50 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections establishing cooperative ventures with Chinese counter- parts, a movement that was actively welcomed by Chinese authorities. This list includes, to name just a few examples, companies such as Penguin, which opened a Beijing o ce in 2005 Hachette, which announced its joint venture with Guangdong-based Phoenix Publishing & Media Group in 2009 Cambridge University Press and Amazon.com, which acquired the domestic online retailer Joyo.com in 2004 and since then has operated the localized version of its store, branded since 2007 as www.amazon.cn. In 2012, Hachette also opened an o ce in Hongkong. Arab eBook Market eBooks and the digital distribution of written content have the potential of becoming a game changer in the Arab world, by opening access to knowledge, learning, and also pleasure reading in a region that traditionally was known for high rates of illiteracy, and ailing distribu- tion channels for books. Digital distribution can perhaps overcome some of these hurdles and bring books within reach of a young population that is quickly moving online with the help of hugely popular electronic devices. With 64 percent of adults owning a smartphone in the United Arab Emirates, digital access is, in principal, within reach of many today.2 At a rst glance, the status quo is complex, if not bleak. Despite a population of 280 million native Arab speakers, spread between Morocco and the Gulf, an Arab book market hardly exists. Information on new title releases is hard to come by. Trading books across borders is limited and often cumbersome. Surveys on reading behavior portray a region where reading books (if they are not about religion) is a pastime for only a small fraction of even the educated strata of the population. Political as well as economic uncertainty add heavily to 2 See the survey carried out by the telecom equipment vendor Ericsson, polling 47,500 Internet users aged 16 to 60 years in 58 countries and regions in the first quarter of 2012, reported by various services, and the Wireless Federation on June 20 2012. xWRyHn). In June 2011, Hanvon signed an agreement with Shanda to gain access to Shanda’s ample list of online titles on its “Cloudy Bookstore.” Shanda’s own device, the Bambook, introduced in 2010, is assumed to come in second, at a low double-digit market share (http://bit.ly/zoCfes). Doukan (“All to see”), a proprietary reader sold by DangDang, has gained a reputation of poor usability, resulting in growing popularity of the Kindle among Chinese consumers (interview with Cheng Sanguo). As Jon P. Fine declared on his second visit to China during the Beijing International Publishing Forum on August 28, he soon hopes to o cially import Kindle devices to China. eBook Distribution eBook distribution platforms of relevant size have also been introduced by a number of publishing companies, such as www.Dajianet.com, launched by China Publishing Group Corporation, one of the largest players in the Chinese publishing industry. Reading as well as writing platforms, bundled with ebook distribution to large user communities, have been introduced by several more popular portals, such as Sina. com, China’s huge infotainment portal and microblog- ging website (http://book.sina.com.cn). Domestic ebooks are most commonly published in CEB, or China Ebook Format, promoted in particular by Apabi (founded in 2006), the former digital content division of Founder Group, a major Chinese technology conglomerate. The CEB format has also been used by European and American publishers for introducing their ebooks to the Chinese market (such as by Penguin, when converting more than 2000 titles into CEB in 2009 and distributing them via Founder Apabi http://pear.sn/ wIcKjO). International Cooperative Ventures Over the last ten years, at an accelerating pace, most major international publishing brands have looked at