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. Furthermore, many European online retailers are owned or controlled by bricks and mortar booksellers that are not interested in putting a question mark after the classical bookselling business model. As a result, not a single online retailer in continental Europe has either the interest or enough financial resources to jump into the e-book business in the same way that Amazon and B&N have done in the USA.

Secondly, in most EU countries, taxes on e-books are double the taxes on p-books, thanks to a rather bizarre ruling of the European Commission, which decided that the supply of a “book on any physical support comes under supply of goods, whereas the downloading of an e-book is defined as a supply of services. Therefore different VAT rates apply.” This quite clearly means that according to EU bureaucrats, taxation on books should be lower, because they are printed on paper or stored on a DVD, and not because the book is a repository of culture and knowledge. Or to go one step further in this line of reasoning, for European bureaucrats the novels read on paper are culture, but the ones read on Kindle are not. I’m sure Marshall McLuhan would love this way of reasoning as it shows that European bureaucrats are true believers of his dictum that “the medium is the message”. However, in the context of the e-book trade, this puts European e-booksellers in a more difficult position than their American counterparts as they are burdened with higher taxes.

And thirdly, the agents that represent bestselling authors around the globe don’t have in mind the fact that in continental Europe, many of the published books are translations. When these books are published in e-format, the publisher will have to pay again for the translation for many of them, as in the times when these books were first translated, e-rights didn’t exist. Therefore, if Andrew Wylie decides to charge 50% for the e-edition of backlist books, and if we add 20% taxes and 30% for the e-bookseller (if the agency model is applied) to it, the sum is 100% - which means that nothing remains left for the publishers and translators. Even if the agent charges only 25%, the sum is around 75% - and out of 25%, it is almost impossible to cover all the publisher’s and translator’s costs.

A variety of reports on bestsellers in the EU prepared by Ruediger Wischenbart and myself has shown that there are more and more people in Europe whose first language is not English who read books in English; in Germany, for example, the market for novels in English has doubled in the last five years. It is very logical to assume that e-readers would make such a process even more intensive. The Kindle I bought at Amazon eight months ago works just perfectly almost anywhere in Europe and with it, I can buy a huge amount of books in English at American prices without EU taxes or customs being applied, as wise European bureaucrats haven’t yet found a way to tax e-content that is being electronically send across EU borders (two weeks ago, I spent more that 100 USD on a Cretan beach buying my summer reading).

To cut a long story short, it is rather obvious that the rigidity of European bureaucrats, the greed of agents and European cultural diversity are quite paradoxically a combination that is enhancing the dominance of US e-book retailers in Europe and with it, the role of English as the main language of commerce and culture. My guess is that these trends could only be slowed down by the introduction of bookselling business models and reading devices that would allow the users to buy and read books in a variety of languages on only one device. And this is far from being only a business issue.

Miha Kovač is currently publisher at Mladinska knjiga Group in charge of company’s digital strategy and associate professor at the Department of Information Science at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2008, his first book in English Never Mind the Web. Here Comes the Book was published by Chandos in Oxford.