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

book imports.
    Interestingly, most CEE publishers that agreed to complete a questionnaire for this report have not considered the import of English books as significant or endangering their own sales of translated international bestsellers, with the notable exceptions of Lithuania and Slovenia, where we estimate that notably strong young readers read more than 50 percent in English. Those who emphasize the impact of English reading habits refer to the lower prices of imported books and the broader choice of available titles through both local bookstores and through Amazon.
    The emerging role of ebooks in Central and Eastern Europe
    Today, ebooks have everything they need to turn another page in this context. While printed books must overcome slow delivery and high shipping costs, ebooks can be downloaded instantly and at even lower prices than printed books in English. Readers of English are therefore obviously among the earliest adopters of ebooks and e-reading devices. The ultimate consequences, though, may prove to be truly disruptive. Experimental research conducted at the Florence Publishing Summer School (organized by university students and teachers from Paris, Oxford, Leipzig, and Ljubljana) has revealed that, in Slovenia in June 2013, a remarkable 70% of the 100 top-selling titles in the Slovene IBookstore were in English. By comparison, in Germany , English titles accounted for only 1 percent of the top 100 titles, 3 percent in Italy, and 2 percent in France .
    The domestic production of ebooks in local languages is a different matter altogether. The relatively poor available data indicate that, in all CEE countries, the number of ebook titles in local languages is still just a fraction of the overall output. In 2012, for example, only 400 to 600 ebook titles were available in Slovenia , Croatia , Latvia , and Lithuania each, and 1,600 titles were available in Estonia . However, in the first half of 2013, significant growth was recorded across almost all CEE countries: in Croatia , the number of available ebook titles increased to 1,800, to 1,000in Slovenia and Lithuania, to more than 9,000 in the Czech Republic , to between 5,000 and 6,000 in Hungary, and to 2,000 in Estonia .
    In 2011, opening localized versions of their ebook stores was hardly an option for global platforms such as Amazon or even Kobo . In Apple’s iBookstore, CEE books were limited to just a few. However, since 2011, a surprising number of local e-bookstores has started to emerge, mostly in the form of startups (e.g. Palmiknihy in the Czech Republic ) or as new ventures from established local combined booksellers and publishers (e.g. Zvaizgne in Latvia, Pegasas in Lithuania , and Mladinska knjiga in Slovenia ).
    In addition, some booksellers without publishing activities have built their own ebook platforms (such as Apollo in Estonia ), and in some cases, even telephone companies have launched such experiments (e.g. VIPnet and Hrvatski Telekom in Croatia ). In the Czech and Slovak republics, platforms such as Martinus and Palmiknihy operate across the border in both countries, forming the only cross-border operations in a highly fragmented region.
    Judging from publishers’ responses to a questionnaire for this report, a majority assumes that local platforms are currently local market leaders, as Amazon has not yet entered the CEE market. This might change by 2014, as Amazon has announced plans to establish a regional logistics center in the Czech Republic , and it must be assumed that other global players will follow suit quickly.
    Besides such locally developed e-distribution platforms that were prevalent in the region, Mladinska knjiga in Slovenia has developed its own digital bookstore in a partnership with the American company Impelsys (full disclosure: the author of this chapter has been in charge of this project). Additionally, in Slovenia in September 2013, the ebook library distribution platform Biblos (owned by the local fiction publisher Studentska zalozba ), in cooperation with Slovene public libraries, has started to test the unique business model of offering customers the possibility to either buy an ebook or borrow it for free for two weeks, with both alternatives proposed through the same Web page.
    It must be stressed that, in CEE, there is no real price war between ebook-sellers and print booksellers, as in the majority of cases, ebook retail prices are set by the publishers. Quite obviously, the common vertical