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

prices)
4,000 million DKK (€540)
Bogmarkedet
Titles published per year (new and successive editions)
ca. 9,619 titles
New titles per 1 million inhabitants
1,275
eBook titles (available from publishers)
7,000
10,000 trade titles expected by January 2013 (Bogmarkedet)
Market share of ebooks
1% to 2% in 2011
Bogmarkedet
Key market parameters
No price regulation. VAT at 25% for both print and ebooks.
    Publizon also imports foreign language titles, aside from private imports by consumers, notably from Amazon UK.
    The largest ebook retailers are considered to be Saxo , which launched its dedicated platform for self-publishing (Saxo Publish) in September 2012; the dedicated ebook platform riidr.dk; Adlibris (by the Swedish Bonnier group); and Danish Gyldendal’s g.dk . But Amazon also has a significant market presence through its British site www.amazon.co.uk , catering to the high percentage of readers who are fluent in English. Apple’s iBookstore is also popular with users.
    According to the Danish book trade magazine Bogmarkedet , E ink–based reading devices have a limited presence in Denmark, while the iPad is “dominating the market totally.”
    The average retail price for ebooks is between 99 and 179 DKR (Danish crowns), at a discount of 40 to 50 percent from the printed edition. There is no price regulation for printed books or for ebooks, and both formats are subject to 25 percent VAT, which is among the highest rates in Europe.

Austria
    Austria is a good example of a relatively small market neighboring a much larger territory and a market of the same language. With a population of about 8 million, Austria is roughly 10 percent the size of Germany in all major relevant respects for this study and shares both the vernacular and, largely, the current cultural and media framework of its dominating neighbor. Both countries are members of the European Union and the Euro Zone.
    With regard to printed books, books from German publishers already reign supreme in Austrian bookshops, namely the chain stores as well as the online platforms of Amazon, Thalia , and Weltbild , serving the Austrian market from headquarters in Germany. Amazon also serves Austria from its German Kindle store, which opened a localized version in April 2011. Although local Austrian bestselling lists show, as would be expected, significant differences from locally branded authors (e.g., local celebrities as well as local literary talent), the overall pattern and a share of roughly two-thirds of those charts are very similar to those in Germany (for details, see Diversity Report 2010 ).
    On the other hand, local Austrian publishers have always confronted substantial hurdles to bringing their books to retailers, to media, and hence to consumers in Germany, where Austrian imports account for only about 3 percent (not, as expected by the equivalents in size, around 10 percent). In recent years, this imbalance has significantly increased. Between 2008 and 2010, in an overall flat book market in both Germany and Austria, imports from Germany to Austria have increased by 8.14 percent, as exports by Austrian publishers into Germany slumped by a remarkable 24 percent, reflecting on a domestic publishing sector in Austria that has ever growing difficulties in reaching out beyond its borders.
    The Austrian debate on ebooks has been largely shaped by Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels, the Austrian publishers and booksellers support of their German equivalent Börsenverein, in their legal action against Google’s unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works from libraries and against the proposed — and, at least for the US, widely accepted — Google settlement. No recent comments have been released as to the association’s stand in view of those recent developments.
    In November 2012, the association published its second report on ebooks in Austria, but with most data limited to the years 2011 and 2010, which have only very limited value to assess the situation as of late 2012. Because Austria is largely served by publishers, retailers, and distributors from Germany, it is fair to assume that developments as described for Germany largely apply also to the Austrian market, meaning that ebooks are increasingly embraced by the strongest readers, and that retail sales show a significant shift from traditional chain stores to online, notably to Amazon. This last trend has been highlighted by several small Austrian publishers interviewed in