This Friday, after my overview of the Icelandic book market was published on thebookseller.com I received a question from twitter user @Petrona_:

Fascinating piece - no mention of ebks (eg back catalogues?) – Petrona

I didn’t mention ebooks because, for several reasons, there aren’t any ebooks sold in Icelandic.

The following problems aren’t unique to Iceland. I’d imagine that most book markets for minority languages suffer from the same issues.

The nine problems that hold back Icelandic ebooks:

1. OCR for Icelandic isn’t nearly as well tested as that for English. There are not many (if any) outside firms that handle OCRing Icelandic text, so publishers can’t outsource the problem either.

2. Icelandic publishers often don’t have copies of books that are out of print.

3. Beyond the titles published in the last decade or so, publishers rarely have digital copies, not even scans.

4. There are no local ebook vendors for Icelandic titles. Iceland’s only bookstore chain, Penninn-Eymundsson, does run an ebook store, but it’s expensive, confusing, and only contains English language titles. The chain is also bankrupt and now managed by the bank, so there isn’t much of a chance of them investing too much into developing their ebook store.

5. Icelandic publishers run on very lean margins, there’s very little money to outsource conversion, even if they did find somebody willing to deliver Icelandic titles.

6. There is comparatively little ebook or web expertise in the country. Most of those with expertise find better paid employment abroad. Education and training is not coming even close to solving the problem for the web industry.

7. Icelandic publishers are many years behind English language publishers when it comes to researching and understanding the problem. Their staff has neither training nor experience with epublishing.

8. The most popular ebook reading device in Iceland is the Kindle, but Amazon doesn’t sell ebooks in minority languages (and despite what Times of Malta says, this is a long standing policy of theirs).

9. The rights situation was completely unknown.

Problem one is just a matter of building up the experience and expertise. Problems two and three aren’t unfamiliar to English language publishers and they’ve worked around them.

Problem four will probably be addressed to begin with by direct sales from the publisher followed by Penninn-Eymundsson adding Icelandic books to their selection.

Problems five to seven, however, are essentially variations of the same thing: A lack of human capital, a problem that is plaguing every industry in Iceland outside of banking and finance.

The popularity of the various kinds of computer education in Iceland collapsed after the dot-com bubble and never recovered. As bad as the talent situation is in the US and the UK when it comes to programmers, web developers, and web designers, the situation in Iceland is even worse, both due to the unpopularity of those fields and due to brain drain. Most of us fled the country for greener pastures after the Icelandic economy crashed.

Icelandic publishers will have to retrain their staff to handle the brave new ebook world and that is going to cost them.

Problem eight is another big one. The most popular ebook reader is from a retailer who won’t sell their titles. No matter what Icelandic publishers do, as long as they require DRM on all titles, Icelandic publishers will be locked out of selling to some of the most active ebook buyers in their market.

Problem nine, however, is one that has just been solved… for the most part.

It was announced today on the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service that the Writer’s Union of Iceland has finally come to an agreement with the Publisher’s Association on ebook royalties.

The agreements calls for a minimum 25-30% royalty of the wholesale ebook price. The union royalty rate for print books is 23% of wholesale price.

(And before you ask, yes writers are unionised in Iceland. It is a proper union. Every legal profession in Iceland is unionised and every working Icelander has to be in a union. It’s required by Icelandic law.)

According to Ásberg Sigurðsson, who was in charge of the negotiations for the Writer’s Union, the reason why writers didn’t get a higher percentage was that publishers claimed DRM costs cut too much into their margins, which I find to be a rather perplexing claim.

I rather suspect that publishers cited some of the problems I’ve listed above as costs: retraining, ebook development and design, new Q&A procedures, and, yes, DRM. They are all reasons why the Icelandic publisher’s margin on ebooks isn’t as big as writers expect. These facts then get the Chinese whispers treatment and end up just being ‘DRM’ when quoted by the media.

A final problem, related to problem nine, with Icelandic ebooks is that no publisher owns the rights to the vast majority of the Icelandic backlist.

Due to the long standard practice of letting books go out of print, often within months of being released, the rights to a good portion of Icelandic literary history have reverted to the authors. If the Icelandic ebook retailing scene ends up dominated by direct sales from the publisher, as seems likely, a large part of Icelandic literature could end up excluded from the new world of ebooks.