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Beyond ebooks: Theecosystem of digital booksand readingMany observers of the global book businessspent much of 2011 marveling at the paceof ebook penetration in the United Statesand the United Kingdom. In 2012, a newdigital buzzword was added: global. Neverbefore has one book spread across not just a continent ortwo but around the globe, as did E.L. James’ Fifty Shades ofGrey.By 2013, we began to see the US and UK markets maturing,with growth in ebook penetration slowing down andebooks transcending their initial niche in a number ofcountries in continental Europe. More importantly thoughebooks are triggering a wave of structural innovation in anold industry, with ever-broadening experiments to explorenew business models, such as subscriptions as driversfor reading communities (Nubico in Spain, Scoobe inGermany, Youboox in France, Oyster in the US), new modelsof cooperation between publishers and telecommunicationgiants and other partners in technology, and scoresof startups, which include digital-only publishing ventures,social reading platforms, or service providers thatadapt data mining to the requirements of publishing andbook retail. In the meantime, global platforms such as Amazonor Apple’s iBookstore affect markets such as China andBrazil, invigorating the dynamics of globalization, but theyalso challenge traditional local players in publishing andin retail, while Kobo, as the newcomer, proposes its approachand partnership models with local players, fromFrance (with Fnac) to Brazil (with Livraria Cultura), as analternative to the predominance of just a few superpowersof the Internet. In the small and highly fragmented marketsof Central Europe, and not just there, the unleashing ofsuch new forces is met with serious concern, as it challengesthe local book and reading cultures in a time ofeconomic upheaval.This report will therefore explore the manifold dimensionsthat the digital transformation is inducing.A global book business versusnational cultures, fairness andprideEbooks are only one part of this new ecosystem of writing,publishing, and reading, as are publishers and retailers,and in many continental European markets, they representjust a few percentage of the revenue of their national bookindustry. The digital distribution of books finds itself in themiddle of a complex economic, political, and cultural battlefieldwhere national governments, the European Commission,and the leading global digital actors such as Amazon,Apple, and Google fight over power and control inthe digital economy of the next decade.Globalization, therefore, inevitably spawns a secondmovement: regulation. In the US, the Department of Justice(DoJ) has stepped in, disagreeing with five major publishersand Apple (a distributor of ebooks) over who shouldcontrol the pricing of digital books, bluntly calling theThe Global eBook Report 5