39 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections LitRes LitRes, founded in 2007, is considered to be the leading ebook retail platform for legal titles in Russia, currently listing 200,000 ebook and audio titles for download and its own LitRes Touch device. As early as 2009, Alexander Roife, chief editor of LitRes, noted that titles which g- ured on the print bestselling charts had between 3,000 and 6,000 legal downloads on average as well (Publishing Perspectives, October 2009). On its website, LitRes operates with the complete set of current state-of-the-art reader and community tools, including ratings and debates for popular titles and topics, and o ers and supports a wide variety of stan- dards and formats. Ozon Ozon is a general retailer selling not only books and other media products but also house and garden appli- ances, beauty, gifts, shoes, antiques, jewelry, and fashion products. It is currently the second largest online retailer in Russia (after Utkonos.ru, a platform specializing in food). Opened in 1998 as a “scalable business” (company statement), Ozon is a megastore market leader in B2C ecommerce in Russia, with revenues of US$137 million in 2010, up 34 percent from 2009, and 5.6 million registered users (as of March 2011) and 600,000 visitors daily. Ozon has a catalog of about 600,000 printed book titles, of which 240,000 are in Russian, and about 10,000 ebook titles, equaling some 10 percent of value of hard- cover sales (Elizabeth van Lehr, “A Russian Riddle,” London Fair Dealer, April 27, 2011). Ozon promotes its own eread- ing device, the Ozon Galaxy (not to be confused with the Samsung Galaxy). In September 2011, Ozon raised US$100 million in funding, the largest such investment ever for an Internet company in Russia, according to the company. (For details, see The Guardian, September 8, 2011). piracy when it comes to ebooks, as stakeholders queried for this report assumed that pirated ebooks represented an estimated 90 percent of the current ebook downloads in Russia. Main Actors and Driving Forces in the (Legal) Russian eBook Market By the end of 2011, ebook releases of national bestsellers were considered to be the main driving force behind the recent expansion of the (legal) Russian ebook segment (e.g., Viktor Pelewin’s postapocalyptic novel S.N.U.F.F., Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, or the Millennium trilogy by Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson). A relevant ebook bestseller list is available at the ebook retail platform LitRes. With overall about 60,000 ebook titles available by the end of 2011, the two largest publishing groups, EKSMO and AST, are also considered the market leaders in Russian ebooks. In distribution, LitRes is the top-performing platform, followed by Imobilco, the general online sales platform Ozon, Labirint, and Bookland, plus a few specialized ventures developing innovative models adapted to the Russian speci c environment, notably KnigaFund (liter- ally “book fund,” of the Digital Distribution Center, DDC Ltd.) and the online library BookMate. In Russia, the most popular format for ebooks is FB (or FictionBook), an open XML-based standard with the le extension .fb2. The format is without DRM and describes the structure of a document, including the basic metadata such as the author’s name, the title, and the publisher of a book, allowing convenient conversion to other le formats as well as indexing and manage- ment of ebooks by the reader. (For more details in English, see http://bit.ly/AzI7vL.) FBReader is an open source reading software for GNU/Linux, Windows, and other platforms, originally released in January 2005. (For more details in English, see www.fbreader.org/about.php.)
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