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

by several obstacles, each highlighting diverse features of how these markets are shaped by different forces and contexts. Hence, the goal of this comparative analysis cannot be to bridge those differences and complexities but instead to identify some characteristics and to map certain patterns while being clear about all the remaining uncertainties.
    First, aside from the UK and, to a certain degree in Germany, no authoritative ebook charts have been established at this point. Instead, we had to work with lists proposed by various leading online platforms and juxtapose overlaps as well as differences among them.
    The simple question of asking what a bestseller is in ebooks and what it costs is leading to a set of complexities.
    Across markets, two basic approaches take shape. One is promoted by Amazon on its localized sites for Germany, France, Italy, and Spain that provides the sales rank for ebooks by units sold, regardless of the retail price, as long as the book is not offered for free. Long novels at €14.99 and digital shorts at €0.89 live side by side. Self-published books, often priced aggressively at €0.99 or €2.99, occupy a significant number of top positions.
    By contrast, in Germany, Börsenverein publishes monthly bestseller charts, and the top 10 fiction titles sell at an average price of €10.94, with no discounting being allowed, as the concept of fixed retail prices applies to ebooks, too (list for July 2013, the most recent available as of September 2013, compiled by Media Control on behalf of Börsenblatt .) At the German Amazon site, in September 2013, the average price for the 10 bestselling ebooks was €7.14, with six of the 10 ebooks priced at less than €4.00 and Amazon allows both self-published titles as well as digital books from traditional publishers’ releases. The top 10 fiction ebooks at Weltbild , the second most popular online site for books in Germany, average €13.19, due to the presence of high-priced titles by Dan Brown ( Inferno at €19.99) and John Grisham ( The Racketeer at €18.99), as similar to Börsenblatt’s list, selfpublished books are excluded, but a few ebooks from Weltbild’s own exclusive catalogue are included (e.g. Brenda Joyce books at €4.99). The gap in the average retail prices for ebooks widens considerably when the sample is extended. For ranks 11 to 20, at Amazon, the average price falls to €3.99, as the share of self-published books increases, while at Weltbild, with an average of €9.64, the drop in prices is less dramatic.
    A strong competitive pressure builds, as Amazon in particular is seamlessly including low-priced ebooks with titles from publishers whose outspoken policy it is in markets such as Germany to keep prices for ebooks close to the level of printed editions. It is foreseeable, that over time, even in markets where book prices are fixed by law, as is the case in Germany and in France, publishers will see their pricing strategies seriously challenged by Amazon’s policy.
    Table 11-1. Average top 10 ebook prices in selected EU markets (ave. price in €)
    Country
Top 10 Amazon Kindle
Top10 leading domestic platform
Germany
7.14
13.99
France
5.08
9.79
Spain
6.88
6.74
Italy
6.99
6.19
UK
3.15 (£ 2.65)
not collected
    The disparity in average price levels between Amazon and their competitors among local online platforms shows considerable variations between markets and seems to highlight, for each country, how strongly local publishers currently seem to fight to keep ebook prices up.
    This can be illustrated even more clearly in a comparison between the prices of current bestsellers in print, and their respective digital editions and the evolution of those price levels over the past two years.

    In Germany, for instance, efforts by publishers to keep ebook prices close to those of print editions seem to be successful thus far. The average price difference between print and digital edition between late summer 2011 and 2013 reflects the customers’ readiness to buy expensive ebooks in Germany and in Sweden, where the average price of the top 10 in fiction reaching the staggering level of just under €17.00, while the respective print editions are priced at €20.52 in Germany and €21.34 in Sweden. Obviously such a strategy comes at a risk, as average prices for ebooks continue to slide in all markets, including in Germany (in 2012 at €8.61, according to Media Control), and in France, where 54% of all ebook titles are