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy protection as well, including the manufacturer of the Cool-er ereader and the European division of Foxit.
In the meantime, a number of ereaders are available that have the capability to integrate with online stores. For example, bol.com offers readers with WiFi capabilities, among them the Sony eReader and the BeBook Neo, which was developed in the Netherlands.
Pricing
In the Netherlands, as in Germany, bookstores must use the price defined by the publisher because of fixed book price arrangements. The fixed book price arrangement in Germany is not subject to any time restriction, whereas the corresponding arrangement in the Netherlands is applicable for only the first year after the publication of printed and digital books.
As in most other European markets, a VAT of 6 percent is an advantage for printed books versus ebooks (taxed at a VAT of 19 percent, which will rise to 21 percent by October 2012; source: Boekblad).
Austria is a good example of a relatively small market neighboring a much larger territory and a market of the same language. With a population of about 8 million, Austria is roughly 10 percent the size of Germany in all major relevant respects for this study and shares both the vernacular and, largely, the current cultural and media framework of its dominating neighbor. Both countries are members of the European Union and the Euro Zone.
With regard to printed books, books from German publishers already reign supreme in Austrian bookshops, namely the chain stores as well as the online platforms of Amazon, Thalia, and Weltbild, serving the Austrian market from headquarters in Germany. Amazon also serves Austria from its German Kindle store, which opened a localized version in April 2011. Although local Austrian bestselling lists show, as would be expected, significant differences from locally branded authors (e.g., local celebrities as well as local literary talent), the overall pattern and a share of roughly two-thirds of those charts are very similar to those in Germany (for details, see Diversity Report 2010).
On the other hand, local Austrian publishers have always confronted substantial hurdles to bringing their books to retailers, to media, and hence to consumers in Germany, where Austrian imports account for only about 3 percent (not, as expected by the equivalents in size, around 10 percent). In recent years, this imbalance has significantly increased. Between 2008 and 2010, in an overall flat book market in both Germany and Austria, imports from Germany to Austria have increased by 8.14 percent, as exports by Austrian publishers into Germany slumped by a remarkable 24 percent, reflecting on a domestic publishing sector in Austria that has ever growing difficulties in reaching out beyond its borders.
The Austrian debate on ebooks has been largely shaped by Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels, the Austrian publishers and booksellers support of their German equivalent Börsenverein, in their legal action against Google’s unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works from libraries and against the proposed—and, at least for the US, widely accepted—Google settlement. No recent comments have been released as to the association’s stand in view of those recent developments.
In November 2012, the association published its second report on ebooks in Austria, but with most data limited to the years 2011 and 2010, which have only very limited value to assess the situation as of late 2012. Because Austria is largely served by publishers, retailers, and distributors from Germany, it is fair to assume that developments as described for Germany largely apply also to the Austrian market, meaning that ebooks are increasingly embraced by the strongest readers, and that retail sales show a significant shift from traditional chain stores to online, notably to Amazon. This last trend has been highlighted by several small Austrian publishers interviewed in late 2012 for this report. Some of the interviewees, however, recognized in that shift an opportunity, notably with regard to bringing ebooks to the tenfold larger German market, as it allowed them to compete on par with the much larger German publishing houses. eBooks and the various services proposed by Amazon would more and more lower the barriers of entry and compensate for a disadvantage of geography for small enterprises.
A top 20 fiction ebook bestselling list for October 2012, which was included in the association’s ebook report, was unsurprisingly dominated by James’ Shades trilogy, followed by Rowling with Casual Vacancy and numerous international blockbuster titles, like Ken Follett’s Giants saga and Jonasson’s Hundred Year Old Man. All top 20 titles came from German publishers.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €792 million | Publishers Association |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 8,505 | Publishers Association |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 1,028 |
Austrian publishers have been very cautious with regard to investing in digitization, with most starting only in 2011, or even 2012, to regularly offer new print releases in ebook formats. A preference for direct distribution of ebooks by the publishers, which could be seen in 2011, has diminished, as most houses have signed service contracts with German distributors.
Some, like general trade publisher Haymon, started to build a modest list in 2011 and added digital editions of their printed releases as a routine procedure as of spring 2012.
But, as on the German side, the ebook market is largely dominated at this point by a few leading publishing groups. It is forseeable that it will be increasingly difficult for small Austrian publishing houses to carve out a digital niche.
