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French-founded B2B distribution platform ePagine alsooperates a Dutch platform serving a broad list of publishers,including Artemis, Athenaeum, Kluwer, and Queridoand retailers and wholesalers Boekhuis and Luisterhuis, aswell as ePagine itself and the British Gardners Books.Several other platforms have been launched to sell,stream, and lend ebooks, including Yindo and ebook.nl.Reading DevicesIn the Netherlands, iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Philips,introduced ereaders at the end of 2008 and reported salesof just over 4,000 units by the end of 2009. Sales rose to50,000 ereaders by mid year 2010, but this was not enoughto prevent iRex from filing for bankruptcy protection inJune 2010.Several other ereader manufacturers have filed for bankruptcyprotection as well, including the manufacturer ofthe Cool-er ereader and the European division of Foxit.In the meantime, a number of ereaders are available thathave the capability to integrate with online stores. For example,bol.com offers readers with WiFi capabilities,among them the Sony eReader and the BeBook Neo, whichwas developed in the Netherlands.PricingIn the Netherlands, as in Germany, bookstores must usethe price defined by the publisher because of fixed bookprice arrangements. The fixed book price arrangement inGermany is not subject to any time restriction, whereas thecorresponding arrangement in the Netherlands is applicablefor only the first year after the publication of printedand digital books.As in most other European markets, a VAT of 6 percent isan advantage for printed books versus ebooks (taxed at aVAT of 19 percent, which will rise to 21 percent by October2012; source: Boekblad).AustriaAustria is a good example of a relatively small marketneighboring a much larger territory and a market of thesame language. With a population of about 8 million, Austriais roughly 10 percent the size of Germany in all majorrelevant respects for this study and shares both the vernacularand, largely, the current cultural and media frameworkof its dominating neighbor. Both countries are membersof the European Union and the Euro Zone.With regard to printed books, books from German publishersalready reign supreme in Austrian bookshops,namely the chain stores as well as the online platforms ofAmazon, Thalia, and Weltbild, serving the Austrian marketfrom headquarters in Germany. Amazon also serves Austriafrom its German Kindle store, which opened a localizedversion in April 2011. Although local Austrian bestsellinglists show, as would be expected, significant differencesfrom locally branded authors (e.g., local celebrities as wellas local literary talent), the overall pattern and a share ofroughly two-thirds of those charts are very similar to thosein Germany (for details, see Diversity Report 2010).On the other hand, local Austrian publishers have alwaysconfronted substantial hurdles to bringing their books toretailers, to media, and hence to consumers in Germany,where Austrian imports account for only about 3 percent(not, as expected by the equivalents in size, around 10percent). In recent years, this imbalance has significantlyincreased. Between 2008 and 2010, in an overall flat bookmarket in both Germany and Austria, imports from Germanyto Austria have increased by 8.14 percent, as exportsby Austrian publishers into Germany slumped by a remarkable24 percent, reflecting on a domestic publishingsector in Austria that has ever growing difficulties in reachingout beyond its borders.The Austrian debate on ebooks has been largely shapedby Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels, theAustrian publishers and booksellers support of their Germanequivalent Börsenverein, in their legal action againstGoogle’s unauthorized digitization of copyrighted worksfrom libraries and against the proposed—and, at least forthe US, widely accepted—Google settlement. No recentcomments have been released as to the association’s standin view of those recent developments.In November 2012, the association published its secondreport on ebooks in Austria, but with most data limited tothe years 2011 and 2010, which have only very limited valueto assess the situation as of late 2012. Because Austriais largely served by publishers, retailers, and distributorsfrom Germany, it is fair to assume that developments asdescribed for Germany largely apply also to the Austrianmarket, meaning that ebooks are increasingly embracedby the strongest readers, and that retail sales show a significantshift from traditional chain stores to online, notablyto Amazon. This last trend has been highlighted byseveral small Austrian publishers interviewed in late 2012for this report. Some of the interviewees, however, recognizedin that shift an opportunity, notably with regard to46 The Global eBook Report