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Big Five trade publishing groups: Ebook related key parameters. (Sources: Company and trade media reports)Penguin Random House Hachette Livre Harper Collins Macmillan Simon &SchusterGroup revenues frompublishing€2655m (2013) €2066 $1189m (2012) €1608m (2012) $809m (2013)Revenues from ebooks 20% 10.4% 39% 27% n.a.Revenues from ebooks(details, 2013)100 m ebooks sold; -9% in volum2013/2012);RH: 10% of German revenues from ebooks;Penguin: 33% ebook rev. in US (2011)30% rev. in US trade; 27% in UKadult tradeRev. of ebooks in France: n.a.28% revenues fromebooksUS: 7.4m ebooks sold(+8%)n.a.2.6%m ebooks soldgardère Publishing, headquartered in France), HarperCollins(a division of the US-British-Australian News Corp),Simon & Schuster (a division of the CBS Corporation, headquarteredin New York), and Macmillan (the trade publishingarm of the German Holtzbinck group).The map which is emerging from an analysis of the roleand scope of ebooks at the Big Five allows to identify a fewfault lines that have emerged in recent years, and so despitethe many blanks it has thus far.On a global level, and in some of the largest book marketsin North America and in Europe, a few publishing groupshave started to re-invent themselves from market leadersinto global enterprises through a mixture of consolidation(led by the Penguin Random House merger, and the group’snew acquisition of Spanish Santillana), and vertical integration(which for all Big Five, however, lacks the last stepto the consumer, retail). And among those Big Five, the roleand impact from digital transformation and from internationalambition is highly diverse, as Hachette is anchoredin a domestic market in France where ebooks are so farrather held off, than embraced, even by the company’sown management. Simon & Schuster is, by comparison tothe other four big groups, still a company largely cateringto the US market alone. HarperCollins, for some time expectedto be sold by its TV and multimedia driven mothercompany, has recently made a come back within News-Corp, while at Holtzbrinck, despite recent restructuring, theUS and UK arms are largely kept separate from the Germanholdings (as is the case for Random House), while at Holtzbrinck,an integration of publishing with the digital venturesof the group has so far not been implemented - andseveral early and promising digital ventures of the mother,pioneering notably digital social communities, have overtime been marginalized by globalizing US based platforms,notably Facebook and GoodReads.But even the largest publishing groups are dwarfed bythose Internet platforms which control the direct access tothe users - in the form of consumers, and readers: Amazon,Apple, Google, Facebook, with telecommunicationsgroups (like Telefonica in Spain and in Latin America, orDeutsche Telekom, with the German Tolino alliance) puttingtheir footprint onto a digital content market, where digitalbooks and book distribution might find themselves seemlesslyembedded next to music or movies, thereby strugglingto maintain their traditional business model by offeringsfrom subscription based services (see the chapteron the newly emerging, much debated Netflix or Spotify“Subscription platforms and reading communities” onpage 110).This accerlerating competitive context coincides withbook chains that were considered as market leaders acrossthe US and Europe only a few years ago, struggling for theirsurvival, and confronting steep challenges in finding a rolein the new landscape shaped by online retail and, growingly,by ebooks, with all its disruptive forces that derivefrom the community driven, direct relationship with theconsumer. This applies to markets so different in every regardas the US (Borders, Barnes & Noble with its digital arm,the Nook), Germany (with both of its leading book chains,Thalia and Weltbild, struggling), France (with Fnac restructuring,and the second largest book chain, Chapitre, as wellas the multimedia Virgin Megastore folded), or the Netherlands(with the book chain Polare closing).It is a safe bet to say that the digital transformation of theentire ecosystem that is spanning between the author andthe reader, and which includes books, publishing and distribution,is just becoming visible enough for an effort tochart those waters.The Global eBook Report 22