EBooks: changing the publishing industry, PwC

2.3 

Market Overview:  

A Market or a Niche?

2.3.1  The Range of Products

The US as the pioneer in a developing 

market 

Internationally, there are considerable 

differences with regard to the range of 

eBooks that are available. The United 

States is a pioneer in this regard: At the 

launch of the Kindle, Amazon offered 

90,000 eBooks for purchase, including 102 

of the 112 The New York Times bestsellers. 

According to Amazon’s own information, 

the company now has more than 725,000 

eBooks in its proprietary AZW format. 

And there are an additional 1.8 million 

free eBooks in the public domain that 

can be downloaded from Amazon. In 

addition, Amazon offers 132 newspapers 

and 40 periodicals under the terms of a 

subscription or as individual editions. The 

largest bookstore in the world, Barnes & 

Noble, has more than 1.2 million eBooks. 

Its digital bookstore has fewer newspapers 

and magazines than Amazon: 20 and 14, 

respectively.

The UK also benefits from an extensive

range of English-language content. For 

instance, the Kindle offers more than 

320,000 books for readers in the UK alone, 

and more than 1 million free books are 

available in English via Google Books.

On the other hand, publishers in the 

Netherlands and Germany are more 

conservative in their approach to digitizing 

their book holdings. As recently as 

summer 2009, the range of eBooks in the 

Netherlands was limited to about 1,000 

eBooks.

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 The largest online bookstore 

now offers approximately 4,000 eBooks in 

Dutch (by way of comparison: at the Dutch 

market leader bol.com, about 350,000 

printed books in Dutch are available). 

The range of German-language eBooks 

is also relatively limited in terms of an 

international comparison. It is true that 

online bookstores such as buecher.de now 

have a selection of more than  

100,000 eBooks, representing about 8% 

of the currently available 1.2 million 

German books, in a wide range of formats. 

However, most of the books are only 

suitable to a limited extent to be used on 

mobile reading devices because they are 

made available in PDF. 

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PwC: Entertainment and Media Outlook for the Netherlands: 2010-2014, 2010.

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