The goal of this study —and particularly the updates that we’ve continued to make to it after its initial presentation at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt in October 2011— is to pursue a mapping process of international ebook markets and to provide details and insights for a better understanding of those challenges and opportunities. The current update of this report, now rebranded as Global Ebook report, is the first edition published directly by Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, after O’Reilly Media generously decided to handing over the rights to do so after deciding to discontinue the Tools of Change conference series.
This study primarily dwells on data, reporting, and research done by others, adding original research only on some key aspects (such as ebook pricing issues in Europe). Its aim is to summarize, condense, and —with the ambition of comparing trends and developments— frame the status quo and strategic perspectives with regard to global ebook markets. (It is more and more significant that the plural “markets” is used here, as compared to the initial 2011 study.)
For many markets, we also want to provide at least a directory of brief references to a variety of local actors, be they involved, as independents, in ebook publishing, or act as aggregators and distributors, or launch reading and writing community platforms.
To some extent, descriptions of earlier developments reaching back to 2011 and even 2010 have been kept in the text as a reference and for historic context.
The ambition is not and cannot be to track every ebook market development worldwide. We are very much aware of the incompleteness of the report in both geographical and thematic regards. Japan and Korea are missing from this study, as is a chapter on the digitization of educational materials, to name just a few blind spots. But much more fundamentally, we cannot yet refer to any useful global map of the ebook business, nor to reliable definitions of identifiers and parameters. As a result, it is mostly hard, if not impossible, to provide comparable figures for even basic statistics. The market share of ebooks sometimes refers to total industry revenues - which makes only limited sense, as ebooks concentrate usufally on a few sectors, notably fiction. Also the number of available titles as an ebooks is difficult to assess, as for most markets, no clear line can be drawn to differentiate between commercial titles, and corporate or public domain works, not to speak to the sky rocketing number of selfpublished ebooks of all sorts. As will be shown in the chapter on ebook pricing strategies, this results in uncomparable ebook charts, as the definitions (and the intentions behind the bestselling lists) are a strong illustration of the traditional book trade, and the new digital ecosystem are drifitng apart.
This report is thus very much a survey limited by the availablility of material. Despite all of the previously listed shortcomings, the ambition is to serve as a reference for the industry as well as nonprofit stakeholders. In return, we strongly encourage feedback and —even more enthusiastically— the input of information and data to improve the foundations of this analysis.