23 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections The catalogs of the three largest distribution plat- forms—Numilog, Eden Livres, and Eplateforme—have been integrated since May 2010. Fnac, founded in 1954, is the largest chain bookstore, also selling music and movies in France, with revenues of €4,473 million. Fnac has additional ventures in Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Taiwan, and Brazil. Fnac o ers a catalog of 82,000 ebooks (with no breakdown available for the percentage of French titles), of which 75 percent are in PDF format and the rest pri- marily in EPUB. Fnac introduced its own dedicated ereader, the FnacBook, in October 2010. In 2010, Fnac. com hosted 120,000 ebook downloads (versus 60,000 in 2009), with 130,000 in the rst quarter 2011 alone—half of which, however, were free titles (LeMotif). Virgin Megastore France extended its online platform for electronic devices and media content to ebooks in November 2011 and selling branded Bookeen ereaders and Amazon Kindle ereaders and tablets in France. Virgin Megastore’s French arm is owned by private equity group Butler Capital Partners French online book shop Chapitre has started a cooperation with Sony on distributing its ereaders and tablets, starting in September 2012 (buchreport, August 22, 2012). For the library market, British academic book supplier Dawson runs a branch o ce out of Paris that is dedi- cated to serving France and other French-speaking markets. Bookeen is, according to one of its founders, Laurent Picard, “primarily a site for book lovers. A 100 percent digital library where the Internet user can be well served,” with a current catalog of 42,700 titles, of which 1,300 are free of charge and without DRM, the others including works published by Gallimard, Flammarion, P.O.L., Bragelonne, and Publie.net. The two largest French publishing groups with their digital platforms are “the big voids” (company statement). Bookeen was founded in 2003, after the rst wave of enthusiasm in electronic reading devices had collapsed, and produces its own localized Kindle store with a broad o er of French lan- guage titles for the Kindle only opened in October 2011, while Kobo entered in a partnership with Fnac in November 2011. The French book industry has a long tradition of its leading publishers also owning signi cant distribution operations from the very beginning, this tradition has shaped the distribution of ebooks as well. Numilog was launched in 2000 and was acquired by Hachette in 2008, but was returned to its founder in June 2012 (press release by Hachette). The distributor claims to be the “reference library” for ebooks in France, with 34,000 commercial titles and 130,000 free books avail- able, of which 22,000 are supposedly French titles. (Status at year end 2011, no current update available.) Similar to the German market, most ebooks are o ered in PDF or EPUB formats. Eden-Livres is a joint venture of the independent publishing houses Gallimard, La Martinière/LeSeuil, Actes Sud, and Flammarion, o ering a catalog of over 5,000 titles in various formats, mostly EPUB. The techni- cal service provider Canadian De Marque has received additional nancing of 3 million Canadian dollars from three French publishers, Gallimard, Flammarion (later in the year acquired by Gallimard), and La Martinière. Epagine—which also has a Dutch branch—is a gen- eral-solutions provider founded in 2008 for (currently) 177 publishers and bookshops specializing in ebooks. With Decitre, a new platform for ebooks, branded as “the ebook alternative”, or tea, was launched in March 2012, from Lyon-based retailer Decitre, which is based on an open access model for all interested stakeholders, o ering direct ebook distribution to all interested retail- ers (Livres Hebdo, March 18, 2012). Eplateforme is a hub controlled by the publishing arms of Editis, which has passed distribution deals with Média Participations, and Michelin (see http://bit.ly/ yFoBD3).
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