45 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections declared its wish to acquire digital rights for the books it purchased in 2012 for high school students through the Programa Nacional do Livro Didático para o Ensino Médio (PNLEM). It is o ering US $50,000 for each title, including unlimited reproduction. Publishers are now trying to secure digital rights for images and other content in order to supply the PDFs and still clear a pro t. Another area of Brazilian government participation in digital publishing that cannot be neglected is the pur- chase of academic content, either via licensing or ebooks. These purchases are made by CAPES , a federal organization linked to the Ministry of Education that supports nationwide graduate courses and initiatives. The CAPES Periodicals Portal o ers Brazilian graduate students free access to about 31,000 journals and 150,000 ebooks. In 2011 alone, CAPES spent US $71 million on digital periodical licenses and ebooks for its library. No wonder Wiley has just opened an o ce in Brazil, and Springer is also moving in that direction. Brasilia is de nitely becoming an important city in digital publishing geography. Conclusion There are other digital initiatives in Brazil. In higher education, for instance, Estácio de Sá, a private university of 260,000 students, is already o ering digital textbooks to its students. The four largest Brazilian textbook pub- lishers have gotten together to create the Minha Biblioteca, a cloud-platform that sells access licenses to universities. Telecom companies like Vivo and Claro, too, are starting to o er ebooks for weekly fees to their mobile clients, and several magazines are going digital. Brazil hasn’t reached the tipping point yet but is very close to it. The game changer, as it has been in other countries, will be the opening of local branches of inter- national ebookstores, whether iBook, Google Play, Kindle, Nook, or Kobo. When this happens, Brazil will become an intrinsic part of the global ebook market. And although it is hard to predict when this is going to eGovernment If tax issues were not good enough reasons for digital publishing and bookselling executives to visit Brasilia regularly, the power of federal government book pur- chasing is. As we saw above, the public sector generated over 28.7 percent of publishers’ revenue in 2011, and the truth is that the ebook revolution will only get major traction in Brazil when the government decides to go digital. However, that may happen faster and more easily than would seem possible. First, one must remember that the Brazilian govern- ment is digitally quite savvy. Elections are digitally con- trolled nationwide, and winners are announced a few hours after any ballot. The Brazilian Internal Revenue Service has been receiving income tax declarations electronically for years now. The in ationary 1980s and 1990s forced not only the banks but the whole nancial system to develop online services long before the Internet was a reality, and that included the government. That being said, the Brazilian government will undoubt- edly embrace ebooks as soon as the savings are obvious. Actually, digitized government book purchase in Brazil has already begun. In November 2011, the federal government included digital content in the 2014 edition of its Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD), which acquires all educational books used in public schools. Initially the plan has only proposed buying DVDs, although the goal is to purchase additional digital mate- rials in the future. Since the PNLD alone purchased US $633 million worth of books in 2011 (again, almost 25 percent of publishers’ revenues), you can imagine the potential here. But the PNLD is not the only potential bulk purchaser. In February 2012, the Ministry of Education announced that it would supply 600,000 tablets to public school- teachers nationwide. By the end of 2012, the govern- ment will take delivery of all tablets—at an estimated value of US $75 to $90 million. In the beginning, not much attention was paid to the content such devices would carry. More recently, though, the ministry has