56 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections and its book arms Pearson Education and Penguin, plus the Financial Times newspaper—being an exception to the overall rule). Today, opening o ces in the Gulf, or even holding corporate management conferences in Beijing (as Penguin did a few years ago) has shown that book publishing is in no way any longer limited by national or linguistic borders. Amazon Founded as an online bookseller in 1995 in Seattle, Washington, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) por- trays itself not as a specialist on books, but as “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” catering to “four pri- mary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators.” Even in the short version, the company statement hints at the ambition of Amazon to assume, as a vertically integrated service provider, a broad number of business roles that traditionally had been the domain of a wide array of separate businesses, notably book- seller/retailer, used bookstore, library, publisher, service provider to authors, as well as publisher (including print on demand), ecommerce platform, and marketplace—to name just a few. The integration of roles under one roof has, on one hand, opened unique ways of expanding Amazon’s business but has on the other hand drawn critical reac- tions from many of the traditional players of the book business and resulted in recent controversies. Today’s ebook environment can reasonably be described as having been triggered, directly or indirectly, by the launch of Amazon’s Kindle reading device in 2007. The device was the part visible to consumers, in a much more complex and proprietary, highly integrated system that consisted of Amazon’s leading online platform for selling (printed) books in the US and most major European markets, plus China a phone hookup allowed the direct ordering and downloading of digital books, and the agreement with publishers—at rst the big six in the US—to make available a wide catalog of attractive titles under this system. Q Amazon and the Kindle allowed books—first in English, then in more languages—to flow through these virtual tubes, and the iPad seamlessly embeds those digital books in an integrated digital content universe, with movies, music, games, other reading, education, and other media. ■ Numerous local companies springing up in the various target markets enroot and diversify that web and extend it into a three-dimensional grid, by add- ing to the globalizing dimension local specifics, with local language, credibility, and logistics adding the last mile or last inch. The last factor—adding localization to the global read—must not be brushed aside as just a level for collecting the consumer’s money for the global players. Quite the opposite: it is a critical part in stabilizing a process of exploration and expansion that has, even with tremendous momentum, only started. Still, in the following discussion some of the globaliz- ers are highlighted in terms of their initiatives and strate- gies. Some selected local actors in emerging markets have been identi ed in the previous sections on Brazil, China, and the Arab world. The Recent Expansion of Global Platforms Publishing groups with international reach are certainly not a new feature of the industry, as the strong presence of British houses in all of the former Commonwealth and in the US well illustrate. With the acquisition of the world’s largest trade publisher, Random House, by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann in 1998, the subsequent reaching out of Hachette in the US and the UK, and the more recent international aspirations of regional groups such as Spanish Planeta or Swedish Bonnier, international expansion has become common. And their parent companies all control various media and related activities, with book publishing in most cases not being the groups’ largest division (with Pearson—