Microsoft confirmed yesterday that the next version of Windows 10 will include an ebookstore and reading app built into the Edge web browser.
References to the reading app and store had been found in previous beta releases of Windows 10, and yesterday MS told us:
With the Creators Update, we’ve added new features like advanced tab management to help you find, organize and open tabs you’ve set aside without leaving the page you’re on. You can now discover and get your favorite e-books in Windows Store and read them in Microsoft Edge across all of your Windows 10 devices.
The Creator Update will be released on 11 April, but that is really all we know for certain at this time.
Beta versions of the Edge browser have supported Epub since November, though the user reports I have heard suggest that the app is buggy and still only semi-functional.
The store, on the other hand, was spotted in the code in a January beta release of Windows 110 mobile. It didn’t work at that time, but we did get a screenshot of the storefront:
Whether the store uses this layout remains to be seen.
According to a press release Yahoo Japan has outsourced its ebook operations to a company called eBook Initiative Japan. The handover will take place on 1 April, after which eBook Initiative Japan will be responsible for all aspects of running the ebookstore and marketing its content.
Coincidentally, the parent company Yahoo only controls a minority stake in Yahoo Japan; Yahoo owns about 35% of its Japanese subsidiary, while Softbank owns 36%. So Verizon, which is still in the process of acquiring Yahoo, doesn’t quite own a Japanese bookstore.
In any case, outsourcing operations made sense given the relatively small size and slow growth of the Japanese ebook market.
According to Japan’s Research Laboratory of the Publishing Science, Japanese ebook sales rose 13% in 2016, to 25.8 billion yen. In comparison, book sales alone accounted for 737 billion yen.
Proposed changes to Australia’s copyright law should make it easier for people to create and distribute versions of copyrighted works that are accessible to people with disabilities.
If passed, it would enable people with disabilities to access and enjoy books and other material in formats they can use, such as braille, large print or DAISY audio.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has long been calling for action to end the “world book famine” – only 5% of books produced in Australia are available in accessible formats. This means that people with vision impairment and other reading disabilities are excluded from a massive proportion of the world’s knowledge and culture.
Under the current law, educational institutions and other organizations can produce accessible copies of books, but the system is slow and expensive. Only a small number of popular books are available, and technical books that people need for work are often out of reach.
Technology should make accessibility much easier, but publishers have been slow to enable assistive technologies.
People with disabilities have long complained that they are not able to take advantage of new technologies such as inbuilt screen reading software on computers and smartphones.
Amazon’s Kindle, for example, used to allow text-to-speech to help blind people read books, but Amazon gave in to publishers’ fears and allowed them to disable the feature. Apple’s electronic books are much better, but there are still major gaps.
Our research looked at books available through electronic academic databases, and found that most ebook libraries have some features that frustrate full accessibility.
The Copyright Act in its current form does grant statutory licenses for copying by institutions that assist people with disabilities, but there are no comprehensive exceptions for individuals. Research shows that even students in resourced universities have trouble accessing the materials they need to study.
A fair right for people with disabilities
The new Bill aims to create a clear right for individuals to copy materials into accessible formats. Critically, this new “fair dealing” exception also allows other people to help out by creating and sharing accessible versions of books and other materials.
The Marrakesh Treaty, once implemented around the world, will enable organizations to share accessible books to the people who need them in other countries. This is an extremely important change as the costs of scanning and making a book accessible are so high that most blind people are denied access to most works.
Once the laws are clarified, the accessibility of books will increase dramatically. Google has been busy digitizing the world’s books, and it has given those books to a charity called Hathi Trust. Soon, Hathi Trust will be able to share those books with blind people around the world.
Google’s partnership with Hathi Trust means that blind people will soon be able to access more than 14 million volumes almost overnight. This figure may grow quickly as Google has already digitized more than 30 million books. Very soon, the proportion of accessible books might jump from 5-10% to closer to 30%.
A missed opportunity
The Bill also proposes a number of other long awaited updates to Australian copyright law. But one thing the Bill does not do is fix a drafting error that has plagued Australian copyright law for the past decade.
When Australia signed the Australia – US Free Trade Agreement, we introduced a system of “notice-and-takedown” that would protect copyright owners. The system provides a way for people to ask online service providers to remove content that infringes copyright.
