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

sold at €10 or less. ( Livres Hebdo , 23 August 2013)
    By contrast, ebooks in heavily discounting UK bookshops and in crisis-stricken Italy and Spain cost only half of German or Swedish bestseller prices. The fact that Spain has a fixed book price system, the UK stiff competition over pricing, and Italy´s position somewhere in the middle do not seem to play a major role in differentiating these markets.
    Similarly, discounts for ebook versions of titles that are the top sellers in print show remarkable variations. A reader in Germany can only save some 17%, on average, in the top segment, while his Spanish peer pays only half by choosing an ebook over print -which may contribute to the strong recent dynamics in the Spanish ebook sector. France is positioned between these extremes.

    These differences not only highlight the very broad range of prices and discounts among ebook frontlist titles but also emphasize that ebooks, even in the early stages of their emergence, as in Germany, have a strong tendency to dissolve the notion of books as one integrated, homogeneous market segment.
    By looking at top-selling titles around Christmas 2012, we can observe that print and ebook charts are drifting apart, as if they reflect two different continents of reading preferences.
    Aside from current erotica, in a mix of Fifty Shades of Grey, Silvia Day’s Crossfire series, and scores of subsequently self-published titles, only a few books from January’s print bestseller lists tended to figure on the ebook charts, notably Ken Follett’s Century , J.K. Rowling’s Casual Vacancy , Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which hit European movie theaters around Christmas, and some top-of-the-line Nordic crime novels by Danish Jussi Adler-Olsen and Jo Nesbø. The strongest print books per country, such as Jonas Jonassen’s Hundred Year Old Man in Germany and the UK, the works of local crime writer Andrea Camilleri in Italy, and María Dueñas´ with Misión Olvido in Spain (priced at €12.34!) are sure to be found side by side with ebook editions in the top ranks.
    By late summer of 2013, the rift seems to have widened. Only a very few authors have managed to be represented in both the top 10 for printed fiction in the analyzed major European book markets and the respective Amazon chart, or at least in those of domestic platforms such as Weltbild in Germany (two women crime authors, German Rita Falk and British Jojo Moyes) or Casa del libro in Spain.
    The biggest publishers are getting bigger in ebooks
    A rather complex picture evolves when looking at the publishing houses behind the top-selling titles. Ebooks are currently seen by many, especially in the largest publishing houses, as an additional channel to push top-selling titles into the market. It is no surprise to see these globally acting groups, such as Random House or Hachette (coincidentally the publishers of Fifty Shades of Grey in English, German, and French) having a strong presence in the charts.
    Data for the top 20 ebook bestsellers in 2012 from nine European countries and the US (provided by Kobo for this report’s February 2013 update), may not be representative of all these markets, given the online retailer’s different market share for each market. However, it provides a valuable basis for some informative observations and comparisons (the data cover Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US).
    Across these 200 ebook title entries in ten markets of different sizes and primary languages, 57 can be attributed to various imprints of Random House, of which 35 are editions of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, in their US, UK, and German editions.
    Scholastic comes in second, with 20 entries, all but two of which are variants of the US edition of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, which the New York-based house successfully sold, in English, across the Scandinavian markets of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
    George R.R. Martin comes in third with A Dance with Dragons , again part of a series, which sold well across all European markets in print but was represented in the Kobo ebook charts only in the English-language edition across Scandinavia as well as in Spain. The book is followed by Ken Follett’s Giants , with 10 entries, in English, German, and Italian translations.
    Examining some of these ebook markets more closely, it turns out that, in Germany, France, and Italy, the respective market leaders in print