DenmarkKey Indicators Values Sources, commentsBook market size (p+e, at consumer prices) 4,000 million DKK (€540) BogmarkedetTitles published per year (new and successive editions)New titles per 1 million inhabitants 1,275ca. 9,619 titleseBook titles (available from publishers) 7,000 10,000 trade titles expected by January2013 (Bogmarkedet)Market share of ebooks 1% to 2% in 2011 BogmarkedetKey market parametersNo price regulation. VAT at 25% for both print and ebooks.(Saxo Publish) in September 2012; the dedicated ebookplatform riidr.dk; Adlibris (by the Swedish Bonnier group);and Danish Gyldendal’s g.dk. But Amazon also has a significantmarket presence through its British site www.amazon.co.uk,catering to the high percentage of readers whoare fluent in English. Apple’s iBookstore is also popular withusers.According to the Danish book trade magazine Bogmarkedet,E ink–based reading devices have a limited presencein Denmark, while the iPad is “dominating the market totally.”The average retail price for ebooks is between 99 and 179DKR (Danish crowns), at a discount of 40 to 50 percent fromthe printed edition. There is no price regulation for printedbooks or for ebooks, and both formats are subject to 25percent VAT, which is among the highest rates in Europe.NorwayWith a population of just around 5 million—yet a nominalGDP per capita of $97,254 (2011) and an economy benefitingfrom rich offshore oil resources—Norway is spendingpart of its fortune on significant subsidies to its culture.The country’s book market, which is worth around €800million, is commercially embedded in the wider Scandinavianmarket, where notably publishing companies fromSweden (e.g., Bonniers) have a strong role to play, yet witha local book production that is strongly supported by governmentfunding, as it acquires 1,000 copies of every bookthat a Norwegian author publishes. Furthermore, everyNorwegian author who is a member of the Author’s Unionreceives an annual grant of $19,000 (Andrew Goldstoneand Lee Konstantinou: To Norway!).Aside from state support, local Norwegian authors, suchas Jon Michelet (En sjøens helt, The Hero of the Seas) and PerPetterson (Jeg nekter, I Refuse), are embraced by a largedomestic readership. And they compete on par with internationalstars like E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey, with420,000 copies sold of the combined three volumes in2012) or Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which sold440,000 copies).Unlike neighboring Sweden, ebooks have made a significantimpact on Norwegian readers. In 2012, 148,000ebooks worth 10 million Kroner (€1.34 million) were sold(data provided by the Norwegian book trade magazineBok&samfunn for this report). Some 3,500 titles are availableas commercial ebooks.All ebooks from Norwegian publishers are distributed byone central platform, Bokskya, a service provided by theindustry information service Bokbasen (or Book Database),which is co-owned by major publishers, distributors,and booksellers in Norway (more details here). By the endof 2012, Bokskya had 100,000 registered users (up from50,000 in August). The platform calls itself a “digital bookshelfwhich provides secure storage of all your e-bookspurchased in a Norwegian online bookstore. The bookscan be downloaded or read in the apps offered by Norwegianonline bookstores,” with all major retail platformsbeing members. In addition, Bokskya also offers an HTML5-based app for offline reading in EPUB format.With the ambition of creating a vast library of earlier Norwegianliterature and making it digitally available to thecountry’s readers, the National Library of Norway has starteda substantial digitization effort. In collaboration withKopinor (the Norwegian collecting society that representsall domestic copyright holders through its 22 member organizations),250,000 works are to be digitized by 2017,with 60,000 titles already available “to anyone with a NorwegianIP address” (read more here).44 The Global eBook Report
Netherlands2012 was a tough year for the Dutch book market, as saleshad declined by 6.3% in value and 4.3% in volume. (Informationprovided by the publishers’ associationwww.nuv.nl for this report). Earlier reports saw an evenstronger decline for the first quarter 2012, of –15.4%, hittingtop-selling titles particularly hard and resulting in thechain bookstore Selexyz’ filing for bankruptcy in March(buchreport, March 26 and August 2, 2012). The overalleconomic crisis is seen as a central factor causing theshrinking of the book market. At the same time, the Dutchebook market saw a comparatively positive evolution,even though it does not yet compensate for the loss inprint revenue. For 2011, the trade association NUV recordedebook sales of about €7.6 million from a catalog ofsome 10,000 commercialized titles in the Dutch language.By mid 2012, the title catalog was estimated to have grownto 16,000 titles, with a market share of 3 percent, whichmay grow to as much as 7 percent by the end of the year(estimates by goodereader.com as well as by Jürgen Snoerenat the Futurebook blog).Anticipating further rapid growth in ebooks, the largestDutch ebook publisher, De Arbeiderspers | A.W. BrunaUitgevers, has decided to use watermarks instead of hardDRM effective January 18, 2013, for its current catalog of1,200 digital titles (more here).NetherlandsKey Indicators Values Sources,commentsBook market size (p+e, atconsumer prices)Titles published per year(new and successiveeditions)New titles per 1 millioninhabitantseBook titles (availablefrom publishers)€1,174 million (Trade:557m)PublishersAssociation23,300 PublishersAssociation (NUV)1,29310,700 Estimate, PublishersAssociationMarket share of ebooks 2.2% Estimate, PublishersAssociationKey