16 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Thalia’s revenues. By early fall 2012, it was decided that the entire Douglas group was to be sold to a US investor, Advent International its bookselling arm is undergoing severe restructuring, which might involve the closing of up to 50 locations (buchreport, September 5, 2012). A similar trend in favor of online sales occurred for Weltbild, a chain store that is the second-largest online bookstore after Amazon.de. But Weltbild turned these developments to their advantage by heavily promoting its own E Ink readers and tablet computer starting in late 2011, making these the “absolute top-selling products” for Christmas 2011 (Weltbild digital head Klaus Driever, buchreport, January 12, 2012). On December 25, 2011, Weltbild recorded 17,500 customers buying ebooks, versus an average of 10,000 before Christmas (buchre- port express, 51 and 52, 2011 buchreport, December 21, 2011). Amazon claimed similar sales. At Hugendubel— which is, together with Weltbild, part of DBH, the Deutsche Buch Handels group—revenues from ebooks for the rst time accounted for more than 10 percent of all online sales by the end of 2011 (buchreport express, 51, 2011). Weltbild’s trouble came not from poor business performance but from con icting strategies set by their owner, the Catholic Church, which, in a surprise announcement, said in late fall 2011 that it would sell the successful company, seeing no reasonable way to har- monize the bookseller’s business ambitions with the church’s ethical standpoint. Indeed, a controversy had raged on its board over some erotic and esoteric litera- ture in its catalog. In June 2012, the board decided to instead have a foundation take over the commercial enterprise, in part to secure its compliance with moral standards—a decision announced ironically only two weeks before the launch of the erotic megaseller Fifty Shades of Grey in a German edition, which will account for a signi cant share in the group’s 2012 results (inter- view with Weltbild CEO Carel Hal , boersenblatt, June 29, 2012). Additional stimulus to the emerging battle on ebook pricing has come from attempts to o er discounts, notably Apple’s iTunes store, which has promoted vouch- ers that could be used for any digital content, including ebooks. The German trade association Börsenverein instantly confronted Apple on this policy and insisted on compliance with price regulation for books (buchreport, August 14, 2012). The Coming Trends Although an ebook market is building momentum in Germany, approaching a strong year-end season in 2012, the broader debate in the public and most media focused on entirely di erent topics. Most remarkably, the issue of copyright infringement in the rst half of 2012 developed from a niche topic into a mainstream issue, producing headline news in early summer and drawing almost as much attention as the Euro crisis and Germany’s role in preventing the continent’s economies from drifting apart (see the later discussion of piracy for a detailed account). In retail, the traditional chain and independent stores found themselves on a steady downward path, having lost some 8 percent in sales over the past decade. And professional media for the book community found their de ning moments when arguing over how the two largest book chains have been running into ever deeper trouble since late 2011. The market leader in brick-and-mortar book retail, Thalia (owned by the perfume and drugstore chain Douglas), fell behind its owners’ expectations—notably in its online performance, which despite being the strongest part of the company failed to compete with either Amazon or Weltbild. At Thalia, pro ts declined from €30 million in 2010 to €5 million in 2011, and sales for the fourth quarter of 2011 underperformed in com- parison to the overall market. At the same time, online revenues at Thalia grew by 20 percent, casting even darker shadows over the group’s brick-and-mortar per- formance. Online sales accounted for 14 percent of