The Global eBook Report: Current Conditions & Future Projections. Update October 2013 Read Free

networks of digital content, have growing educational aspirations as well as an interest in both local and global entertainment, and have access to all this via the Internet and their mobile devices.
A relatively small number of leading publishing companies, specializing in trade and education — groups such as Pearson , the newly formed Penguin Random House , Hachette , HarperCollins (backed up by their parent NewsCorp ), plus a few learning companies ( Oxford , Cambridge , Wiley , Cengage ) and publishers of science and professional information ( Thomson Reuters , Reed Elsevier ) — have woven truly global networks over the past few years, with local offices (not just for sales) exploring those (notably digitally connected) routes opened by the finance industry in the 1980s, global cities in the 1990s, and global tourism in the 2000s.
Apple’s iPod and iTunes have shown consumers around the globe how easily content can flow, while text messages, Facebook , and Twitter have connected consumers as individuals, not just as target groups.
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 adding 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.
    The global ebook market will not be a level playing field for some time to come, and we can be fairly certain that it will not become the open digital space that many across the globe wish for. Exclusions and inclusions will remain a governing pattern for a long time, often enough in not planned, but accidental ways.
    For instance, US headquartered Amazon launched a localized platform and Kindle shop in neighboring Canada only in January 2013 (!), over five years after its introduction in the US in November 2007. Google Play varies the media it offers to consumers widely, according to territory. Another example had two deeply intertwined, neighboring markets such as Germany and Austria at first separated by a gap, as books were initially available in Germany, yet not in Austria. Only since spring 2013, books can be purchased in Austria as well through Google Play. Also an ebook edition of a given (English language) title may be available internationally on Amazon for the Kindle, yet not through other major international platforms in ePub, despite the fact that an ePub version has been made available by the publisher.
    Sometimes, the result of all these contradictory developments are simply funny: My wish, in late 2011, to acquire a digital copy of, ironically, a book on the global spread of English (Nicholas Ostler’s fabulous The Last Lingua Franca , published by Penguin in the UK) led to an unexpected odyssey. Buying an EPUB version (as opposed to one for Mobipocket/Kindle) of the book from online retailers in the UK ( Waterstones or WHSmith ) from a computer in Vienna, Austria turned out to be impossible. British retailers would not accept an overseas customer. They would, of course, have shipped a paper copy anywhere in the world without hesitation (with a few extra pounds charged for shipping). The same applied to the publisher, Penguin, despite that house being at the forefront of both the globalization and digitization of books. In the end, the purchase was possible through Kobo , a (then) new Canadian venture,