18 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections which includes a majority of titles in other languages than German and 80,000 titles in German. Libri has announced that it will re-branded Libri.de as eBook.de as of October 2012, proposing a catalog of altogether 600,000 ebook titles. Ciando is an independent retail platform for ebooks, with 220,000 currently available titles from about 600 publishing houses, including both independent (e.g., Hanser, Campus) and corporate (e.g., Random House, the Bonnier group) as well as international (e.g., Pearson Education, Wiley, O’Reilly) publishers. Textr o ers a broad range of distribution services on various platforms, notably for retailers, usually under their customers’ brands. In 2011, Textr won an invest- ment from 3M to extend their international strategy. Bookwire (not to be confused with www.bookwire. com, a service of the US bibliographical service Bowker) is a Frankfurt-based startup o ering small- to medium- sized companies, in particular, easy access to the ebook market. KN Digital, a branch of the distributor KNA, is a “full- service provider for digital media” (source: company statement), which includes digital distribution, ecom- merce solutions, print on demand, conversion, digital warehousing (or hosting), and marketing services for ebooks. KNA has provided these services for printed books to a broad customer base for many decades, particularly for various small- and medium-sized publish- ing houses. KN Digital announced the launch of their proprietary ereading device in September 2011. Skoobe is a consortium led by Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck that specializes in lending ebooks as a “mobile library.” Reading Devices For fall 2012, almost all major ebook consumer platforms and device brands have announce that they will intro- duce new reading devices and tablets with a speci c focus on reading, bringing the retail prices for ereaders below €70, and that of tablets below €200 Euros. This percent on books cannot be applied to ebooks, as they—being categorized as a service, not a product—fall under the normal rate of 19 percent. According to the Börsenverein study, 35 percent of German publishers have released ebooks as of 2011, with a clear lead by large houses (67 percent) and a signi cantly more cautious approach from medium- sized publishers (44 percent) and small publishers (28 percent). An estimated 40 percent of new titles are released—usually simultaneously—as ebooks alongside print. Distribution A number of domestic actors compete—and cooper- ate—in the distribution of ebooks. Among the leading global actors was Amazon, the rst to launch a dedicated German website for its Kindle reader in April 2011, with 40,000 commercial (or copyrighted) German-language ebook titles available by summer 2011 (and almost 1 million titles overall). Kobo followed in July 2011 and also announced a collaboration with Libreka. As a rule of thumb, almost all commercially distributed titles come with DRM, with only some rare limited experiments with social DRM (e.g., watermarking). As le formats, ebooks are predominately o ered as PDF or EPUB, except those for Amazon’s Kindle, which are Mobipocket. Libreka is a platform launched by Börsenverein in 2006, o ering ebooks since 2009 and with an September 2011 catalog of about 530,000 ebook titles, of which 57,000 are in German. Libreka claims to be the largest German distributor of ebooks. Owned and run by Börsenverein, Libreka has recently announced several partnerships—such as with Kobo, in July 2011—to position itself as a link between retail platforms and publishers, thereby strengthening its strategic position after facing internal challenges, notably from domestic wholesalers, over competition issues. Libri, the largest wholesaler for printed books—and claiming to be the lead seller of ebooks—o ers a catalog of 450,000 ebook titles as of June 2011 (buchreport),