But the law was poorly drafted. It applied only to a small number of Internet Service Providers (such as Telstra, Optus, and iiNet) but not the larger category of search engines and content hosts.
This means it does not apply to giants such as Google and Facebook. It also means that other organizations that host content uploaded by users, such as The Conversation, are also excluded.
These safe harbors provide a shield in case people – outside of the service provider’s control – use their networks to upload content that infringes any copyright laws.
The reason they are so critical is that it is often prohibitively expensive for the companies that host internet content to check all content before a user uploads it.
But the safe harbors aren’t free. The quid pro quo is that the ISP must introduce a notice and takedown scheme. This is one of the few effective mechanisms to get content removed from the internet, and has been a crucial part of protecting the rights of publishers and authors online.
When the new Bill was first drafted, it was set to fix the drafting error that excludes content hosts, search engines, universities and other organizations from the scheme. But the Bill introduced this week contains no such fix.
The past two decades of the internet in the United States have shown how critical the safe harbors are to all developers, both large and small. They reduce uncertainty and allow innovation in the ways that people access content.
So while this new Bill is important, it is also a missed opportunity. The drafting error in Australia’s copyright safe harbors means that neither tech companies or authors and publishers are well protected.
After four and a half years of floundering around, trying to find a viable business model, Medium has finally chosen one – only it is from the 19th century, not the 21st.
On Wednesday Medium announced its subscription service, which (when it finally launches) will cost $5 a month and give readers access to … something.
The service is in limited beta at the moment, but when it is more widely available subscribers will get access to:
exclusive content,
beta access to reading features,
an offline reading mode.
That really doesn’t look like much; readers already have offline reading modes in apps like Pocket and Instapaper – which coincidentally offer a better reading experience anyway. So Medium isn’t offering much of value – just "exclusive stories from top writers":
As a founding member, your contributions will be used to directly pay writers and publishers. That means new content that wouldn’t otherwise be on Medium—or wouldn’t exist at all. You’ll have access to exclusive stories from leading experts, including your favorite Medium writers, on topics that matter not just today, but tomorrow too.
Basically, Medium is making the same offer as countless other publishers in the past two centuries; pay us for our unique content. (To be fair, a lot of news publishers couldn’t even make that claim; their content was closer to filler than unique.)
Nevertheless, I am in favor of paying for content where it is worthwhile; this is why I have been a paying member of Medium since January 1970.
There was something wrong with their date system, yes.
Snark aside, here’s what I really think:
Finally, the hype bubble has burst.
When it launched in 2012, Medium was pitched as a new and unique solution to the problem of poor content on the web, but it was pretty clear by 2014/2015 that Medium had little to offer that couldn’t be found on just about any other platform.
Sparse page layout? WordPress had those as optional themes years ago.
Instant audience through a recommendation engine? Again, WordPress – and social media.
A simple user interface for writing? Okay, this is nice if you like minimalism, but why bother going to a site’s admin pages to write when Open Live Writer offers an MSWord-like interface (the app works with most blogging platforms, too)?
Nevertheless, the hype persisted in the media coverage of Medium until early this year when Medium laid off a third of its staff and announced that it would be seeking a new solution to its finance problem.
That new solution is quite old, and even in its current web-only incarnation is already being used by a number of other sites, including Pando Daily, Financial Times, The Bookseller, and the NY Times.
And unfortunately, the hype isn’t dead yet; Medium founder Ev Williams still believes it. Here’s what he wrote back in January:
We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.We believe there are millions of thinking people who want to deepen their understanding of the world and are dissatisfied with what they get from traditional news and their social feeds. We believe that a better system?—?one that serves people?—?is possible. In fact, it’s imperative.
Lofty ideals are great and all, but this is the same guy who pursued these same ideals for five years without stumbling across a business model.
It is past time for an injection of reality. Someone who knows how to turn a profit needs to take over before Medium runs out of money.
Some segments of the legacy book publishing had good news in the AAP’s latest month report, but overall the news was bleak.
Trade book revenues were down 7.5% in the month of October, and as a result the industry revenues (for the 1,200 odd publishers which submit data to the AAP) were down 0.7%.
Surprisingly, Adult ebook revenues were up for the month (2.6%) but the format as a whole was still down 17.2% for the year to date.