market parametersFixed book prices for year1 after publication; VATof 6% for printed booksversus 21% (fromOctober 2012) for ebooksThis recent development must be compared to an initiallyslow start in an ebook market that had been characterizedby readers and consumers that showed little enthusiasmin migrating from print to digital, according to a study byPricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) carried out among consumersand experts from the publishing industry in 2010.In addition, the survey concluded that iPads and othertablets had little use as reading devices. The ebook marketin the Netherlands shows similar characteristics as Germany,with a conservative approach to digital publishing outsideof science, technical, and medical (STM) publishing.In public professional debates, the threats—rather thanthe opportunities—are highlighted, such as the risk of lostprint book sales.However, the situation started to change in early 2011,when the trade magazine Boekblad reported that as manyebooks were sold in the Netherlands in the first half of 2011as were sold in 2010 altogether. For January through June2011, ebook sales totaled €3.4 million, with about 327,000units sold. From there, the growth curve continues to gosteadily up.Momentum is building in the Dutch ebook market fromthe addition of several of the big global players. Apple,Google, and Kobo (partnering with the retailer Libris BLZin the Netherlands) launched localized platforms in 2012,and Amazon is as well. Barnes & Noble is expected to followbefore the end of the year—challenging the current marketdominance of BOL.com. As ebooks are not subject toa fixed retail price, a war on prices is expected to begin (seethis blog post at FutureBook by Jürgen Snoeren).Further expansion of the ebook market will have the advantageof a reading audience that has already heavilyembraced printed books in English.DistributorsOnline media store BOL is the leading Dutch retailer, servingover 2.7 million customers, which makes it the marketleader in the online sales of media products and the largestonline media shop of the Netherlands. The store has a catalogof over 3.8 million products. As for ebooks, BOL haspartnered with German distributor Txtr since 2010. In February2012, BOL.com was acquired by the general retailgiant Ahold (in full: Koninklijke Ahold N.V.) for €350 million(read more here). In January 2013, BOL posted solidgrowth, making it the main engine for Ahold’s performancein the Netherlands, with books increasing at adouble-digit rate, according to BOL book director PetraLubbers (Boekblad, January 11, 2013).The Global eBook Report 45
- Page 2 and 3: ContentsAbout the Global eBook Repo
- Page 4 and 5: Receptiveness for foreign (English)
- Page 6 and 7: Produced in Atlas by O’Reilly Med
- Page 8 and 9: Mapping and Understandingthe Emergi
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- Page 18 and 19: Metadata is the key to online sales
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- Page 23 and 24: Overall, the spectacular growth in
- Page 25 and 26: hit (source: various reports summar
- Page 27 and 28: Debates Shaping the Book Industry i
- Page 29 and 30: Contributed article BookwireAvailab
- Page 31 and 32: GermanyKey Indicators Values Source
- Page 33 and 34: than 10% of all online sales by the
- Page 35 and 36: warm at best, and the half-year res
- Page 37 and 38: SNE had earlier started to systemat
- Page 39 and 40: ginning by Hachette Livres, among o
- Page 41 and 42: SpainKey Indicators Values Sources,
- Page 43 and 44: focusing on both Spain and Latin Am
- Page 45 and 46: The emerging ebook market may confr
- Page 47: SwedenKey Indicators Values Sources
- Page 51 and 52: inging ebooks to the tenfold larger
- Page 53 and 54: magazines, and devices, with a cata
- Page 55 and 56: ever, in the first half of 2013, si
- Page 57 and 58: Source: Vesselin Todorov, Ciela Nor
- Page 59 and 60: Contributed articleCopyright Cleara
- Page 61 and 62: Emerging MarketsRussia70% of Russia
- Page 63 and 64: (see details in “eBook piracy in
- Page 65 and 66: The first research comparing the pe
- Page 67 and 68: Revenue Service has been receiving
- Page 69 and 70: on ebooks. It has not gained much t
- Page 71 and 72: ChinaKey Indicators Values Sources,
- Page 73 and 74: Key players in the digital environm
- Page 75 and 76: The Government of India is leading
- Page 77 and 78: Android-based devices in the countr
- Page 79 and 80: and Mathematics books, Hindustan Bo
- Page 81 and 82: When it first launched, most ebooks
- Page 83 and 84: 3. Source: Personal interview with
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- Page 87 and 88: Amazon’s performance in 20122012
- Page 89 and 90: strict or eliminate competition”
- Page 91 and 92: settlement is expected to make avai
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- Page 95 and 96: Average top 10 ebook prices in sele
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ation solutions have recently emerg
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In Germany, the by far the largest
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(SSRC, the American Assembly, Colum
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In its report of May 2011, by Le Mo
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Of those who admitted to downloadin
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1,200 titles (see this blogpost by
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The AcceleratedTransformation of th
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AcknowledgmentsThis report has been
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Mandarin, she has specialized in re