17 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Fair, market research company GfK published a survey on the rst half of 2011, reporting ebook sales of €13 mil- lion—already equal to 60 percent of overall revenues in 2010, which is signi cant, as book sales in December alone represent usually around 18 percent of a year’s sales. At the end of 2011, the German book market recorded a signi cant acceleration of previously experi- enced change in the book industry, and digital develop- ments account for the momentum in this shift. Available Titles In a subset of the survey based on a questionnaire answered by 437 publishing professionals in January 2011, revenues from ebooks accounted for 5.4 percent of publishers’ revenues, with projections for this value growing to 6.6 percent in 2011 and 16.2 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, a panel of 394 retailers surveyed expected ebooks to represent 1.9 percent of sales in 2011 and 9.2 percent of sales in 2015. Libri.de, the wholesaler and ebook platform, has almost 200,000 ebook titles available, a number that is di cult to compare to that of 25,000 reported for 2011, as ebooks from publishers mix with academic studies and other publications from outside the book trade. But clearly, the available literature in electronic formats is rapidly expanding. Several of the leading publishing groups—notably Random House, the Holtzbrinck imprints (Rowohlt, S. Fischer, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, and Droemer Knaur), and Lübbe—are releasing and promoting most of their new titles as ebooks alongside print. Pricing eBooks are generally sold at a retail price about 20 per- cent lower than the lowest-priced printed edition. The trade association Börsenverein is strongly lobby- ing to extend the German regulatory framework of xed book retail prices to ebooks. Another major concern is that under European policies, the reduced VAT rate of 7 The pattern of online growth could be seen in various other segments of the German book market in 2011. At the end of 2011, Amazon.de announced that its Kindle reader, introduced in a localized German version in September 2011, had been the bestselling product since the start of the holiday season on November 1, 2011 the bestselling product on Cyber Monday, December 12, 2011 and the top-selling product of 2011 (January 4, 2012 press release). Libreka, the German trade association’s ebook distri- bution platform, announced in January 2012 that sales in 2011 showed “exponential growth,” driving Libreka’s income from €50,000 in the rst quarter of 2011 up to €150,000 in the second quarter, €420,000 in the third quarter, and €1.5 million in the fourth quarter. Forecasts for 2012 indicate a continuation of this trend: in the rst two weeks of January alone, sales of €400,000 were recorded (buchreport, January 19, 2012). In November 2011, Germany’s largest wholesaler of books, Libri, at its online platform libri.de claimed rev- enues from ebooks that were for the rst time higher than from any other book format. End-of-year holidays in 2011 appear to have marked an even more fundamental watershed in ebook and ereading developments for Germany, as re ected in a comment by trade magazine buchreport: “The signal is unambiguous” (buchreport express, 52, 2011, December 2011) notably, ereading devices and tablet computers were the drivers behind the trend, and ebook downloads were expected widely to follow the expansion in device sales. Only half a year earlier, in summer 2011, various media reports estimated that in Germany, ebooks accounted for about 1 percent of the book market. In March 2011, Börsenverein released a study based on a 2010 survey by market research rm GfK identifying an ebook market worth €21.2 million for 2010 or 0.5 percent of the market of book consumers (the estimated share of books bought by readers in retail). In 2010, 2 million ebooks were sold to 540,000 ebook consumers, accord- ing to the study. In October 2011, at the Frankfurt Book