O O O
Press release:
Religious presses and Childrens & Young Adult Books Publishers’ revenues increased for Oct. 2016 and for the year to-date. Despite those increases, the challenging month for adult books and educational materials resulted in a decline in overall publisher revenues of 9.3% in Oct. 2016 and 6.4% for the year-to-date in all tracked categories (Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, PreK-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses).
Trade book revenues fell 7.5% in Oct. 2016 vs Oct. 2015, and were down 0.7% year-to-date. The cause of the decline was Adult Books, which was down 13.1% for the month. Interestingly, after 19 months of decline, Adult eBooks grew 2.6% in Oct. 2016 vs Oct. 2015; eBooks, however, remain down for the year-to-date in all trade categories – Adult Books, Childrens/YA and Religious Presses.
Publisher revenues include sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, etc.
Trade Books
From Jan. – Oct. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015 trade books were down 0.7% year-to-date.
By Category:
Adult Books were down 3.2% to $3.9 billion
Childrens & YA Books were up 4.4% to $1.4 billion
Religious Presses are up 7.0% to $401.8 million
By Format
Paperback books grew 6.8% to $1.8 billion
Hardback books were flat at 0.2% $2.1 billion
Downloaded audio grew 27.3% to $219.5 million
eBooks were down 17.2% to $971.4 million
Educational Materials and Professional Books
Educational Materials had a revenue loss of 8.6% for PreK-12 Instructional Materials and 11.4% for Higher Education Course Materials from Jan. – Oct. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015
Professional Publishing was down 21.5% From Jan. – Oct. 2016 vs. the same time in 2015. These categories include business, medical, law, scientific and technical books. University presses were down 3.8% for the 10 months.
There are many experts who can help authors get published, and now Amazon has gathered all that advice on a single site.
Currently in beta, Amazon Author Insights features the advice of many published authors including Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, Bryan Cohen, and Elizabeth S Craig as well as a number of articles by Amazon’s staff (under the byline Kindle Press).
The site is hosted on Tumblr, and is divided into three sections: Write, Publish, and Market. There’s also a fourth section which claims to focus on tools and services, but really just lists various Amazon services (KDP, Createspace, Kindle scout, Goodreads, etc).
Amazon has not announced the site yet, and it’s not clear what they’re trying to accomplish here. But the articles I read all contained sound advice, so the site is definitely worth checking out.
Amazon rolled out an update today for its iOS app.
The update adds a new sharing option for iOS Safari, enabling readers to easily convert documents and web pages and save them to their Kindle library.
The other new feature is support for Comixology’s guided view, the frame by frame viewing mode which directs readers along the story.
Amazon bought Comixology in 2014, and then integrated the platforms in 2015 so that users could read their Kindle purchased comics in the Comixology apps. Now apparently the integration goes both ways.
Changelog:
ComiXology’s Guided View is now available on Kindle! Experience comics in a whole new way with this breakthrough cinematic and immersive reading mode.
Send to Kindle – Now you can save documents and web pages to your Kindle library. Tap the share button in Safari and add Kindle as a destination. Web pages are converted to Kindle format so you can adjust the text, font and page color, and read on any Kindle app or device.
The media is playing an elaborate game of telephone today with the news that the US gov’t may soon require that electronics be limited on flights from, well, Arab countries.
According to the BBC and other sources, passengers will only be able to bring smartphones with them in the passenger cabin:
Airlines from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa will require passengers heading to the US to check laptops and tablets in the hold. The directive is reportedly the result of a security threat and could be announced as soon as Tuesday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declined to comment on the issue. "We have no comment on potential security precautions, but will provide an update when appropriate," DHS said in a statement to the BBC.
The Transportation Security Administration, which is part of Homeland Security, also refused to comment.
It is unclear which airlines would fall under the ban and how long it will be in place. But Royal Jordanian Airlines tweeted on Monday that it would ban passengers from carrying on most electronics to and from its North American flights, CNN first reported.
I still haven’t found any reports that this story has been confirmed, but according to a contact, this is not such a ridiculous idea.
Edit: The Guardian has a screenshot of the original TSA memo, but no explicit confirmation.
"You can fit a bomb into a smaller volume than most people realize," they told me. "Banning large electronic devices from the cabin will mean that the gadgets will go through bomb-detecting scanners before being loaded into the baggage hold."
