2 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Mandobservers any in the global book business spent much of 2011 marveling at the pace of ebook penetration in the United States United Kingdom. In 2012, a new digital buzzword was added: global. Never before has one book spread across not just a continent or two, but around the globe, as did E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. How could a piece of “mommy porn” nd so many readers on so many frontiers? Its readers share at least some traits that can be considered middle class, which translates to identi ers such as having a job and a desire for shaping one’s own destiny (at least a little bit) and forming an identity that includes sexuality as well as ethnicity and religion. But at least one more factor is missing in that common portrait: all of these readers are in some way part of the digitally connected world, which allowed knowledge of this book to spread via word of mouth on an entirely new scale. “Shades”—what a nice metaphor for that novel phenomenon—started as a piece of fan ction (another pastime that would not exist without the Internet and social media) of a highly media- tized book, Twilight (which speaks to how culture works in the digital age). It was then self-published, which leads us to consider the author selling directly to the con- sumer as an alternative approach to a system of middle- men that has developed over the past two centuries. Reading this book in electronic format meant that read- ers could take advantage of a phone or a shiny new tablet to hide a revealing cover for their innocent plea- sure—giving ownership of the reader’s fantasies an entire new meaning. Industry then stepped in and did what it does on a global scale: promoting, marketing, further expanding. eBooks are only one part of this new ecosystem of writing, publishing, and reading, as are publishers and retailers. But as ebooks have become embedded into the wider scope of digitized content as it ows around the globe, they now play a critical part in these tides, even where ebooks currently account for just a tiny percent of the market versus printed books—which includes most non-English-language markets. Globalization inevitably spawns a second movement: regulation. In the US, the Department of Justice has stepped in, disagreeing with major publishers and Apple (a distributor of ebooks) over who should control pricing of (digital) books, bluntly calling the publishers’ agree- ment with Apple a conspiracy. The ultimate result of this lawsuit, say the critics—and not all of them are publish- ers—will be a “government-assisted monopoly” (Jenn Webb in a TOC blog post), as it will help Amazon single- handedly dominate an industry, by allowing it in the future to ultimately de ne retail prices of ebooks, instead Mapping and Understanding the Emerging Global eBook Market