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China’s huge infotainment portal and microblogging website(http://book.sina.com.cn).Domestic ebooks are most commonly published in CEB, orChina Ebook Format, promoted in particular by Apabi(founded in 2006), the former digital content division ofFounder Group, a major Chinese technology conglomerate.The CEB format has also been used by European andAmerican publishers for introducing their ebooks to theChinese market (such as by Penguin, when convertingmore than 2,000 titles into CEB in 2009 and distributingthem via Founder Apabi; http://pear.sn/wIcKjO).International cooperative venturesOver the last ten years, at an accelerating pace, most majorinternational publishing brands have looked at establishingcooperative ventures with Chinese counterparts, amovement that was actively welcomed by Chinese authorities.This list includes, to name just a few examples,companies such as Penguin, which opened a Beijing officein 2005; Hachette, which announced its joint venture withGuangdong-based Phoenix Publishing & Media Group in2009; Cambridge University Press; and Amazon.com,which acquired the domestic online retailer Joyo.com in2004 and since then has operated the localized version ofits store, branded since 2007 as www.amazon.cn. In 2012,Hachette also opened an office in Hongkong.IndiaBy Vinutha MallyaUpdate spring 2014eBooks consumption and productionEnglish-language trade publishers producing ebooks continueto report that sales of ebooks remain less than 1% oftotal sales. The number is marginally higher for STMebooks. The STM publishing segment brings 84% of theprofit to the India publishing industry. But the share ofebooks in STM segment is only 2%. This figure reflectsconsumption and not origination of ebooks. It is unclearhow many STM ebooks are produced in India as yet.In the ebook retail space, it is rumoured that Flipkart holds75% of the market share for ebooks in the country. However,it is currently impossible to verify this “rumour”. In abid to expand its offerings, Flipkart has signined up withinternational content platforms such as Smashwords.More recently, at the New Delhi World Book Fair held inFebruary 2014, the company inked a distribution deal withthe US-based Publish on Demand Global. This arrangementwill “allow all digital content distributed throughPODG’s network to be made available for sale in India toany reader with an Android, Apple iOS or Windows 8 device.Additionally the platform makes their full store frontavailable via their website, http://www.Flipkart.com, forthose who prefer desktop viewing.”With the presence of Amazon Kindle and Kobo, ebook retailis picking up in India. In the case of Kindle, Amazon appearsto be tapping into the growing self-publishing segment,which is expected to “explode”; the company was seenheavily promoting its Kindle Direct Publishing platform atthe New Delhi World Book Fair. “We have been here (in India)for 18 months with the KDP and have already witnessedabout 20 per cent of top 100 e-book titles, in any givenweek, being self published on Kindle Direct,” said Jon PFine, Director, Author and Publishing Relations, Amazon.com,in an interview with The Indian Express.In the educational ebooks space, a new entrant, MumbaibasedStudyeBuddy, claims to be “the largest e-book platformin India for academic books”. By the end of March, theplatform will have 100 publishers and 50,000 educationalebooks, claimed founder Nizam Ahmed. Through the website,StudyeBuddy makes available textbooks, references,supplementary reading and books that “make good reading”,to schools, colleges, universities and corporates. Theplatform has already tied up with publishers in India, andalso with international publishers like Springer andThieme.In all this, the appearance of ebooks in Indian languagesremains slow, both due to technological constraints, aswell as lack of support for the scripts on the reading devices.However, there is a growth in ebooks in Hindi language,which has received more support from level, andfor which the tools are more evolved. A few Hindi ebooksare now available on Kindle and Flipkart, but there is a longway to go for Indian languages in general.In a bid to address the problems faced by publishers ofIndian languages, the Kolkata-based firm, Swiftboox, hasdeveloped a proprietary technology for digital conversionof content in Indian languages. The company is workingwith 20 publishers to digitize and distribute their books.At present, the company digitises books for publisherswithout a charge, and takes a share from the sales. With acollection of 250 books available on their site, and 30–40titles getting added every month, two-thirds of Swiftboox’ssales come from selling to the Indian diaspora, particularlyin the US and UK.The Global eBook Report 72