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The Expansion of GlobalPlatformsPublishing groups with international reach arecertainly not a new feature of the industry, asthe strong presence of British houses in all ofthe former Commonwealth and in the US wellillustrate. With the acquisition of the world’slargest trade publisher, Random House, by the Germanmedia conglomerate Bertelsmann in 1998, the subsequentreaching out of Hachette into the US and the UK, and themore recent international aspirations of regional groupssuch as Spanish Planeta or Swedish Bonnier, internationalexpansion has become common. And their parent companiesall control various media and related activities, withbook publishing in most cases not being the groups’ largestdivision.Today, opening offices in the Gulf (like Bloomsbury in Qatar),or even holding corporate management conferencesin Beijing (as Penguin did a few years ago) has shown thatbook publishing is in no way any longer limited by nationalor linguistic borders.The recent expansion of distribution platforms and channels,both in reach and in the scope of their offer of productsand services, has brought the globalization of publishing,books and reading to an entirely new dimension.AmazonUpdate spring 2014“If anything seemed reliable in today’s topsy-turvy retailclimate, it’s that Amazon.com would continue to put upshocking rates of revenue growth, lapping rivals in traditionaland online commerce”, noted Brad Stone, author ofthe Jeff Bezos biography The Everything Store and a columnistwith BloombergBusinessweek in January 2014. He addedhowever that the growth rate of around 20% which thecompany reported for 2013 was “the lowest growth ratein several years.” (BloombergBusinessweek, 30 January2014).By early 2014, Amazon has clearly evolved into forming aseparate submarket of global publishing in its own right.It has broadened its umbrella to span over the entire valuechain, from author services via being a publisher and distributorand a market place for third parties, to a readingplatform (and a reading community, with Goodreads)where readers discuss their preferences, to impacting onpolitical debates in a wide array of countries, with a longlist of controversial topics, be it sales tax (or value addedtax) in the US and Europe, or a dispute over free trade versusprotection for local markets, as it occurs in India.(BloombergBusinessweek, 23 January 2014).In the words of Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, in a televisioninterview in December 2013, the online giant is in fact thewrong culprit to blame for all the disputes it stands for:“The Internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie,you know, people can complain about that, but complainingis not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to bookselling, the future is happening to book selling.” (60Minutes,CBSNews, interview with Charlie Rosen, 2 December2013).Amazon’s high media profile resulted not the least from itsrecently accelerated expansion, notably in emergingeconomies from Brazil to India. But alerts rang even rathercalm markets in Europe, when the market research firmXerfi anticipated the US retailer to be en route for becom-93 The Global eBook Report