Contents

The AcceleratedTransformation of theEcosystem of Publishing andReadingBy fall 2013, ebooks have earned a presence ina growing number of book markets, and insome, notably in the United States and the UnitedKingdom, ebooks drive the market. In Germany,ebooks at least in fiction, begin to berecognized as engines of sectorial growth.While the ebook niche had initially been boosted by theincrease in purchases of devices, with a clear tendency fortablets to winning over dedicated ereaders, in 2013,ebooks have started to gaining their specific profileamong readers. Ebooks not only account for some 20% ofgenre fiction in the UK. Various lists of bestselling ebooks,as sketchy as they might be thus far, differ clearly from theprint charts, hinting at forming a specific segment in books- and not simply a technical format. In countries like Germanyor France, with fixed book prices and a firm stance ofpublishers trying to maintain ebook prices oriented atprint prices as benchmarks, this can lead to a rapid discrepancy,or even confrontation, over prices, between theworld of old publishers, and the new readers and consumerswho move all their cultural consumption to digital environments.The few leading global players, Amazon, Apple, but alsoGoogle, Kobo, and a growing number of local or regionalleaders, Fnac, the German Tolino alliance, China Mobile aswell as Spanish Telefonica with Grupo Planeta, or BrazilianLivraria Cultura with Kobo, are keen to form paramountplatforms to ideally wrap their offer around all reading, listeningand watching that a cultural audience is craving for- pushing the traditional book country to the fringes.Particularly the expansion of Amazon, but also the ambitionsof Apple and Google, across territories, but also byassuming all the different roles of the profession, from thecreation through to production, distribution and marketingof - printed and electronic - books, have triggered anincreasingly ferocious criticism, at various levels, amongtheir customers, who call on their governments to makesure that the global leaders actually pay local taxes, or evento encourage buy local initiatives, to provide a similar convenienceand choice, with the comfort of being good, localemloyers, sustaining communities and the diversity of culture.This spawns a real wave of innovation, as new digitalonlypublishing ventures are experimenting together oralongside with new reading communities, book streamingservices or localized selfpublishing startups, while on theother end of the scale, the pressure in the publishing potleads to industry consolidation, resulting in ever bigger,more global groups, with the merger of Penguin RandomHouse defining the agenda.The Global eBook Report 107