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

interlopers. After a while, though, the club members realized that ebooks were an opportunity, not a threat. By the time they all reached that conclusion, they already had a functioning platform and signed deals. DLD offers 3,000 titles in their catalog. This number might be misleading, however. A glance at the PublishNews bestsellers list, which provides the most reliable ranking in Brazil, shows that DLD publishers are responsible for a third of the print bestsellers on the list. Their technological platform has been recognized as a very good and reliable one by most retailers.
    Acaiaca is one of the largest national book distributors in Brazil. It is privately owned and has recently launched their Acaiaca Digital venture. They are set to become another digital aggregator and already have some publishing houses to distribute. They also have a deal with Clube de Autores, the largest self-publishing company in Brazil, to distribute digitally their more than 25,000 authors that are only available in print today.
    Minha Biblioteca is a consortium of the largest Brazilian textbook publishers — Saraiva, Atlas, Grupo Gen, and Grupo A — with the goal to distribute their digital content. They use Ingram’s Vital Source platform to offer cloud-based e-textbook licenses to universities but also work on a traditional wholesale model if that is the client’s desire. They offer over 3,500 titles and have already signed 26 universities.
    eRetailers
    The ebook retailers’ scenario in Brazil replicates the American one. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Kobo are present. Barnes & Noble is not around, but the local bookstore chain Saraiva fills the gap in a very similar way. In addition, there are some minor companies trying to find their spaces among the big guys.
    Amazon While Kobo is often portrayed as the nice guy in the Brazilian market, Amazon has faced some resistance when negotiating with local publishers. It took several months of back-and-forth contract negotiations for the Seattle giant finally to put together a catalog and launch their store in December 2012, and to reach a final deal with the big Brazilian publishers, Amazon had to accept discount limitations in their wholesale agreements even though no agency model was used. Currently, Amazon sells only ebooks in Brazil, and even to distribute its Kindle devices (Touch and Paperwhite), it depends on local partnerships with the retailer Ponto Frio and independent bookstore chain Livraria da Vila. Actually, this is the largest challenge that Amazon faces in Brazil, i.e. the fact it does not have any physical logistics and almost all book and electronics retailers refuse to carry Kindles due to competitive issues. Even Ponto Frio refuses to sell the devices in its brick-and-mortar stores. This situation made Amazon get creative, and in a partnership with a local company, Kindle kiosks were opened in the main malls of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to sell Kindles to Brazilians physically. This bottleneck sales problem might end soon, however. Amazon is starting to sign contracts for physical distribution in Brazil, which means that they will solve the logistical issues in the next months, and when they are able to ship books, they will be able to ship Kindles — or anything — and play ball in a much more aggressive way. Amazon also has a strong local team in Brazil.
    Apple Apple opened its iBookstore for business in Brazil in October 2012. Even better, it started to sell Brazilian ebooks on that day, since technically a de facto Brazilian store was never opened. When Apple realized it would be a nightmare to use its agency-based business model in a place where books are tax-free but book-related services are not and no lawyer can ultimately guarantee that agency or even retail price controls are actually legal, it decided to use the American iBookstore to sell in the Brazilian market in American dollars. The result, therefore, is not a traditional Brazilian iBookstore but a window of access to Brazilian content available in the American store. This solution, however, also brought some problems. First, Brazilians pay a 6.38% IOF tax when using their credit cards abroad. Second, purchases must be carried out with international credit cards, and only 15% of the Brazilian population possesses them. Finally, the currency conversion only takes place when the credit card invoice is closed and the customer will only know the final price in Reals (R$) when they pay their credit