A first survey of the Austrian ebook market, released on September 29, 2011, by the Austrian publishers’ and booksellers’ association HVB showed that just 17 percent of Austrian publishers have sold ebooks as of 2010. Another 21.7 percent are planning to do so in 2011, 30.1 percent at some point in the future, and 36 percent said that they had no plans for ebooks. This compares to Germany, where 35 percent of publishers already offer ebooks, and another 43 percent plan to include ebook editions in the near future (for details, see the Börsenverlag study from spring 2011 in the discussion on Germany). The Austrian study reveals several more distinctly different developments and expectations between the two countries, as even those publishers in Austria who have launched ebooks do so for just 10 to 20 percent of their new releases and prefer distribution from their own website (with online retailers and Libreka being the second and third most popular options for distribution). PDF is the prevalent file format, with 88.5 percent of the titles, but half are available as EPUB as well, and 15 percent in the MobiPocket format for Amazon’s Kindle. Three out of four books are distributed with some copyright management included, but only 35 percent of the books come with DRM, and 65 percent have digital watermarks built in.
Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that no domestic infrastructure for ebook distribution and services has been set up, and publishers—just like local chain and independent bookstores—are instead encouraged to use services from companies based in and run from Germany. At this point, no local branch offices of any of the major German service providers have been opened.
As in other European countries, books are subject to a reduced VAT of 10 percent, and ebooks carry the full 20 percent VAT and are discounted against printed editions by 10 percent on average.
With an estimated 8,000 trade titles available as ebooks and scanning initiatives for public domain books accounting for about 27,00 titles (mostly in PDF), the Polish ebook market is in its early stages. However, the topic is widely debated, such as in panels at the 2011 Warsaw Book Fair. More importantly, major domestic actors are committed to developing their strategic position.
By the end of 2011, and for the holidays, ereaders were promoted heavily, and most publishers started to add rights for ebook editions to new author contracts. However, printed editions and ebooks were considered different products and were usually not promoted together. This resulted in only modest growth in sales. eBook bestselling titles included Umberto Eco’s new novel, The Prague Cemetery, and the biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
Regarding devices, industry sources estimate an installed base of about 20,000 Kindles, 7,000 ONYX BooX readers, 20,000 to 40,000 iPads, and 250,000 to 350,000 iPhones (source: EMPIK).
A discussion of ebooks in Poland cannot be limited to a focus on an exclusively domestic market. Not only are foreign-language imports—notably in English and, to a certain degree, in German—already a staple for printed books, but in addition, imports and adaptations of devices are met with significant attention, such as when a Kindle edition of the weekly news magazine Polityka is promoted (without a localized Kindle shop by Amazon in sight) or when a Polish programmer comes up with an upgrade that allows the popular American Kindle device to read ebooks aloud in Polish.
Empik, the largest chain store and online shop for books and cultural goods in general (CDs, films, multimedia games, art&pap, press, tickets for cultural events), which is owned by NFI Empik Media & Fashion, is moving into the emerging market, with 175 stores in Poland and 19 in Ukraine (as of October 4, 2011). In 2007, Empik set up empik.com to extend their international business by offering foreign language (primarily English and German) products and by catering to communities of Polish customers internationally. In its online stores, Empik is offering 250,000 Polish and 425,780 products in its foreign catalog. Since November 2010, Empik has promoted its own dedicated ereading device, the Oyo, and in 2011 it added the Boox as well as other devices. By summer 2011, the Empik ebook catalog included 4,521 titles in EPUB format and 4,068 in PDF format, with most (7,010) selling under 50 Zloty (or €12), similar to the retail price for printed books. eBooks have their own section at empik.com, plus a “Top 50 ebooki” bestseller chart and promotional campaigns such as heavily discounting a popular series (which included the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy) in March 2011.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €697 million | Renek Mendrun: Polish book market study, 2010 |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 21,740 | |
New titles per 1 million inhabitants | 571 | |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | 18,000 | at EMPIK, by year end 2011: 9,937 ebooks, 1,017 audiobooks, 7,288 free ebooks for logged on customers (EM&F Group/EMPIK/Virutalo) |
Key market parameters |
Virtualo Sp. z o.o., in which Empik Group holds a controlling stake of 51 percent, claims to be the largest electronic bookstore in Poland, specializing in a mix of ebooks, digital magazines, and devices, with a catalog of 12,600 ebook titles.
