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Receptiveness for foreign(English) readingIt has been argued that ebooks will give a big push toEnglish reading around the globe, for the simple reasonthat ebooks travel at low cost over long distances,crossing borders seamlessly, once globally actingcompanies have set up the required infrastructuresand made the required legal arrangements per eachtarget market, and also because early adopters of ebooksare the strongest readers and the most worldly, the mostfrequent travelers, and the most linguistically competentconsumers. Although at this stage no data are available asevidence for this assumption, some indicators can neverthelessbe identified.In countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden, Englishlanguageprint books have become increasingly popularwith readers; such is also the case in several Central andSoutheast European countries, including Slovenia, to thepoint that translation of English-language fiction into locallanguages has been reported to be challenged by importsof the original editions. For details on English reading inthat region, see at “The accelerating impact of Englishreading” on page 50.In Germany, the by far the largest wholesaler, Libri, hadsuccessfully started to expand its foreign-language packagesto retailers almost a decade ago, as could be seen inthe ever-growing foreign-language selections in the largestchain stores, notably Thalia. Although these foreignlanguageshelves used to be occupied predominantly byliterary classics, it is now the latest releases of bestsellingfiction from the US and, to a lesser degree, the UK thatconstitute this segment’s profile.More recently, an increasing number of online shops haveadded dedicated English catalogs with an increasing numberof titles, even in countries like France, Italy, or Spain,which were traditionally more difficult to access forforeign-language reading.Amazon, which expanded its presence with localized onlinestores in Italy and Spain in 2011, is strongly promotingits English catalog as well as increasingly broad offeringsin other languages, both in print and for the Kindle.But the strongest force in the emergence of an internationalweb of English reading is probably Amazon’s integrationof its ebook catalog, with the Kindle reading platformand an increasingly uniform pricing policy ready toflatten the differences in what an ebook costs a consumeracross markets.115 The Global eBook Report