Contents

strict or eliminate competition” as being “simply unacceptable.”(Press release by the European Commission, 13December 2012)The ruling on Apple is ending what has been called the“agency model” of publishers setting a fixed retail price fortheir ebooks. The controvery broke out at first when Amazonhad started to discount ebooks below the publishers’wholesale price, yet backed down in a short and hardstandoff in February 2010 with Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent.(The Bookseller, 8 February 2010)The international expansion of Apple’siTunes and iBookstoreBy December 2012, the iTunes Store had been made availablein 119 countries, with hugh markets such as India andIndonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey being able toaccess an online market place for music and various otherdigital content. (Apple press release, 4 December 2012)However, the iTunes universe is not exactly the same in allthese markets. On the one hand, pricing can vary significantly,as music is available in India for instance for only7-15 rupees (then $0.11 to $0.24), much less than in marketsin North America or Western Europe. (TheNextWeb, 4Deceber 2012) Also, not all channels are open in all markets,with notably books having a much more limitedreach. In Japan, Apple had reached enough agreementswith major local publishers for opening an iBookstore onlyin early 2013. In most of Latin America, the iBookstore isopen since summer 2012, with observers seeing it as theleading distributor notably in Brazil, with a market shareof 28.5% in March 2013. (PublishNews Brazil, 2 May 2013)By summer 2013, iBooks are available in over 50 countries.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBooks)The iBook universeiBooks is an application that has come bundled with iPadssince the device was first introduced by Apple in January2010. The app allows readers to download digital books inEPUB format from the iBookstore, and it is integrated withApple’s iTunes platform for the exchange and usage ofother file formats, such as PDF.The iBooks app comes in over 30 language versions, includingEnglish, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Ukrainian.However, this does not mean that all these languages arealso supported for publishing a book to the iBookstore(e.g., Arabic, along with other languages that are writtenfrom right to left, are at this point not supported; by theend of 2012, 18 languages were supported, including simplifiedChinese). For more information, see the guide)iBook Author is a free of charge authoring solution, whichis also notably promoted for the creation of educationalcontent, witnessing the witnessing[download of 350,000textbooks] in just three days in early 2012. (For more detailson iBooks Author and textbook creation, see below.)Earlier developments, 2012 and beforeIn the ranking of paidContent of the world’s top 50 digitalmedia companies, for which only revenue from digitalcontent sales have been included, Apple has been rankedat number 5, with digital revenue (not including hardwaresales) of $5.4 billion (http://bit.ly/T1EUu7).With regard to reading devices, evidence grew in 2012 thattablet computers had gained in popularity versus E Ink–based dedicated readers—to the advantage of Apple’siPad, which was reported to have been a favorite gift inyear-end holidays 2011 not just in the US and UK but alsoin many other markets (as an example, in France, see LivresHebdo, February 6, 2012). However, by late summer 2012,with the rollout of the next generation of low-cost ereadersas well as tablets, notably by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, andKobo, a fierce struggle for market share ensued.New reading devices will also deeply influence the developmentof digital publishing. One segment of publishingwhere this will be leveraged is certainly textbook publishing,a sector famously singled out by Apple’s founder SteveJobs as being “ripe for digital destruction.” The launch ofiBooks Author, together with the iBooks 2 format, which isdesigned to allow authors to publish stories and notablymore complex and multimedia content directly to theiBookstore—is a toolset that the Economist labeled a“breakthrough in transforming how textbooks are createdand distributed” (The Economist, January 20, 2012). Apple’sinitiative was not directed only at eventual authors—inany field requiring “media-enriched” publications—butalso included from the beginning the adaptation of existingtextbooks from major educational publishers, notablyPearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill,making all these materials directly accessible and purchasablethrough the iBookstore.Barnes & NobleThe announcement of senior leadership changes in earlyJuly 2013 highlighted the complex challenges that Barnes& Noble is currently confronting. The resignation of CEOThe Global eBook Report 85