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

an exploration of whether or not the digital publishing and distribution of books can provide new opportunities for small and highly diverse book cultures, with audiences that are often particularly fragmented between a domestic population and relevant groups that have migrated overseas. Also, it allows us to highlight how the emergence of ebooks reinvigorate and accelerate other patterns of change, such as the increasing tendency of the strongest readers to read in two languages, their mother tongue and English. Finally, relatively small local publishers and retailers in those markets usually find themselves confronted at once by totally new competitors as consumers privately take advantage of the possibilities for privately importing books and e-reading devices from global platforms such as Amazon or Apple , which results in further strain for local actors in an already strained economic environment.
    The case study of this chapter aims at analyzing this complex evolution, as Central Europe offers a good example through its unique set of small countries that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic sea, each with less than five million inhabitants and speakers of languages more or less limited to their national states ( Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia , and Serbia ). Regardless of their shared history in the second half of the twentieth century, significant economic, political, and cultural differences are also an inherent part of their contemporary identities, as much as the fact that today’s economic recession hits them in very different ways.
    The book markets in Estonia , Latvia , and Lithuania , commonly described as the Baltic region, were most severely struck by the financial crisis after 2008 and started to show new growth only in 2012. The economic evolution of Slovenia , meanwhile, is different, as it had its worst year in 2012, resulting in a decline of the book market by 10 percent — while it was up by 5 to 10 percent in Latvia and Estonia .
    The accelerating impact of English reading
    Regardless of their differences, these book markets share at least three similar characteristics:
    With the only exception of Slovenia, in most Central and East European (CEE) countries, many of the old, traditional publishing houses of the Communist era disappeared with the state-centered economy after 1989, while new ones were created by either local entrepreneurs or by international actors, which withdrew from these markets after 2000.
In most CEE countries (with the notable exception of Estonia), major bookshops and publishers are often owned by the same mother companies (so bookstores are commonly owned by publishers or the other way around).
As English as a second language gains ground massively across the CEE region, all of these markets turn more and more into bilingual reading markets, witnessing a steady growth of imported books in the English language, though it is difficult to quantify this development, as it is largely driven by individual imports of books and, more recently, of digital reading devices. It must be assumed that, to a high degree, these private imports come through the distribution platforms of Amazon and, to a lesser degree, Apple’s iTunes and iBookstore . However, no data have been made public about those trends.
    The only empirical reference available are British export statistics, which hint at, for instance, a share of 10 to 15 percent of English books in Slovenia, while in Latvia , Lithuania , and Croatia , English books supposedly account for around 6 percent of the local market. In all other CEE countries, English-language imports represented 3 to 5 percent of the market in 2011. This difference probably echoes the fact that, in Slovenia , even in the time of Yugoslavia , before 1992, English was the first foreign language usually taught in schools, as opposed to Russian in the other countries of the region.
    According to data from the British Publishers’ Association (PA), in 2012, printed book imports from the U.K. remained stable in Slovenia , Slovakia , and Hungary and were slowly growing in Romania , the Czech Republic , and Latvia , while Lithuania and Estonia saw a significant 20% growth, as opposed to considerable drops in Croatia (as importers expected the abolition of custom charges with Croatia’s entrance into the European Union by January 2013). In Serbia , a severe general recession has caused a cut in English