Weltbild is the Polish subsidiary of the successful German parent Weltbild, as a chain store, online shop, and ebook platform; Weltbild relaunched its Polish platform earlier in 2011, aiming to strengthen its position in the Polish market as a vendor for cultural as well as beauty and household supplies, catering to some 800,000 customers each month.
BezKartek (literally “book without pages”) is a platform launched in 2009 and dedicated to the distribution of ebooks, audiobooks, ereaders, and Apple iPhones. Its catalog includes 145,000 books, of which 1,400 are in Polish. The initiative’s goal is to “popularize ebooks,” serving various formats (PRC, PDF, EPUB, and mp3), and to expand their offer by partnering with selected foreign publishers, notably German educational and language teaching Klett Group and the Polish branch of Canadian romance publisher Harlequin. The venture is the offspring of Apetonic, a local consultancy specializing in IT and telecommunications and financed through the Dracula Investment Fund, plus private investors from Poland and France.
Libranova is a promotional platform for ebooks and digital reading.
Wolne Lektury is a project launched by the Modern Poland Foundation in 2007, promoting and displaying school reading as identified by the Polish Ministry of National Education, with a library of predominantly Polish classical literary books in the public domain.
Overview by Miha Kovac
While most of the international debate focuses on ebook developments in only the largest markets, an analysis of smaller markets allows an exploration of whether or not the digital publishing and distribution of books can provide new opportunities for small and highly diverse book cultures, with audiences that are often particularly fragmented between a domestic population and relevant groups that have migrated overseas. Also, it allows us to highlight how the emergence of ebooks reinvigorate and accelerate other patterns of change, such as the increasing tendency of the strongest readers to read in two languages, their mother tongue and English. Finally, relatively small local publishers and retailers in those markets usually find themselves confronted at once by totally new competitors as consumers privately take advantage of the possibilities for privately importing books and e-reading devices from global platforms such as Amazon or Apple, which results in further strain for local actors in an already strained economic environment.
The case study of this chapter aims at analyzing this complex evolution, as Central Europe offers a good example through its unique set of small countries that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic sea, each with less than five million inhabitants and speakers of languages more or less limited to their national states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia). Regardless of their shared history in the second half of the twentieth century, significant economic, political, and cultural differences are also an inherent part of their contemporary identities, as much as the fact that today’s economic recession hits them in very different ways.
The book markets in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, commonly described as the Baltic region, were most severely struck by the financial crisis after 2008 and started to show new growth only in 2012. The economic evolution of Slovenia, meanwhile, is different, as it had its worst year in 2012, resulting in a decline of the book market by 10 percent—while it was up by 5 to 10 percent in Latvia and Estonia.
Regardless of their differences, these book markets share at least three similar characteristics:
The only empirical reference available are British export statistics, which hint at, for instance, a share of 10 to 15 percent of English books in Slovenia, while in Latvia, Lithuania, and Croatia, English books supposedly account for around 6 percent of the local market. In all other CEE countries, English-language imports represented 3 to 5 percent of the market in 2011. This difference probably echoes the fact that, in Slovenia, even in the time of Yugoslavia, before 1992, English was the first foreign language usually taught in schools, as opposed to Russian in the other countries of the region.
According to data from the British Publishers’ Association (PA), in 2012, printed book imports from the U.K. remained stable in Slovenia, Slovakia, and Hungary and were slowly growing in Romania, the Czech Republic, and Latvia, while Lithuania and Estonia saw a significant 20% growth, as opposed to considerable drops in Croatia (as importers expected the abolition of custom charges with Croatia’s entrance into the European Union by January 2013). In Serbia, a severe general recession has caused a cut in English book imports.
Interestingly, most CEE publishers that agreed to complete a questionnaire for this report have not considered the import of English books as significant or endangering their own sales of translated international bestsellers, with the notable exceptions of Lithuania and Slovenia, where we estimate that notably strong young readers read more than 50 percent in English. Those who emphasize the impact of English reading habits refer to the lower prices of imported books and the broader choice of available titles through both local bookstores and through Amazon.
Today, ebooks have everything they need to turn another page in this context. While printed books must overcome slow delivery and high shipping costs, ebooks can be downloaded instantly and at even lower prices than printed books in English. Readers of English are therefore obviously among the earliest adopters of ebooks and e-reading devices. The ultimate consequences, though, may prove to be truly disruptive. Experimental research conducted at the Florence Publishing Summer School (organized by university students and teachers from Paris, Oxford, Leipzig, and Ljubljana) has revealed that, in Slovenia in June 2013, a remarkable 70% of the 100 top-selling titles in the Slovene IBookstore were in English. By comparison, in Germany, English titles accounted for only 1 percent of the top 100 titles, 3 percent in Italy, and 2 percent in France.
