30 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Distribution Scandinavia’s largest ebook distributor is Elib, founded in 2000 and owned by the Swedish publishing companies Bonnier, Natur & Kultur, Norstedts (of the KF group), and Piratförlaget. This producer and distributor currently distributes about 50,000 digital books per month to major retailers and libraries in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The relative success of Elib is nota- bly connected with strong ties as a service provider to libraries, which greatly dominate the ebook market at this point. Elib is selling about 13,500 ebooks each month to retailers and about 85,000 to libraries. Publit is Sweden’s second-largest ebook distributor and initially o ered print-on-demand services. It was founded in 2006 and o ered its rst releases in 2008. Denmark With a population under 5.5 million, yet in one of Europe’s most developed regions, located between Germany and Sweden, Denmark hosts a signi cant publishing industry, with internationally active groups such as Egmont and Gyldendal, as well as signi cant local branches of major players in both publishing and retail from other Scandinavian countries, including Swedish Bonnier (both publishing and retail). The major- ity of the highly educated reading audience is uent in English, to the point where translations into Danish are signi cantly impacted. Local publishers—notably, Egmont, Gyldendal, Lindhardt og Ringhof, Politikens Forlag, and People’s Press—have started to release ebooks, and dynamically extended their catalog to an expected list of 13,000 titles by early 2013, while distribution has been organized through a consortium-driven platform, Publizon, which was founded in 2005. Publizon is a platform for distributing ebooks and electronic audiobooks, which are “sold by the a liated retailers. Publizon handles the task of assembling the content from numerous content providers, and distrib- utes this catalog to the associated retailers who can be largest publishing group, Bonnier, followed by Bokus, which is owned by the Swedish KF (or “Coop” group). Adlibris launched its own ereading device, Letto, in June 2012, but Apple’s iPad is still considered to be the most popular device among readers. Among publishers, promotion of ebooks is currently not a high priority, and only a selection of new titles is released digitally, with an estimated 500 new digital titles rolled out per year versus 3000 for printed books. Even leading publishers so far have only a limited catalog of available ebook titles (Harlequin has around 400 Nordstedts, Bonnier, and Natur & Kultur have fewer than 400 each Piratförlaged has around 200). With retail prices between 100 and 170 Swedish krona, ebooks sell at about 10 percent less than printed editions. A new and so far widely successful approach was started by Novellix, a startup founded in May 2011 and specializing in the publication of short stories and other books with a limited volume of around 32 pages each, which are released in print, audio, and ebook formats. Novellix titles are available through all major online platforms for books in Sweden, as well as through Amazon. Novellix’s titles include one of the early ebook bestsellers in Sweden: Heder, by Jens Lapidus. (Details at Publishing Perspectives, July 30, 2012). The publishing and bookselling arm of KF, Akademibokhandeln (which is also linked, through the umbrella of KF, to Norstadts Publishing), and Bokus were also early innovators, as they launched an integrated reading and book-selling platform branded as Dito at the Gothenburg book fair in September 2011, with an app available for both Apple and Android platforms. At launch, Dito o ered 5,400 titles in Swedish as well as between 75,000 and 100,000 titles in English, in “all formats,” according to the KF release (quoted in Svensk Bokhandel, September 11, 2011). In contrast to other European markets, DRM is not widespread in Swedish ebooks.