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magazines, and devices, with a catalog of 12,600 ebooktitles.Nexto runs retail and wholesale operations. One of itsshareholders is Ruch S.A., which is listed on the WarsawStock Exchange and leads the market in press distribution.In 2013 the Nexto Reader, the firm’s own app, was recognizedin a competition held by MasterCard as Poland’s bestmobile purchasing app, and came second on a Europeanscale.The platform Woblink is part of the Znak Group. It offersebooks in all available formats, placing special emphasison making their publications interactive, with original solutionstargeted especially at children.Publio.pl belongs to the Agora media group. In 2013 theservice introduced minibooks - or ebook shorties - to itsrange of products.Ebookpoint.pl belongs to the Helion group, and specializesin the distribution of ebooks on information technology,law, business, psychology and education. It offers a platformfor selfpublishers and ebook production services forcorporate and private customers.The Internet library Wolne Lektury (or Free Reading Matter)is a project launched by the Modern Poland Foundationin 2007 to promote and display textbooks promoted bythe Polish Ministry of Education, including a library of classicworks of Polish literature which are in the public domain.In 2012 the Wolne Lektury Library was visited by2,454,193 users, of whom 179,000 were individuals outsidePoland, mostly from Great Britain (29,000), Germany(19,000), the USA (13,000) and Ukraine (9,000).Weltbild is the Polish subsidiary of the successful Germanparent Weltbild, as a chain store, online shop, and ebookplatform; Weltbild relaunched its Polish platform earlier in2011, aiming to strengthen its position in the Polish marketas a vendor for cultural as well as beauty and householdsupplies, catering to some 800,000 customers each month.BezKartek (literally “book without pages”) is a platformlaunched in 2009 and dedicated to the distribution ofebooks, audiobooks, ereaders, and Apple iPhones. Its catalogincludes 145,000 books, of which 1,400 are in Polish.The initiative’s goal is to “popularize ebooks,” serving variousformats (PRC, PDF, EPUB, and mp3), and to expandtheir offer by partnering with selected foreign publishers,notably German educational and language teaching KlettGroup and the Polish branch of Canadian romance publisherHarlequin. The venture is the offspring of Apetonic,a local consultancy specializing in IT and telecommunicationsand financed through the Dracula Investment Fund,plus private investors from Poland and France.Libranova is a promotional platform for ebooks and digitalreading.Wolne Lektury is a project launched by the Modern PolandFoundation in 2007, promoting and displaying schoolreading as identified by the Polish Ministry of National Education,with a library of predominantly Polish classical literarybooks in the public domain.Central and Eastern Europe:eBooks in English and LocalLanguagesOverview by Miha KovacWhile most of the international debate focuses on ebookdevelopments in only the largest markets, an analysis ofsmaller markets allows an exploration of whether or notthe digital publishing and distribution of books can providenew opportunities for small and highly diverse bookcultures, with audiences that are often particularly fragmentedbetween a domestic population and relevantgroups that have migrated overseas. Also, it allows us tohighlight how the emergence of ebooks reinvigorate andaccelerate other patterns of change, such as the increasingtendency of the strongest readers to read in two languages,their mother tongue and English. Finally, relativelysmall local publishers and retailers in those markets usuallyfind themselves confronted at once by totally new competitorsas consumers privately take advantage of the possibilitiesfor privately importing books and e-reading devicesfrom global platforms such as Amazon or Apple,which results in further strain for local actors in an alreadystrained economic environment.The case study of this chapter aims at analyzing this complexevolution, as Central Europe offers a good examplethrough its unique set of small countries that stretchesfrom the Baltic to the Adriatic sea, each with less than fivemillion inhabitants and speakers of languages more or lesslimited to their national states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, andSerbia). Regardless of their shared history in the secondhalf of the twentieth century, significant economic, political,and cultural differences are also an inherent part oftheir contemporary identities, as much as the fact that today’seconomic recession hits them in very different ways.The Global eBook Report 49