The domestic production of ebooks in local languages is a different matter altogether. The relatively poor available data indicate that, in all CEE countries, the number of ebook titles in local languages is still just a fraction of the overall output. In 2012, for example, only 400 to 600 ebook titles were available in Slovenia, Croatia, Latvia, and Lithuania each, and 1,600 titles were available in Estonia. However, in the first half of 2013, significant growth was recorded across almost all CEE countries: in Croatia, the number of available ebook titles increased to 1,800, to 1,000in Slovenia and Lithuania, to more than 9,000 in the Czech Republic, to between 5,000 and 6,000 in Hungary, and to 2,000 in Estonia.
In 2011, opening localized versions of their ebook stores was hardly an option for global platforms such as Amazon or even Kobo. In Apple’s iBookstore, CEE books were limited to just a few. However, since 2011, a surprising number of local e-bookstores has started to emerge, mostly in the form of startups (e.g. Palmiknihy in the Czech Republic) or as new ventures from established local combined booksellers and publishers (e.g. Zvaizgne in Latvia, Pegasas in Lithuania, and Mladinska knjiga in Slovenia).
In addition, some booksellers without publishing activities have built their own ebook platforms (such as Apollo in Estonia), and in some cases, even telephone companies have launched such experiments (e.g. VIPnet and Hrvatski Telekom in Croatia). In the Czech and Slovak republics, platforms such as Martinus and Palmiknihy operate across the border in both countries, forming the only cross-border operations in a highly fragmented region.
Judging from publishers’ responses to a questionnaire for this report, a majority assumes that local platforms are currently local market leaders, as Amazon has not yet entered the CEE market. This might change by 2014, as Amazon has announced plans to establish a regional logistics center in the Czech Republic, and it must be assumed that other global players will follow suit quickly.
Besides such locally developed e-distribution platforms that were prevalent in the region, Mladinska knjiga in Slovenia has developed its own digital bookstore in a partnership with the American company Impelsys (full disclosure: the author of this chapter has been in charge of this project). Additionally, in Slovenia in September 2013, the ebook library distribution platform Biblos (owned by the local fiction publisher Studentska zalozba), in cooperation with Slovene public libraries, has started to test the unique business model of offering customers the possibility to either buy an ebook or borrow it for free for two weeks, with both alternatives proposed through the same Web page.
It must be stressed that, in CEE, there is no real price war between ebook-sellers and print booksellers, as in the majority of cases, ebook retail prices are set by the publishers. Quite obviously, the common vertical integration between publishers, booksellers, and ebook sellers seems to make a strong case for a rather peaceful cohabitation of the analogue and digital side of the business, and the attitude is shared even by independent ebook sellers.
In a majority of CEE countries, most of publishers discount ebooks by about 30 percent, with Slovenia being the only exception, as publishers have decided to set the prices of ebooks equal to those of paperback editions, the main reason for this being the fact that, due to the higher VAT and higher royalties, the production costs of ebooks more or less equal those of printed books.
In all CEE countries, the preferred format for local ebook titles is EPUB, and most publishers use hard DRM, but with a growing skepticism as to its value, so watermarking is gaining in popularity.
In the tiny Slovene publishing market, which is worth an estimated €80 to €100 million at consumer prices, according to the official statistics, more than 6,000 titles are released every year. However, recent research has shown that, out of these 6,000, only 3,500 to 4,500 titles are published for sale on the marketplace, while the rest are reports, directories, and self-published titles for both corporate and private use.
Slovenians are remarkably strong readers and are used to reading books not only in their native language but also in English and, to a lesser degree, in German. In larger bookstores, English titles—which represent an estimated 15 percent of the Slovenian market—are not in separate foreign language sections but are seamlessly intermingled with domestic titles. Public libraries with more than 12 loans annually per inhabitant add to the ample reading diet of Slovenians.
In 2013, two ebook distribution platforms, Biblos and e-Emka, appeared. Owned by fiction publisher Studentska zalozba, Biblos started as a library lending platform in cooperation with Slovene public libraries and quickly registered more than 7,000 ebook library users. In September 2013, Biblos started to offer users the opportunity to buy ebooks from the library platform if no copies for lending were available. Mladinska knjiga started to run its ebook store in July 2013 with 200 titles, including a majority of its bestselling authors.
