E-book sales in The Netherlands passed the 600,000 mark over the first half of 2012, with close to 16,000 available titles. E-book revenue constitutes 3% of the market, against 1,6% over 2011 and 0,7% over 2010.

The Dutch e-book market is predicted to reach 5-7% at the end of this year. This means the growth of both sales and the number of available titles is now clearly accelerating. Read more »

This week, the news came out that libraries and publishers have agreed to disagree on e-book lending. This will finally clear the way for a fast development of e-book lending in The Netherlands. Read more »

On Friday, The Bookseller reported that Argos is planning to sell e-books and expand its print book offering. And noted, ‘The retailer said it would not rule out producing its own e-reader in the future.’

This seemed to barely register a ripple, with many unaware that Argos sells print books. Read more »

The 4th Editech Conference in Milan, held on June 9th, was mostly about the fragmented nature of the European digital market. That was not unexpected – the majority of the audience was Italian, and the Italian e-book market is among the smallest in Europe, small enough to say it is virtually non-existing. Read more »

Philip Stone, charts expert: Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White tops this week's e-book charts thanks to its recent four-part TV adaptation hitting BBC Two. Sales of the print edition of the novel have also been on the up - sales are up five-fold from just a month ago. Read more »

Charts expert Philip Stone: The first book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, returns to the summit of The Bookseller's eBestseller chart after a week's hiatus, while "the next Stieg Larsson" Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast joins the Top 10 as the only new entry. According to Waterstones.com, the latter is "Book 1" in the Norwegian's Detective Harry Hole thriller series, but in actual fact it is the third book in the series. The first two titles, The Bat Man and The Cockroaches, are yet to be released in the UK. Read more »

Philip Stone, charts editor: It's "as you were" at the sharp end of this week's e-bestseller list with numbers one-thru-four all holding position week-on-week. "The next Stieg Larsson" Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast joins the chart in eighth place, as his The Leopard falls out of the Top 10. Read more »

Here is today's e-bestseller list with prices from major e-tailers. Prices supplied by Luzme.com (formerly ebookprice.info).

The FutureBook e-bestseller list is compiled by The Bookseller's chart expert Philip Stone. He uses a points-based system based on e-tailer chart positions and estimated e-tailer market shares. It is compiled at the same time each week. This will be replaced by a more robust e-chart when it is available. Read more »

At least at first sight, there are three reasons why the development of e-book markets is much slower in continental Europe than in the USA. Firstly, there is no European Amazon. The reason for this is quite obvious: thanks to linguistic diversity, there are no online retailers that could sell and distribute all the books published in all the European languages in the same way that Amazon distributes and sells almost all books published in English. Read more »