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...

The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing has a piece by an indie publisher, looking at Amazon’s 99-cent e-book pricing, and explaining to writers who price their e-books that way how far from universally available that pricing actually is. It starts by reminding readers that the Kindle Fire is only available in the US (as with every Nook B&N sells), and outside of North America even the old black and white Kindle is only available in Britain, France, and Germany. In many parts of the world that don’t have hardware Kindles yet, the Kindle app is still available—but that 99 cent...

The Bookseller reports that Secretary Halbe Zjilstra from the Netherlands’ Department of Culture has announced there will be no fixed price for e-books in the Netherlands. The Netherlands (like much of Europe) has fixed prices on paper books, meant to secure wide availability of titles. However, e-books still have less than 1% of market share in the Netherlands. A study commissioned by the Netherlands government determined that even though the rise of e-books might harm bookstores, slapping a fixed price on them will not help bookstores and will harm the overall e-book market by diminishing innovation. I have...

Here in America, we think of e-books as being on the verge of kicking paper back to the dark ages. But only in America do e-books make up as much as 20% of total book sales—it’s a very different story in the rest of the world. PaidContent reports that e-books are only 6% of UK book sales, but in much of the rest of Europe it’s only 1%, and almost zero almost everywhere else. PaidContent goes into the reasons that the e-book market has been slow to develop elsewhere. One problem is a lack of affordable e-readers—Kindle is almost...

Kindle has just launched officially in France at €99 and a decent seeming catalogue of French titles to go with the English language books already available. Of course Amazon has also opened the French market to self-publishers and independent publishers through their Kindle Direct Platform. Yesterday Google brought its UK ebook store online. Last week, iBooks launched in over two dozen countries around Europe. And this only six months since Amazon launched Kindle in Germany. It is clear now that the pace of adoption of ebooks will rise in Europe if only because availability of ereaders AND ebooks is increasing rapidly here. What’s more the price for the new Kindle, at JUST sub-€100...

From EurActiv: Books that have been gathering dust on library bookshelves can now be transformed into eBooks, according  to a pan European agreement signed by libraries, publishers and rightsholders yesterday (20 September). Industry federations and the European Commission heralded the agreement signed yesterday between publishers, libraries, collecting societies and authors as groundbreaking as it would unleash countless books for consumption online. "I am not aware of any Memorandum of Understanding of its kind," Angela Mills Wade, the Executive Director of the European Publishers Council told EurActiv. Previously books have been kept offline because collecting societies, organisations...

From the press release: Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 4.7 million users worldwide, has announced that European online retailer redcoon (www.redcoon.de) will sell the company’s Kobo eReader Touch Edition beginning Oct. 1. Priced at 149 €, the innovative Kobo eReader Touch Edition comes with a rich feature set, including Kobo’s industry-leading Reading Life™ social eReading experience, providing fun, awards and sharing through Facebook and Twitter. Kobo offers more than 80,000 German language titles and a total of 2.5 million eBooks, delivering the largest eBook store and localized selection to...

mocoNews is reporting: Europe has lagged behind the U.S. in widespread adoption of e-books, but a new report suggests that they are finally taking off. The e-book market in Western Europe grew by 400 percent in 2010, a new report finds. By 2015, e-books should make up 15 percent of total book sales in the region. (By contrast, in the U.S., they were already at 6.4 percent in 2010.) Futuresource Consulting, a UK-based consulting firm, published the research on e-books and e-readers. “Despite all this rapid growth in demand for e-books in Western Europe,...

This was announced back in June but the collection has grown significantly since that date. It now includes 45K titles, up from 19K. Here is more from the press release: BiblioLabs, LLC and the British Library have launched their British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for iPad - now available on the App Store. The App was announced in June with an initial offering of a thousand 19th century books - it now makes some 45,000 titles available to subscribers, expanding to over 60,000 titles by the end of the year. For just £1.99 a month in the UK...

The Spanish company, which launched earlier this month, has just announced a free iPad app. The app uses a sliding pane interface similar to Twitter's iPad app, but for now it's pretty bare bones. The same might be said for the company's book selection at the present, at least based on the comment a reader named Michael left on our earlier post. He wrote: Near as I could tell, almost all of their content consists of English-language works in the public domain. Covers for those books cleverly use some sort of random pattern generator. There are a few Spanish-language books with...