Mike Shatzkin; Christina Mussinelli, Associazione Italiana Editori
Digital statistics in Europe poor. English is fist foreign language taught in Europe and 69% of Europe is confident in it. Big market for English books throughout Europe. Nordic countries have very high sales of English books. Online book sales growing in Europe. Europeans moving to smartphones, especially in Italy and UK. For ebook devices sales have only begun in about the last 6 months. Only hundreds of thousands. Way behind US. E-ink and tablets have been one of the best Christmas gifts. People getting more used to reading on the screen and numbers growing. Pricing in bookstores are fixed. Germany and France decided to fix ebook prices and other countries will probably apply. In most countries there is a reduced VAT for print books, but does not apply to ebooks. In Italy VAT for print books is 4% and for ebooks is 20%. European publishers started converting books much later and number of titles much smaller than US, however this is picking up and number is growing rapidly. In each country is at least one national distributor for books and is often controlled by the publishers. Publishers like to deal with a single distributor. European publishers will be reluctant to go to Amazon, Apple and Google because of nationalistic concerns.