"Bombs have been found in checked luggage in US airports, and the stories rarely make the evening news," they added.
Cory Doctorow just announced his support for an ebookstore platform that has me scratching my head.
It’s not just that he has apparently abandoned his support for free Creative Commons-licensed ebooks in favor of selling ebooks (welcomes to 2007, Cory!) but also that he believes that authors should be sales staff for publishers.
Walkaway has traditional publishers, and it will have a traditional e-book edition. But I’m going to sell that e-book in a nontraditional way. I’m launching an e-book store with the book, a store that I’ve privately developed for the past three years, code named "Shut Up and Take My Money" (SUATMM). SUATMM is what I like to call a fair trade e-book store, in which the writer also serves as a retailer.
There are many small, niche-oriented e-book stores serving highly specific markets, but SUATMM is different. It’s a retail platform that lets authors with traditional publishers serve as retailers for their those publishers, on the same terms as Amazon, Kobo, Google, BN.com, Apple, and other giants. Those stores have resources no individual author (save, perhaps, the delightfully DRM-free J.K. Rowling) can muster. In particular, they can manage a seamless experience that no indie bookstore can hope to match.
Buying an e-book from a website and sideloading it onto your Kindle will never be as easy as buying it from the Kindle store (though if the world’s governments would take the eminently sensible step of legalizing jailbreaking, someone could develop a product that let Kindles easily access third-party stores on the obvious grounds that if you buy a Kindle, you still have the right to decide whose books you’ll read on it, otherwise you don’t really own that Kindle). But a bookstore operated by an author has an advantage no giant tech platform can offer: a chance to buy your e-books in a way that directly, manifestly benefits the author.
As an author, being my own e-book retailer gets me a lot. It gets me money: once I take the normal 30 percent retail share off the top, and the customary 25 percent royalty from my publisher on the back-end, my royalty is effectively doubled. It gives me a simple, fair way to cut all the other parts of the value-chain in on my success: because this is a regular retail sale, my publishers get their regular share, likewise my agents. And, it gets me up-to-the-second data about who’s buying my books and where.
It also gets me a new audience that no retailer or publisher is targeting: the English-speaking reader outside of the Anglosphere. Travel in Schengen, for example, and you will quickly learn that there are tens of millions of people who speak English as a second (or third, or fourth) language, and nevertheless speak it better than you ever will. Yet there is no reliable way for these English-preferring readers, who value the writer’s original words, unfiltered by translation, to source legal e-books in English.
Amazon and its competitors typically refuse outright to deal with these customers, unable to determine which publisher has the right to sell to them. Most publishing contracts declare these nominally non-English-speaking places to be "open territory" where in theory all of the book’s publishers may compete, but in practice, none of them do.
Even in the Anglosphere, readers are often left to their own devices. Told that Amazon U.S. can’t sell the book to them, they must discover for themselves where to find the book on Amazon U.K. But acting as my own retailer, I can easily determine who gets the publisher’s end of the payment: in the U.S. and Canada, it’s Tor; in the U.K. and the Commonwealth, it’s Head of Zeus. Everywhere else—all that open territory—it’s me.
For the other defined territories, it’s a simple matter of calculating the remittances and sending payments and statements to my other publishers, just like any other retailer. The difference being that rather than my publishers sending me 25% of the money due twice a year in the form of a royalty check, I am in control of the money.
In case you are wondering, Doctorow is apparently talking about BookGrail, the (Gumroad slash Aer.io) platform from UK publisher Head of Zeus. (Or at least that platform was briefly mentioned in his post; Doctorow doesn’t explicitly say how his brainstorm would work.)
When I first read this I first thought about taking Cory to task for his anti-Amazon FUD (he blames Amazon for only selling ebooks where suppliers tell it to).
I also thought about pointing out direct sales have never lived up to the hype.
While it is easy to buy ebooks in the Kindle Store, it’s difficult to find much less buy ebooks in niche 3rd-party ebookstores (hence why Harry Potter ebooks are available everywhere, why Baen Books moved into the Kindle Store – not away, and why Hachette never launched its Kindle Store competitor).
But I am not going to make that point because this effort might have enough publicity to succeed. (Plus I want authors to sell direct because they get more money.)
