32 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections about 327,000 units sold. From there, the growth curve continue to go steadily up. Momentum is building up in the Dutch ebook market from the addition of several of the big global players. Apple, Google, and Kobo (partnering with the retailer Libris BLZ in the Netherlands) launched localized plat- forms in 2012, and Amazon is as well. Eventually, Barnes & Noble is expected to follow before the end of the year—challenging the current market dominance of BOL.com. As ebooks are not subject to a xed retail price, a war on prices is expected to emerge (see a blog post at FutureBook by Jürgen Snoeren, quoted already above). Further expansion of the ebook market will have the advantage of a reading audience that has heavily embraced printed books in English already. Distributors Online media store BOL serves over 2.7 million custom- ers, which makes it the market leader in the online selling of media products and the largest online media shop of the Netherlands. The store has a catalog of over 3.8 million products. As for ebooks, BOL has partnered with German distributor Txtr since 2010. French-founded B2B distribution platform ePagine also operates a Dutch platform serving a broad list of publishers, including Artemis, Athenaeum, Kluwer, and ized titles in the Dutch language. By mid 2012, the title catalog had been estimated to grow to 16,000 titles, with a market share of 3 percent, which may grow to as much as 7 percent by the end of the year (estimates by goo- dereader.com, as well as by Jürgen Snoeren at the Futurebook blog). This recent development must be compared to an initially slow start in an ebook market that has been characterized by readers and consumers that showed little enthusiasm in migrating from print to digital, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) carried out among consumers and experts from the publishing industry in 2010. In addition, the survey concluded that iPads and other tablets had little use as reading devices. The ebook market in the Netherlands shows similar characteristics as Germany, with a conser- vative approach to digital publishing outside of Science, Technical and Mediacal (STM) publishing. In public professional debates, the threats—rather than the opportunities—are highlighted, such as the risk of sales losses of printed books. However, the situation started to change in early 2011, when the trade magazine Boekblad reported that as many ebooks were sold in the Netherlands in the rst half of 2011 as were sold in 2010 altogether.For January through June 2011, ebook sales totaled €3.4 million, with Netherlands Key indicators Values Source, comments Book market size (p+e, at consumer prices) €1,168 m Publishers Association Titles published per year (new and successive editions) 21,337 Publishers Association New titles per 1 m inhabitants 1,293 Ebook titles (available from publishers) 16,000 Estimate, FutureBook Market share of ebooks 3% Estimate, FutureBook Key market parameters Fixed book prices for year 1 after publication VAT of 6% for printed books, versus 21% (from October 2012) for ebooks
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