26 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Amazon opened its localized Spanish platform, the fth of its kind in Europe and the eighth worldwide, on September 14, 2011, with a catalog of about 300,000 titles in the Spanish language a Spanish Kindle shop is expected to follow before the end of 2011, triggering immediate strong concerns, notably by the publishers’ association FGEE, about Amazon’s future compliance with the Spanish legislation on regulated prices for both printed and electronic books, which Amazon acknowl- edges (see El Pais, September 15, 2011, for the FGEE concerns see Amazon’s reply here). Other market players from outside the book trade are expected to look for their piece of the ebook pie as well, including powerful Spanish telecommunications group Telefonica, which introduced its own dedicated reading device called the Movistar Ebook bq at the retail price of €169 and an online Movistar eBook store in June 2011. At this point, exports of ebooks—to Latin America, as well as to the US—have not gained relevance but are expected to grow. As of June 2011, Libranda started operations in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. Plans exist to include English titles in the Libranda catalog. Italy eBook sales in Italy in 2011 have been estimated by the Italian Publishers Association AIE at €3.7 million at cover prices, or 0.2 percent of the overall book market (Giornale delle libreria, March 3, 2012). The low overall penetration may hide more complex dynamics in the Italian market place. The European nancial crisis put the book market under severe pressure, with 2012 estimates predicting 10 percent lower overall book sales than 2011. Recent years have been characterized by signi cant changes in the performance of the largest publishing groups. The Mondadori group maintained its leading position, but RCS saw its presence diminishing, including the model of part-time works—distributing books together with popular magazines, at kiosks—diminishing, and even headline of “Palabras Mayores” the rst selections are commercially available in both Mobipocket and EPUB (with DRM) at the platform Leer. The rst emergence of an ebook market can be dated to 2010, with the launch of the dedicated B2B (business- to-business) ebook distribution platform Libranda. The venture is the initiative of a consortium of the three largest publishing groups—Planeta, Santillana, and Random House/Mondadori—with 15 publishers initially contributing titles and eight online stores serving the consumers. Libranda distributes titles in the EPUB format with Adobe DRM protection. By the end of 2010, Libranda had signed up 23 publishers and 98 imprints, representing more than half of the Spanish book market, plus distribution agreements with 56 retailers in Spain and an “indirect distribution agreement” with Barnes & Noble in the US. By September 2011, Libranda’s catalog contained 5,133 titles and was expected to expand to 10,000 titles by the end of 2011. Though Libranda, as a B2B ebook distribution plat- form, is estimated to own 60 percent of the Spanish ebook market, several other ventures have launched services, notably Publidisa (estimated market share of 20 percent) and Amabook (a platform with strong ties with several Latin American markets, including Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia 5 percent). The ebook distributor Leqtor went out of business. In addition to the three publishing conglomerates that initiated Libranda, several more are proposing ebook titles, including Maeva and Roca. For online retail direct to readers, the strongest brands are Casa del Libro, with its dedicated ebook section (o ering a current catalog of 4,458 titles and an estimated market share in ebooks of 45 percent) the Spanish branch of French retailer Fnac (with its own ebook bestseller chart and an estimated market share of 25 percent for ebooks), as well as El Corte Inglés, Europe’s largest general retailer, whose online o erings include a media section with books and music, with an estimated market share of ebooks at around 20 percent.
Downloaded from Tizra Support Resource Hub (support.tizra.com) by unknown.