Instead, I want to point out Doctorow’s blind spot: the unwarranted assumption that authors need or even should be doing business with publishers.
The thing about Cory Doctorow is that he was an ebook pioneer. Ten years ago he was advocating that ebooks should be released DRM-free and under a Creative Commons license so that all could gain access (this mattered more in the pre-Kindle era when it was difficult to buy ebooks even in the US). He even went so far as to forbid his publisher from selling the ebook.
But like many pioneers, Doctorow advanced only so far. He never managed to shed his original assumptions and keep up with the times.
For example, Doctorow still thinks authors should do business with publishers.
It’s 2017, and publishers now expect authors to do their own marketing, blog regularly, be active on social media, and ideally already have their audience built before the contract is signed.
And now Doctorow wants authors to also
Sell ebooks for publishers,
And handle payments,
And remit the money to publishers in several countries?
Okay, but if authors are going to do all this work then why sign with a publisher in the first place?
It’s 2017, and authors can control their work completely, they can hire the help they need, and they can cut out middlemen by dealing directly with retailers like Amazon.
Who would they give up control, and a lot of money, just to act as a salesperson for a publisher?
Remember how the Kindle Unlimited funding pool dipped in February in 2015 and 2016?
It happened again.
The KU funding pool dropped to $16.8 million in February 2017, a decrease of a million dollars from January. At the same time, the per-page rate increased slightly, to just under half a cent per page (0.49741 cents, to be precise).
US: $0.0050 (USD)
Germany: €0.0034 (EUR)
UK: £0.0037 (GBP)
France, Spain, Italy: €0.0049 (EUR)
Netherlands: €0.0045 (EUR)
Brazil: R$ 0.01203 (BRL)
Japan: 0.5170 (JPY)
Australia, India, Mexico, Canada: no data
P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.
July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
Since 2013 Bexar County’s Bibliotech digital library has opened two local branches as well as kiosks in a hospital, bus terminal, and on local military bases.
San Antonio Express News reports that Bibliotech will soon open a third branch on the east side of San Antonio:
Bexar County officials offered a sneak peek Monday of what will become BiblioTech’s third — and largest — digital library, scheduled to open in August at the new East Meadows housing development.
Spanning 4,200 square feet, the digital library at the corner of North Walters and Burnet Street will be equipped with 50 computers and will offer access to electronic books and magazines and other services, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. Membership is free for Bexar County residents.
The digital library’s arrival to the East Side marks another step in the neighborhood’s transformation, which has made big strides since the Wheatley Courts public housing project was demolished and the mixed-income East Meadows development was built in its place.
“You’ve heard me talk about that vision for San Antonio being a globally competitive city, where everyone has opportunity to connect to prosperity,” Mayor Ivy Taylor said Monday. “We can’t achieve that unless we close the digital divide.
The new library will have few if any paper books and will instead devote its space to a reading room, a community room, a children’s area, a maker’s lab, and two group study rooms.
Anti-piracy firm Digimarc has taken a stab at defining the scale of the ebook piracy issue. They hired Nielsen to conduct a consumer survey on piracy, and found:
E-book piracy currently costs U.S. publishers $315 million each year in lost sales, and the Nielsen survey revealed that people who illegally download e-books are largely ordinary consumers, students and working professionals who access e-books from a wide range of digital sources, including online auction sites and via email from friends. The study highlighted the fact that 70% of illegal downloaders have either graduated from college or have a graduate degree. The most common age-range of an e-book pirate is between 30- and 44-years-old with a yearly household income between $60,000 and $99,000.
"When it comes to book piracy, you can’t prevent what you can’t predict. This is the challenge for publishers as they grapple with preventing illegal piracy," said Devon Weston, director, market development, Digimarc Guardian. "Our new Nielsen data makes it clear these pirates don’t fit a typical criminal profile. They access digital content from a vast universe of web pages, social platforms and file sharing portals. Our aim is to break down the problem for publishers and help them develop an effective prevention strategy."
Digimarc has a financial incentive to convince you that piracy is bringing about the end of western civilization; they sell anti-piracy services.
So this data comes from a highly suspect source, but even so it is the most accurate piracy data I have seen. Where most piracy stats come from analysts' wild guesses, the figures mentioned above are based on a consumer survey.
