57 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections among ebook users (“Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading,” BISG study quoted in buchreport, August 2, 2012). The total revenue from digital content downloads of Amazon in 2012 was estimated at $1.85 billion in 2011, placing the platform at a rank of 21 among all global ecommerce vendors (“The world’s most successful digital media companies,” paidcontent.org 50, July 31, 2012). In the UK, Amazon accounts for 21 percent of the entertainment market (according to Kantar Worldpanel, as quoted in The Bookseller, July 24, 2012). In Germany, a study by the University of Hamburg on a panel of 2,000 consumers estimated that 57 percent of German ebook buyers acquired at least some of their digital reading at Amazon in 2011 (Michel Clement and Felix Eggers, “E-Books und E-Reader, Kauf und Nutzung,” Universität Hamburg, January 2012). For 2011, in the UK, Amazon announced a ve-fold increase in Kindle ebook sales over 2010. Apple iBooks is an application that has come bundled with iPads since the device was rst introduced by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) in January 2010. The app allows readers to download digital books in EPUB format from the iBookstore, and it is integrated with Apple’s iTunes plat- form for the exchange and usage of other le formats, such as PDF. The iBooks app comes in over 30 language versions, including English, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Ukrainian. However, this does not mean that all these languages are also supported for publishing a book to the iBookstore (e.g., Arabic, along with other languages that are written from right to left, are at this point not supported simpli ed Chinese was added in 2012). For more information, see the guide “Using iTunes Producer 2.7.1 for Books.” The iBookstore currently has paid stores in the US, Canada, Australia, the EU, Norway, and Switzerland. In comparison, the iTunes store has a much wider scope of By mid 2012, the Kindle and its successor devices, notably the color Kindle Fire, were seen as the most popular reading platforms for ebooks internationally, and Amazon set up localized Kindle shops via its website for not just the US but also the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Japan, Amazon entered into an agreement with 40 publishers, including Gakken and Kadokawa, on the distribution of their ebooks for the Kindle in Japanese (Asahi Shinbun, May 7, 2012). In August 2012, the Kindle was also launched in India with a catalog of over 1 million titles priced in rupees, making it the biggest ebook store on the subcontinent. Amazon, the Kindle, and the related o ers—from author services to lending books as a prime customer (available so far only in the US)—form an increasingly integrated sphere, of which signi cant parts are not available via other platforms. This connection is demon- strated by Amazon’s claim that 180,000 Kindle exclusive titles are now available on that lending library, and altogether Kindle-exclusive titles have seen over 100 million downloads by late August 2012 (press release, August 28, 2012). On the other hand, the Kindle device was originally sold only via Amazon’s website, but as of September 2011, it was also made available in other retail channels, such as the Staples o ce supply stores and the German Karstadt department stores. In May 2012, another— much debated—partnership was been announced with the British book chain Waterstones (buchreport, December 22, 2011, “Amazon verkauft Kindle-Geräte über Karstadt und Staples”). The rst Kindle device was the game-changer for the emergence of today’s ebook market, but various surveys indicate a clear migration of customers from specialized ereading devices to tablet computers. Between August 2011 and May 2012, the preference for the Kindle as the device of choice for reading dropped among US con- sumers from 48 percent to 35 percent Amazon’s tablet, the Kindle Fire, seems to have topped Apple’s iPad tablet