By the time this report was completed, it was clear that, in first nine months of 2013, sales of Slovene ebooks grew more than 300% in comparison to all of 2012 (when only Apple’s iBookstore was open for business), and the number of available ebook titles in Slovene has doubled. Nevertheless, ebook sales still represented less than 1% of the overall market, and only Mladinska knjiga and Studentska zalozba are systematically publishing their new releases as ebooks, together with print.
The e-bestselling authors of 2012 and 2013 were Jonas Jonnason and Sylvia Day, and the Slovene publisher of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy decided against an ebook version of this title. Two heavy bestsellers of 2013, Dan Brown’s Inferno and Sylvia Day’s Entwined with You were published simultaneously in ebook and print formats. It can be assumed that, concerning reading devices, tablets and smartphones prevail.
Ebooks are subject to the normal 22 percent VAT, while printed books benefit from a reduced rate of 8.5 percent. A legal deposit applies to all Slovene ebooks.
Key Indicators | Values | Sources, comments |
Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) | €80 million in 2012 | Estimates by Mladinska publishers |
Titles published per year (new and successive editions) | 5,621 (from 6,139 in 2010, of which around 3,500 are trade titles) | Estimates by Mladinska publishers |
eBook titles (available from publishers) | 1000 | Estimates by Studentska zalozba and Mladinska publishers |
The Lithuanian book market was hit hard by the economic crisis in 2009 and 2010, with a significant recovery starting in 2011, as 3,280 new titles were published (up 22.3 percent from 2010), and 3,450 new titles were estimated for 2012.
Some 1,000 commercial ebook titles had been released by mid-2013. eBooks are subject to the normal VAT of 21 percent (compared to a reduced rate of 9 percent for printed books). So far, a legal deposit is only partially applied to ebooks, and ebooks have not been dealt with in national copyright legislation.
Several publishers, including Alma littera, Obuolys, Šviesa, TEV, and Baltos lankos, have started to launch ebook editions of their titles alongside the print editions, with EPUB being the most popular format, and most ebooks are protected by hard DRM. Most ebooks are distributed by Skaitykle, a platform that also sells reading devices. Other ebook distributors include Knygos and 100knygu. More recently, publishers have started to distribute their ebooks via global platforms, notably Apple, Amazon, and Kobo. PCs and laptop computers are frequently used for reading ebooks, as dedicated ereaders are costly for Lithuanian consumers.
It is estimated that sales of ebooks will reach 1% of the market by the end of 2013. The biggest e-bestseller of 2013 was the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. It is assumed that, among reading devices, tablets and smartphones prevail.
Piracy is an issue of increasing concern, with a number of websites dedicated to delivering Lithuanin books, often scanned from print, notably El-knygos.eu, Elknygos.lt, and Nemokamospdfknygos (Aida Dubkevičiute, director of the Lithuanian Publishers Association).
In 2012, the Bulgarian print book market grew by some 8 percent, with an annual inflation of 4 percent, so the recent net growth was 4 percent.
In Bulgaria, some 1,500 ebook titles are available, of which two-thirds are from Bulgarian authors and the rest from translations. The market share of ebooks is lower than 1%, maybe about 0.2%. English-language titles are mostly ordered by individuals from Amazon, but no detailed information is available.
The domestic market is largely dominated by local—as opposed to international—publishing houses, a majority of which have started to release ebook editions of new titles, notably Ciela, Colibri, Trud, Hermes, Era, Enthusiast, and Gurme.
The leading distributors are Ciela, Vivabooks, Vivacom, Helikon, Bgkniga, Mtel, Biblio, and Ebooks, all using Adobe Content Server DRM, which is reportedly causing problems on certain smartphones. Preferred reading devices are dedicated ereaders, laptop computers, and tablets.
Piracy is a serious problem on the digital front, but not for printed books. Books are often scanned and illegally distributed via the Internet, with distribution sites generating income from advertisements. Blocking of websites is not allowed.
Source: Vesselin Todorov, Ciela Norma, Sofia, Bulgaria.
The Hungarian book market has been nominally flat over the past several years, but when including inflation, a decline of 5 to 6 percent per year is revealed.
