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focusing on both Spain and Latin America, with an estimatedmarket share in Spain of 15%. Publidisa has offices,aside from Spain, in Protugal, Mexico, Argentina and Columbia.Aggregator Leer-e has recently teamed up with the Germanybased aggregator Bookwire.Amabook is a platform with strong ties with several LatinAmerican markets, including Mexico, Argentina, Chile, andColombia.In December 2012, Roca Editores launched a new platformfor self-publishing: Rocautores. Roca Editores also announceda partnership with Jane Friedman’s Open RoadIntegrated Media, to prepare an English-language ebookseries with its “Barcelona Ebooks” spin-off (read morehere).B de Books was launched in November 2011 as a spin offof Barcelona-based Ediciones B to become Spain’s firstdigital-only book publisher to experiment with new approachesfor the book business in several regards, includingcompetitively low pricing of its titles (between €1.99and €9.99) as well as publication without DRM, to makereader convenience a clear priority (“Libros digitales desde1,99 euros y sin protección anticopia,” El Pais, November15, 2011).Grupo Planeta, Spain’s largest publisher, also launched twoebook imprints with a similar pricing strategy, from €0.99to €4.99: Zafiro (romance) and Scyla (science fiction)ebooks (press release). In early 2012, Planeta announceda partnership with the leading telecom company Telefonicato jointly organize an ebook platform to challenge Amazon’simpact on the Spanish market (Bloomberg, March 1,2012).ItalyIn 2012, the Italian book market was facing a difficult economy,resulting in a hefty decline in sales of 7.8% in valueand 7% in volume. However, this overall number must beconsidered a slight improvement from 11.7% year on yearin March and 8.6% in September 2012. As in other Europeanbook markets, children´s (at –6.1%) and young adultbooks as well as fiction (–5.2%) showed relatively betterperformance (data from Nielsen BookScan released in December2012 and in May 2013 at Giornale della libreria).Another indicator of this difficult environment was the announcementin November 2012 that the French bookstorechain Fnac had sold its Italian arm to the LuxembourgbasedOrlando investment group (similar to its shuttingdown their arm in Greece) (La Stampe, November 29, 2012).By May 2013, 60,589 commercial ebook titles have beenavailable to Italian readers, equaling 8.3% of the total availablecatalogue, with some 44% of new titles released indigital format, aside from print, resulting in a market shareof 2.1% of trade publishing in all of 2012 (up from 1.1% in2011). By June 2013, ebooks had gained 8.3% of trade(Source: Ufficio Studi AIE (=Research Office of the ItalianPublishers’ Association)).In 2012, Italian consumers purchased some 2 million tabletcomputers (up 379%). By May 2013, the average retail pricefor an ebook had fallen by 6.6% to €10.44 (from €11.07 in2011), indicating much higher pressure on pricing comparedto print (at an average retail price of €18, down only1.9% from 2011) (all data from Dentro all’e-book, in Giornaledella libreria, 2013).Ebooks with social DRM (ca. 42%) outnumber those withhard Adobe copy protection (35%, information providedfor this report by Informationi Editoriali).For an overview of secialized local actors go to “Distributionand specialized ventures” on page 41The Global eBook Report 39