66 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections development of this platform. With the advent of smart- phones and, more recently, tablet computers, and the with the spread of mobile access to the Internet, a rap- idly increasing number of consumers throughout Arab countries daily access music, movies, and social media, as well as text on their devices. Most of this content has become an integrated digital stream of digital media— yet with the exception of books. Because ebook publish- ing in the Arab language is still in such an early stage, digital books are accessible only as pirated copies. As soon as a book shows initial success with readers, pirated versions appear within days, both digital (in PDF format) and printed. To make the situation worse, many of the most popular platforms for the distribution of various digital content, such as Apple’s iTunes and equivalent local channels, will not carry any (or a large selection of) Arab language books, alongside their extensive selec- tions of music or movies. As a result, a relatively well established platform for the distribution of books online, such as Nil WaFurat, su ers not in spite of but because of the expansion of digital media consumption. But the Arab world is not a homogenous market, even with regard to piracy. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the local production of pirated ebooks is not considered an imminent threat to innovative businesses the UAE government would like the entire country to become a regional leader for the development of a “knowledge society” along the benchmarks of the 21st century. This ambition is well re ected in the recent emergence of several ventures—like Rufoof, or also Qordoba, which are portrayed here in the discussion of the Arab market—as well as the funding that such initia- tives can raise from both local and international sources (an option hardly practical for a company headquartered in Lebanon, such as Nil WaFurat), disregarding the Levantine’s old tradition as a main hub for books and publishing throughout the Arab world. The authoritative practices and strategies with regard to piracy—or, more broadly, with regard to creating the legal framework to cope with the challenges from digital eBook Piracy in Europe: The Example and Debate in Germany, and Related Findings Methodological Issues with Regard to Research on Piracy Throughout media history, the emergence and penetra- tion of markets by new media seems to have been inti- mately intertwined with the advent of piracy and challenges to the current business practices of those in control of the respective “old media.” To provide an example from the early days of the movie industry, a recent, highly authoritative study says bluntly: “Piracy was, we have seen, absolutely central to the birth of the lm industry.”5 In fact, piracy, and the subsequent legal battles, had been instrumental in the forming of the movie industry, and by the outcome of those legal battles, those studios that dominated the new born industry for decades, owed their strong position to a signi cant degree to those early innovators and explor- ers of the new technology of the lm and of drama projected onto a screen who, at the end, had been labeled as pirates. At the same time, and in practical terms—which are not necessarily identical to legal considerations—the label “piracy” can refer to di erent issues under di erent circumstances. In the fragile context of an emergent, under-regu- lated, and under-controlled market such as those in large parts of the Arab world (or similarly, in Russia), piracy can be a direct threat to the already precarious infrastructure of the book business, as the example of Lebanon’s (and the Arab world’s) rst online book shop—Nil WaFurat— well illustrates. Its founder, Saleh Chebaro, explained in an interview for this report in early 2012 how the upswing in the consumption of digital media content paradoxically turned out as essential to the further 5 Peter Decherney: Hollywood’s Copyright Wars. From Edison to the Internet. New York, Columbia University Press 2012, page 65.