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From print to digital, fromnational to global, from localbook cultures to a globalcontent business.Ebooks are only one part of this new ecosystemof writing, publishing, retailing and reading, andin many continental European markets, theyrepresent just a few percent of the revenue oftheir national book industry. The digital distributionof books finds itself in the middle of a complexeconomic, political, and cultural battlefield where nationalgovernments, the European Commission, and the leadingglobal digital actors such as Amazon, Apple, and Googlefight over power and control in the digital economy of thenext decade.Globalization, therefore, inevitably spawns a secondmovement: regulation. In the US, the Department of Justice(DoJ) has stepped in, disagreeing with five major publishersand Apple (a distributor of ebooks) over who shouldcontrol the pricing of digital books, bluntly calling thepublishers’ agreement with Apple a “conspiracy”. The ultimateresult of this lawsuit, say the critics - and not all ofthem are publishers - will be a “government-assisted monopoly”(Jenn Webb in a TOC blog post), as it would helpAmazon to single-handedly dominate an industry, allowingit ultimately to define retail prices of ebooks instead ofpublishers and thus further expand its massive marketshare. The European Commission has a similar investigationunderway.The complex legal argument, though, is not the most relevantaspect for our perspective here. It is the political dimensioninstead, and the fact that Amazon - and a fewother companies, mostly from the US, that are rolling outtheir ebook services on a truly global scale - are of an entirelydifferent scale and scope from what used to reignover publishing in the old days.Pearson, the leader in global book publishing, had annualrevenues of $9.2 billion in 2012. NewsCorp, one of the leadingglobal media companies and the parent of HarperCollins,recorded a turnover of $34 billion in 2012. This hasNewsCorp playing in the same ballpark as Amazon (with$61 billion in 2012). By comparison, Apple has recordedrevenues of $156 billion (Sept. 2012) and an operating incomeof over $55 billion. Google had revenues of $50 billionand an operating profit of over $13 billion.The discrepancies in size fueled the biggest merger in thehistory of book publishing, when Random House and Penguin(a division of Pearson) decided to combine their activitiesin a new company, Penguin Random House, whichbecame effective July 1, 2013. Together, they will generaterevenues of ca. $3.9 billion from an output of ca. 15,000new titles annually (see The Bookseller, 1 July 2013). However,even the now largest trade publisher is clearly centeredon books.The Global eBook Report 88