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

universe
    Apple , whose iTunes store is already popular with consumers in many markets for downloading music, movies, and TV shows, continues to add ebooks in new languages to the closely integrated Apple iBookstore . Some languages have been initially excluded, notably those running from right to left, such as Arabic. Did this build a barrier of access to global knowledge and learning for Arabs? Certainly. But technological innovation can solve these issues. Connecting an entire culture to the ebook market is another hurdle altogether. Will an already shaky Arab publishing industry be able to evolve to meet the standards of the leading global players, or will Arab readers have to read international fiction in English or as a quickly pirated copy?
    For some time, the book business, as an industry of a certain scale, was largely occupied by actors from a few home markets in North America, Europe, and Asia — notably Japan and Korea as well as, more recently, China and India. In most other parts of the world, disregarding the cultural aspirations of large populations, strict limits existed from the simple lack of a professional infrastructure to make all the newest books available, to disseminate basic information about new titles, and to ship a title across much of the Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa (perhaps with the exception of South Africa), and even large parts of Latin America.
    When a simple and affordable hookup to the Internet turns billions of phones, laptops, and now tablet computers into reading and book-retrieval devices, something fundamental is about to happen. In a very similar pattern, communication was forever changed a decade and a half ago by the advent of mobile phones, as they bypassed the ailing infrastructure of land lines in so many parts of the globe.
    In 2011, 86.7% of the world’s population had a mobile cellular subscription; 17%, or 1.2 billion people, owned a mobile broadband subscription, which is slightly more than the 16.6% with a fixed land line ( International Telecommunication Union , November 2011, quoted here ).
    For books and reading, several factors coincide:
    In a significantly growing number of emerging economies — which goes a long way beyond the usually quoted Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and includes countries such as South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the Gulf countries, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and many others — a significant part of the population can afford and is in fact using mobile networks of digital content, have growing educational aspirations as well as an interest in both local and global entertainment, and have access to all this via the Internet and their mobile devices.
A relatively small number of leading publishing companies, specializing in trade and education — groups such as Pearson , the newly formed Penguin Random House , Hachette , HarperCollins (backed up by their parent NewsCorp ), plus a few learning companies ( Oxford , Cambridge , Wiley , Cengage ) and publishers of science and professional information ( Thomson Reuters , Reed Elsevier ) — have woven truly global networks over the past few years, with local offices (not just for sales) exploring those (notably digitally connected) routes opened by the finance industry in the 1980s, global cities in the 1990s, and global tourism in the 2000s.
Apple’s iPod and iTunes have shown consumers around the globe how easily content can flow, while text messages, Facebook , and Twitter have connected consumers as individuals, not just as target groups.
Amazon and the Kindle allowed books — first in English, then in more languages — to flow through these virtual tubes, and the iPad seamlessly embeds those digital books in an integrated digital content universe, with movies, music, games, other reading, education, and other media.
Numerous local companies springing up in the various target markets enroot and diversify that web and extend it into a three-dimensional grid, by adding to the globalizing dimension local specifics, with local language, credibility, and logistics adding the last mile or last inch.
    The last factor — adding localization to the global read — must not be brushed aside as just a level for collecting the consumer’s money for the global players. Quite the opposite: it is a critical part in stabilizing a process of exploration and expansion that has, even with tremendous momentum, only started.
    The global ebook market will not be a level playing field for some