Real people were polled about their media consumption habits. We don’t know what they were asked (and that is another reason to distrust the data) but or once we have real data on the issue.
And that data tells us that piracy isn’t much of a problem in the ebook realm.
That $315 million may sound like a lot but going by AAP figures ebooks were a four billion dollar market last year.
No one knows the true size of the ebook market, but we do know that the AAP said that their members earned $579 million from ebooks in the first half of 2016. That $579 million represents six months of revenue for about 40% of the industry. We can roughly convert it to retail sales by doubling it, and then dividing by 40% and then 70% (the latter roughly represents the industry’s share of the retail price).
That $579 million represents six months of revenue for about 40% of the industry. We can roughly convert it to retail sales by doubling it, and then dividing by 40% and then 70% (the latter roughly represents the industry’s share of the retail price).
When I ran the numbers, I got a market estimate of $4.1 billion.
And so Digimarc’s best estimate is that piracy accounts for less than 10% of the market.
New data from Japan’s Research Laboratory of the Publishing Science shows that the Japanese publishing industry revenues dropped to 1.47 trillion yen (around US $ 12.8 billion) last year, down 3.4% compared to the previous year.
Book sales accounted for 737 billion yen of that total, and only declined 0.7%. Magazine sales in Japan accounted for much of the rest, and totalled 734 billion yen. PublishNews.com.br notes that this was the first time in 41 years that magazine sales in Japan fell short of book sales.
eBooks, on the other hand, were the bright spot in the market stats. Japan’s digital books market grew 13.2% in 2016, compared to 2015. eBook sales totalled of 25.8 billion yen.
The highlights of the Japanese market in 2016 included the ongoing shift from the paper manga to the electronic manga; the bankruptcy of Taiyo-Sya, which was the fifth largest distributor of books and magazines in the country; and the expansion of the digital magazine reading market.
Earlier this week ZDNet and other sites reported that Brazil’s supreme court had reduced or eliminated taxes and import duties on ereaders and ebooks, but I think they are missing the story.
E-books are set to become more affordable in Brazil as the Supreme Court has ruled that they will now enjoy the same tax immunity as the pronto counterparts.
The debate on whether e-books should have the same tax treatment as print has been going on since September 2016 and the final ruling on the matter is that print and e-books are indistinguishable from each other.
In addition, reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle will also be tax-immune. However, the ruling stressed that this immunity is not extended to multifunctional devices that may support book reading software such as tablets, smartphones and laptops.
It is expected that in the next few months prices will be lowered across the purveyors of digital content operating in Brazil
According to Wikipedia, Brazil’s standard VAT rate is 42%, while books are tax exempt. This means that Brazilian ebook prices could drop by half in the near future.
And just as importantly, so could the price of ereaders.
Brazil has magnificent import duties which sometimes exceed the price of the imported product by a factor of two. The duties are not reflected in the price of the Kindle, which sells in Brazil for about 30% more than the US price, but 3rd-party ereaders imported by Brazilians can easily cost twice the list price.
Now much of the import duties have been removed (but not all – some Brazilian states impose their own sales taxes).
And that means ereaders are going to get a lot cheaper in Brazil – and Brazilians are probably going to see ereader prices drop a lot faster than ebooks.
After all, how do you know that publishers won’t just keep ebook prices high so they can pocket the difference?
Dosdoce's Javier Celaya revealed at a PubMagNet meeting last month that ebooks are expected to reach a double-digit share of Spain’s book market in 2016. The final data won’t be available until June, but Celaya said that ebook sales should reach 10%, up from around 6% of Spain’s book sales in 2015.
The Spanish book market as a whole is expected to grow by 3 to 3.5% in 2016, compared to 2.8% growth in 2015. Basically, the market is only growing as a result of digital sales,
Basically, the market is only growing as a result of digital sales, and only because publishers started getting sensible about their digital opportunities.
Celaya also pointed out a peculiarity of Spain’s digital book market: many Spanish publishers have reported that more than 60% of their digital sales are made internationally. Half of those international sales are coming from Latin America, with the US market and Europe accounting for 20% and 10%, respectively.
Spanish publishers are discovering what anyone in a niche national market should know; thanks to ebooks, one doesn’t have to be limited to the local. This is just as true in Spain as it is in South Africa.
