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In its report of May 2011, by Le Motif portrayed, the “strongdevelopment” of legal ebooks in France as coinciding witha “multiplicity of platforms” for illegal downloads. It wasfound that the “generalist aggregators” were addingebooks to their broad offerings of other pirated mediacontent and that new, specialized platforms focusing juston ebooks had also been entering the arena. The offer oflegal digitized titles grew significantly from the spring of2010 to the spring of 2011 —from 17% to 33% of currentbestsellers of the authoritative charts of Livres Hebdo/Ipsos—and 36% of the titles on the charts were available forillegal download.Few of the pirated ebooks were “cracked” copies from legallyreleased originals; the vast majority were obviouslyscanned for the purpose of illegal dissemination. The studyfound that 25.9% of the pirated titles were available inmultiple digital formats (versus only 6.6% in 2010).The pirated catalogs were largely “nonexclusive,” in that atitle found on one site could usually also be retrieved fromother locations (Mathias Daval, “Ebookz: L’offre légale etillégale de livres numériques”, Tableau de bord 2, May2011).GermanyInterestingly, Germany has officially taken -and so farmaintained- a position that is similar to the earlier Frenchstance, with the professional association Börsenverein focusingprimarily on lobbying for stricter laws, and forcefullegal actions against private consumers who can be persecutedfor individual infringements.Over the past two years, the tone of the confrontation hasbecome harsh, as reflected in an exchange of articles betweena spokesperson for one of the most popular piracysites for books, under the pseudonyme of Spiegelbest, andAlexander Skipis, the managing director of Börsenverein.The pirates, who claim to have downloads of 1.5 millionebook titles per month from their site, argued, “It makesno difference whatsoever, if a book is liberated by us, or bysome Russians.” Skipis replied that authors, publishers andbook retailers feel “abandoned” by the government, asthose who shut their eyes to the threat risk “basic conceptsof society” and the “consensus on values” (Der Tagesspiegel,August 25, 2013, and September 2, 2013).While Börsenverein’s general assessment of piracy as a seriousconcern for the emerging ebook business in Germany,and more broadly in Europe, is shared by many observers,more detailed analytics and conclusions are not.In a survey based on a sample of 10,000 people, Börsenvereinobserved an increasing support among Germanconsumers for the existing legal offerings of ebooks, as76% find it “satisfactory”, while 70% prefer legal downloadsbecause this involves legal certainty as well as the supportof the creators of the consumed work. (Studie zur DigitalenContent-Nutzung, quoted in buchreport, April 22, 2013)Skeptics, such as piracy experts and authors of the GermanGutenberg reports on ebook piracy, Manuel Bonik and AndreasSchaale, in an interview for this report, oppose suchoptimism, notably with the help of usage statistics of themost popular piracy sites.b*.bz, for instance, claims to have almost 2.5 million registeredusers for all forms of copyrighted digital content, includinga huge library of digitized books. Measured bytheir Alexa rank of 94 (for German sites, as checked by uson 22 September 2013), this one piracy site is indeed significantlymore popular than all other legal ebook distributors.Börsenverein’s own Libreka platform owns the Germanrank of 11,606, and Libri’s ebook.de is listed at 1,822.The website of the aforementioned, outspoken book pirateSpiegelbest, b*.to, which claims to host a catalog of39,000 ebook titles, has a rank of 2,992.Only Amazon.de is on top of all other sites, with a rank of5 for Germany. However, it must be added that both Amazonand b*.bz obviously owe their remarkably high positionsin Alexa not so much to ebooks alone as to thewealth and diversity of their total offerings.The difference in the assessment of piracy for the ebookmarket extends beyond those data to include the resultingstrategies. Börsenverein very much emphasizes the importanceof legal actions, welcoming a ruling in July byGermany’s Supreme Court that held the file hosting serviceRapidshare responsible for infringements on the rights tothe content on their platform (buchreport, July 19, 2013).Börsenverein, so far, has decided against offering a takedownservice like that provided by their British and Frenchpeers.Bonik and Schaale would favor such services, while pointing,more importantly to what could lead to a shift in strategyamong file hosts such as Rapidshare to legalize theiroperations. “The future is probably the model of Mega“,they argue, referring to a platform introduced in 2013 byGerman national and New Zealand resident Kim DotcomSchmitz, whose earlier, heavily contested site Megauploadhad been shut down, before being revamped as a seeminglylegal hosing service in the cloud.The Global eBook Report 101