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1980s, global cities in the 1990s, and global tourismin the 2000s.• Apple’s iPod and iTunes have shown consumersaround the globe how easily content can flow, whiletext messages, Facebook, and Twitter have connectedconsumers as individuals, not just as target groups.• Amazon and the Kindle allowed books —first inEnglish, then in more languages— to flow throughthese virtual tubes, and the iPad seamlessly embedsthose digital books in an integrated digital contentuniverse, with movies, music, games, other reading,education, and other media.• Numerous local companies springing up in the varioustarget markets enroot and diversify that web andextend it into a three-dimensional grid, by adding tothe globalizing dimension local specifics, with locallanguage, credibility, and logistics adding the lastmile or last inch.The last factor —adding localization to the global read—must not be brushed aside as just a level for collecting theconsumer’s money for the global players. Quite the opposite:it is a critical part in stabilizing a process of explorationand expansion that has, even with tremendous momentum,only started.The global ebook market will not be a level playing fieldfor some time to come, and we can be fairly certain that itwill not become the open digital space that many acrossthe globe wish for. Exclusions and inclusions will remain agoverning pattern for a long time, often enough in notplanned, but accidental ways.For instance, US headquartered Amazon launched a localizedplatform and Kindle shop in neighboring Canada onlyin January 2013 (!), over five years after its introduction inthe US in November 2007. Google Play varies the media itoffers to consumers widely, according to territory. Anotherexample had two deeply intertwined, neighboring marketssuch as Germany and Austria at first separated by agap, as books were initially available in Germany, yet notin Austria. Only since spring 2013, books can be purchasedin Austria as well through Google Play. Also an ebook editionof a given (English language) title may be availableinternationally on Amazon for the Kindle, yet not throughother major international platforms in ePub, despite thefact that an ePub version has been made available by thepublisher.Sometimes, the result of all these contradictory developmentsare simply funny: My wish, in late 2011, to acquirea digital copy of, ironically, a book on the global spread ofEnglish (Nicholas Ostler’s fabulous The Last Lingua Franca,published by Penguin in the UK) led to an unexpectedodyssey. Buying an EPUB version (as opposed to one forMobipocket/Kindle) of the book from online retailers in theUK (Waterstones or WHSmith) from a computer in Vienna,Austria turned out to be impossible. British retailers wouldnot accept an overseas customer. They would, of course,have shipped a paper copy anywhere in the world withouthesitation (with a few extra pounds charged for shipping).The same applied to the publisher, Penguin, despite thathouse being at the forefront of both the globalization anddigitization of books. In the end, the purchase was possiblethrough Kobo, a (then) new Canadian venture, which hadstarted to become an international player exactly by venturinginto this odd mix of challenges and opportunities.Two years later, in fall 2013, such surprises are far fromovercome, as many author contracts are not clear enoughwhen it comes to global distribution rights, and not all involvedin the new dimensions of the trade, from publishersto -global or local- distributors to retailers have been ableto intetgrate all their catalogues and the complex metadatainvolved.These are times of transition, with huge turbulences thatoften enough make it hard to be sure what in this newworld of digital books and reading introduces a new opportunity,and what is instead a cumbersome, or eventhreatening challenge.Global mapping initiativesWith respect to the ongoing globalization of the bookpublishing industry, few surveys have been published witha broad international approach.While professional and STM (science, technical, and medical)publishing has seen both systematic digitization of itsvalue chain and global expansion for a decade, generaltrade houses have followed behind at a much slower pace.A few British houses (notably Penguin, but also Oxford andCambridge University Presses and Harper Collins) have alongstanding tradition of significant operations acrossseveral continents.After the acquisition of Random House, the largest US tradepublisher, by German Bertelsmann in 1998 and similarmoves by French Hachette and, on a smaller scale, Spanish10 The Global eBook Report