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The acceleratedtransformation of theecosystem of authors, booksand readingBy spring 2014, ebooks have earned a presencein a growing number of book markets, and insome, notably in the United States and the UnitedKingdom, ebooks drive the market. In Germany,ebooks at least in fiction, begin to berecognized as engines of sectorial growth.While the ebook niche had initially been boosted by theincrease in purchases of devices, with a clear tendency fortablets to winning over dedicated ereaders, in 2013,ebooks have started to gaining their specific profileamong readers. Ebooks not only account for well over 20%of genre fiction in the UK. Various lists of bestsellingebooks, as sketchy as they might be thus far, differ clearlyfrom the print charts, hinting at forming a specific segmentin books - and not simply a technical format. In countrieslike Germany or France, with fixed book prices and a firmstance of publishers trying to maintain ebook prices orientedat print prices as benchmarks, this can lead to a rapiddiscrepancy, or even confrontation, over prices, betweenthe world of old publishers, and the new readers and consumerswho move all their cultural consumption to digitalenvironments.The few leading global players, Amazon, Apple, but alsoGoogle, Kobo, and a growing number of local or regionalleaders, Fnac, the German Tolino alliance, China Mobile aswell as Spanish Telefonica with Grupo Planeta, or BrazilianLivraria Cultura with Kobo, are keen to forming paramountplatforms to ideally wrap their offer around all reading, listeningand watching that a cultural audience is craving for- pushing the traditional book country to the fringes.Particularly the expansion of Amazon, but also the ambitionsof Apple and, to a lesser degree for the moment, ofGoogle, to assuming all the different roles of the old fashionedbook profession, from the creation through to production,distribution and marketing of - printed and electronic- books, have triggered an increasingly ferociouscriticism, at various levels, among their customers, who callon their governments to make sure that the global leadersactually pay local taxes, or even to encourage buy localinitiatives, to provide a similar convenience and choice,with the comfort of being good, local emloyers, sustainingcommunities and the diversity of culture. This spawns areal wave of innovation, as new digital-only publishingventures are experimenting together or alongside withnew reading communities, book streaming services or localizedselfpublishing startups, while on the other end ofthe scale, the pressure in the publishing pot leads to industryconsolidation, resulting in ever bigger, more globalgroups, with the merger of Penguin Random House definingthe agenda.The Global eBook Report 152