Currently, some 5,000 to 6,000 titles are available as ebooks, representing a market share of around a percent overall and around 1 percent for fiction. The overall leading trade publishers, notably Ulpius-ház, Magvető, and Kossuth, have been most active in the digital segment, providing the Mobi, EPUB, and PDF formats, usually with social DRM. The strongest distributors and retailers for ebooks are Ekonyv.hu, Multimediaplaza.com, and Polc.hu, aside from direct purchases by consumers from the big global platforms (notably Amazon and Apple).
An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 pirated —that is, mostly illegally scanned— books are on offer, but stakeholders see their impact no longer increasing as legal versions become available.
The biggest e-bestseller in the first half of 2013 were the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and three books by Hungarian authors.
The VAT on ebooks is 27%, one of the highest across Europe, while the VAT on printed books is only 5%. The preferred protection is watermarking, and the preferred formats EPUB and Mobi.
Source: Geza Morcsanyi, Magvető, Budapest, Hungary, and Péter Inkei, Budapest Observatory.
The Romanian book market saw a major downturn around 2008–2009, and since then, it has remained flat. Kiosk (or partwork) editions have also decreased in volume recently.
An ebook segment only started to emerge in 2012, and for 2013, it is estimated that the market share will be above 1%. Approximately 65% of newly published fiction books are converted to eformat and put on sale as ebooks. According to industry estimates, only 10 to 12 trade publishing houses have started to release ebooks, including Polirom, Humanitas, and Litera. Currently, some 1,500 to 1,800 titles are available in digital format, mostly in EPUB. The leading ebook distributor is Elefant.
Besides local authors, Tracy Chevalier and Haruki Murakami were e-bestsellers in the first half of 2013. As in most of the other CEE countries, the VAT on ebooks is much higher than the VAT on printed books (24% vs. 9%).
No Kindle editions are produced, as Romanian is currently not among the officially supported languages.
Source: Siviu Lupescu, Polirom, Iasi, Romania.
The Serbian book market has an estimated retail value of €50 to €70 million (excluding textbooks).
No local distribution platform for ebooks exists so far, as the cost of development would exceed the possible income. For the Apple platform, some local subcontractors operate and normally add a markup of 30 percent on the retail price of a work, in addition to Apple’s 40 percent fee, leaving a mere 30 percent for the originators of the work. Amazon’s direct publishing services are not available in Serbia, and the Serbian alphabet (either in Cyrillic or in Latin) is not actively supported for the generation of ebooks.
Piracy is endemic, with illegal downloads of movies, music, and now ebooks being routine for many consumers. As a result, content owners (namely publishers but also authors and translators) are very reluctant to expose their content to piracy in digital formats.
Source: Aleksandar Drakulic, Knjizara, Belgrade.
Conclusions on Central and Eastern Europe
In this current, early stage, small markets overall seem to lag behind in their domestic production of ebooks, as the emerging new niche is challenged by a number of factors: required investments are difficult to earn back in small or at best flat local markets with small language communities. Some local languages have the additional disadvantage of so far not being supported by global ebook platforms for producing ebooks—though in some cases, popular Web browsers are available in local languages, which opens a cultural and practical gap between the usage of the local language against the globalization of English. The strongest—and often best educated and fairly affluent—readers are also those in a position to read in English and make direct purchases, particularly from the shops offered by Amazon and Apple, as well as Kobo and Google, allowing those global players to expand their market share without the cost of localizing their offerings, hence competing with the usually small locally emerging platforms.
In this context, a set of problems was exposed, the most obvious of them being the higher VAT on e-books and higher royalties on translations that more or less equalize the production costs of ebooks and printed books.
Piracy is often not so much direct competition for a commercial legal offer but instead compensates for a legal title list that is nonexistent or still highly limited in scope, while local users nevertheless become accustomed to finding books in digital formats on the Internet, again putting the local legal offerings at a disadvantage against the much broader and better-marketed as well as better-protected offerings in the English language.
The potential of digital technology to cater to niches and to audiences spread geographically at low cost and great convenience has so far not even started to become a competitive advantage for small markets and small local actors.
Google’s library-scanning initiative, publicized and made accessible via the Hathi Trust, is currently the by far largest collection of digitized books from the many languages in the region, and it will be interesting to observe if, after the 2012 settlement with US publishers, that ressource will play a role for starting to change this imbalance, at least in terms of expanding a digital catalog in many small or peripheral languages.