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

authors, Tracy Chevalier and Haruki Murakami were e-bestsellers in the first half of 2013. As in most of the other CEE countries, the VAT on ebooks is much higher than the VAT on printed books (24% vs. 9%).
    No Kindle editions are produced, as Romanian is currently not among the officially supported languages.
    Source: Siviu Lupescu, Polirom , Iasi, Romania.

Serbia
    The Serbian book market has an estimated retail value of €50 to €70 million (excluding textbooks).
    No local distribution platform for ebooks exists so far, as the cost of development would exceed the possible income. For the Apple platform, some local subcontractors operate and normally add a markup of 30 percent on the retail price of a work, in addition to Apple’s 40 percent fee, leaving a mere 30 percent for the originators of the work. Amazon’s direct publishing services are not available in Serbia, and the Serbian alphabet (either in Cyrillic or in Latin) is not actively supported for the generation of ebooks.
    Piracy is endemic, with illegal downloads of movies, music, and now ebooks being routine for many consumers. As a result, content owners (namely publishers but also authors and translators) are very reluctant to expose their content to piracy in digital formats.
    Source: Aleksandar Drakulic, Knjizara , Belgrade.
    Conclusions on Central and Eastern Europe
    In this current, early stage, small markets overall seem to lag behind in their domestic production of ebooks, as the emerging new niche is challenged by a number of factors: required investments are difficult to earn back in small or at best flat local markets with small language communities. Some local languages have the additional disadvantage of so far not being supported by global ebook platforms for producing ebooks — though in some cases, popular Web browsers are available in local languages, which opens a cultural and practical gap between the usage of the local language against the globalization of English. The strongest — and often best educated and fairly affluent — readers are also those in a position to read in English and make direct purchases, particularly from the shops offered by Amazon and Apple, as well as Kobo and Google, allowing those global players to expand their market share without the cost of localizing their offerings, hence competing with the usually small locally emerging platforms.
    In this context, a set of problems was exposed, the most obvious of them being the higher VAT on e-books and higher royalties on translations that more or less equalize the production costs of ebooks and printed books.
    Piracy is often not so much direct competition for a commercial legal offer but instead compensates for a legal title list that is nonexistent or still highly limited in scope, while local users nevertheless become accustomed to finding books in digital formats on the Internet, again putting the local legal offerings at a disadvantage against the much broader and better-marketed as well as better-protected offerings in the English language.
    The potential of digital technology to cater to niches and to audiences spread geographically at low cost and great convenience has so far not even started to become a competitive advantage for small markets and small local actors.
    Google’s library-scanning initiative, publicized and made accessible via the Hathi Trust , is currently the by far largest collection of digitized books from the many languages in the region, and it will be interesting to observe if, after the 2012 settlement with US publishers, that ressource will play a role for starting to change this imbalance, at least in terms of expanding a digital catalog in many small or peripheral languages.

Chapter 8. Advertorial Copyright Clearance Center

New Licensing Solutions for a Changing Publishing Industry
    By Michael Healy , Executive Director, International Relations Copyright Clearance Center
    As digital technology continues its steady transformation of the book market, we have seen in recent years many new companies entering the industry to grasp the opportunities on offer, and many new alliances being formed between those new players and traditional publishers. One interesting consequence of these developments has been the recognition among established and experienced publishers that there are significant opportunities to license their content for republication. In turn, these new entrants have begun to learn — many for the first time —