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Summary Electronic books are gaining momentum among European readers.
The digital share of the book market in European countries still lags behind the United States but publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair were upbeat about their recent uptake and future prospects.Ebook reading devices only become available later in some European countries and ebook prices in others have been too high to entice readers away from their traditional bound rivals, they said.Juergen Boos, the director of the five-day annual fair, has also suggested that a general attachment in Europe to the physical presence of the printed book and its value as a cultural object is holding the ebook back.Its not to do with the range, the ebooks are there... its more a social phenomenon, he said referring to Germany, ahead of the fairs opening in this western German city.Ebook sales in Germany have doubled this year but still only account for two percent of the overall book market, compared to 20 percent in the US, Gottfried Honnefelder, president of the German Booksellers and Publishers Association, told reporters here.Britain, where Amazon launched its Kindle ebook reader in 2010, is further down the digital road, with consumer ebook sales making up about 13 percent of combined print and ebook sales in the first half of 2012, according to The Publishers Association.The penetration of ereading devices in the UK is very strong, its chief executive Richard Mollet told AFP adding that British consumers were already digitally savvy from widely used online banking and online shopping.Ecommerce has come to Britain in a big way. The British consumer seems to have an affinity to digital technology and devices, he said. Its not because they love the physical book less, its just because they are able to embrace digital more, he added.Academic books is one field in Germany to have embraced the ebook earlier, driven by demands from libraries for titles to be digitised, and is not far behind the US market, an academic publisher said here. The US might be, say one year ahead, maybe two, I cant say exactly, but its not like its a bright day in the US and dark night on the continent of Europe, Karlheinz Hoefner, sales director of Oldenbourg Verlag said, referring to academic publishing.The company, founded in 1858 and based in Munich and Berlin, has been producing ebooks for four years, he said, and not just the odd title somewhere in the system but ebooks in rather critical mass.But print academic books still roughly account for 80 percent of their titles, he said. In the Netherlands, ebooks are also expected to double to three percent of the market in 2012, a trend predicted to continue next year, said Erik-Jan Bulthuis from distributing company cb.So I think the market share is going very fast at the moment, he said.Language had played a part in ebook development compared to the US, with a potential market of only 20-25 million Dutch speakers globally, and 17,000 titles in Dutch currently available, he said.One reason why ebooks have been more eagerly embraced in the US is that many Americans live in areas without a local book shop nearby, Kornelia Holzhausen, head of digital media at Germanys Piper Verlag publishers said.Germany also has a policy of fixed prices for books, considering them to be a cultural good, meaning ebooks could not be marketed as price aggressively as in Britain or the US, she said.
