In the United States, the fight to get more access to e-books seems like a constant struggle. Fights over DRM, getting more e-books into libraries, and giving self-published authors the same credibility as traditionally published authors are just some of the issues we contend with. But it seems we may be the lucky ones. In a recent speech in Paris, Neelie Kroes, a vice president of the European Commission, addressed the topic of e-books in Europe—or the lack thereof. "I know some see the advent of digital as a threat to the sector. But for me the biggest risk is that we fail...

Techdirt has a write-up on something I had never heard of--a special copyright introduced in 1996 which protects the contents of databases, even if all the works they list are public domain. The case Techdirt profiles involves a company which wanted to obtain some government records from the 1700s and 1800s and were told they could not: "In order to justify an exclusive right to its database, the department of Vienne told the court it had "committed more than €230,000 [about $300,000] to this project and that the digitization of documents archive had taken eight years." This is a scary story for...

French book news site ActuaLitté reports (in French) that Sony’s PRS T1 149-Euro touchscreen e-reader has sold over 500,000 units in Europe—reportedly not far behind the sales of Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a little tricky to make sense of the Google-translated text, but ActuaLitté seems to report that the Sony’s biggest problem is the lack of a library integrated into the device. The existing store is slow, but Sony says it is seeking a partner who can meet Sony’s performance demands. Meanwhile, competitor Kobo is invading Europe, and a possible Barnes & Noble European expansion could be on the...

From the press release: CourseSmart®, the world's largest provider of eTextbooks and digital course materials, today announced its continued international growth with the launch of an eCommerce platform in the UK and Europe. The platform provides students access to eTextbooks and digital course materials anytime, anywhere from any web-enabled device. Students in the UK and Europe will also now enjoy guaranteed, up-front savings of up to 40% when compared to a new print textbook.    "The world of textbooks is changing. Through the proliferation of tablets, handheld devices, laptops and computers, the academic world is moving online and engaging with students like never before. We are...

In December, I mentioned the UK Parliament considering and then declining to lower the UK’s 20% value-added tax (VAT) on e-books. Lowering the VAT is technically against EU law, though that hasn’t stopped countries such as France and Luxembourg from doing it. Publishing Perspectives reports that the UK’s Publishers Association hasn’t given up, and is lobbying the European Commission to change its VAT rules so that audiobooks and e-books can be assigned the same (0%) VAT as printed books. While [Publishers Association CEO Richard Mollet] says that “considering the explosion of e-books across the...

Earlier today, I blogged Mike Shatzkin’s post that bookstores may be going away and it might be a good idea for publishers to do more to keep them around. In that post, Shatzkin mentioned a statistic that 40% of all UK “high street” shops might have gone away within 5 years. I came across a possible example of that sort of thing today on PaidContent. It seems that the largest European plastic-box video game retailer, Game Group, is in financial trouble. It has closed 277, almost half, of its 609 UK and Ireland stores, and has called in administrators...

From an eBooks on Demand Announcement: The eBooks on Demand (EOD) service, which enables to order digital copies from copyright free books, is now provided by 30 libraries in Europe. The recent libraries offering the EOD eBooks are: National Library of Sweden, Library Am Guisanplatz in Switzerland, the Central Library of Slovak Academy of Sciences and Salzburg University Library in Austria. Already digitised items as well as books offered for digitisation are made available by the EOD search. However, only half of the EOD libraries are ingested at this time. “It has been a pleasure to see that already 600 registered users have...

From LIBER: A group of 17 European partner institutions have joined forces in the “European Newspapers” project and will, over the next 3 years, provide more than 10 million newspaper pages to the EUROPEANA service. The European Newspapers project (funded under EC’s CIP 2007 – 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana. [Clip] Each library participating in the project will distribute digitized newspapers and full-texts free of any legal restrictions to Europeana. There will be a special focus on newspapers published during the First World War, thus providing a meaningful addition to the resources aggregated by the current Europeana 1914-1918 project. Additional Details in the Complete...

From a Radio Netherlands Report: The YouTube generation has gained an ally in the worldwide “copyright wars.” The Dutch government wants to change copyright law so new media users can continue to do “creative remixes” of protected content. The Hague will no longer wait for the European Commission to find a compromise. [Clip] [Bent] Hugenholtz, copyright law professor at the University of Amsterdam [and member of the Dutch state committee on copyright law] , discussed his views last Friday with representatives of European governments, the entertainment industry, internet entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists and librarians. They were gathered in The Hague for “Towards Flexible Copyright,”...

Another ruling from a European court on the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits over the Galaxy Tab’s design has come in, and it doesn’t bode well for Apple. An appeals court in The Hague, Netherlands dismissed Apple’s patent-infringement attempt to get the Galaxy Tab banned from sale in the country, following up on Apple’s appeal after a lower court’s similar decision in August. The court made its decision based on at least two pieces of prior art for each of Apple’s claims, determining that Apple’s claims were therefore narrow enough that they had not been infringed. Next week, a German...

After the matter came up in Parliament last week, the UK has once again declined to lower the value-added tax on e-books, which currently stands at 20%. The Bookseller reports David Gauke, the UK’s exchequer secretary, said the UK could not do this and remain in compliance with European Union law, which classes electronic media as services rather than goods and requires they be taxed at the higher rate. Other European countries, including France and Luxembourg, have reduced their own VATs on e-books significantly. France has told its publishers it will pay any fines the EU imposes on them for flouting...

FutureBook’s Philip Jones has a piece looking at the problems of value-added tax (VAT) on e-books in Europe. The fundamental problem is that, in the UK, e-books are charged the highest possible VAT rate, 20%, while print books have been exempt from VAT for decades. Other parts of Europe are in similar situations. This has the effect of inflating the price of e-books and slowing down their adoption compared to paper. When Parliament member Tom Blenkinsop asked the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer about reducing or eliminating VAT for e-books, the Chancellor said, essentially, that under EU agreements...