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...

Earlier this month in the UK, several publishers formally raised concerns about Amazon's deal to buy online bookseller The Book Depository, and asked their government's Competition Commission to review the matter. I'm not sure whether any Irish publishers expressed similar concerns, but regardless Ireland's own Competition Authority has just given Amazon an all clear to proceed. From the agency's announcement yesterday: The Competition Authority has cleared the proposed transaction whereby Amazon.com, Incorporated would acquire sole control of The Book Depository (International) Limited. The transaction was notified by the parties under the Competition Act 2002 on 4 July 2011. The Authority has formed the...

The new German Kobo ebookstore is now open for business at www.kobobooks.de, with 2.4 million titles—including 80,000 in German—for sale. That's about three times as many as what Amazon offers on its German Kindle store, notes paidContent. Kobo has also released German-language apps for iOS and Android, with a PlayBook version "coming soon." The Amazon store launched This past April, and just a few weeks before that Kobo announced plans for a European expansion of country-specific stores, starting with Germany. PaidContent notes that the next countries in line to have Kobo stores are France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Here's the official...

@calimaq has posted (in French) about a Europeana program that began at the beginning of 2011 to aggregate digital content from European libraries. The focus of the post is on what this might mean for digitized book content from Google. Here’s a mechanical translation of the post using Google Translate and another from Bing Translate. You can read more about the aggregation via “Europeana Libraries: Aggregating digital content from Europe’s libraries” from the European Commission. Hat Tip/Thanks To: @blanktextfield and @calimaq...

It's been compared to Spotify and Pandora in the music space, and I called it the Netflix of ebooks back in April. Now after a closed beta period, the Spanish company 24symbols has officially launched to the public with ad-supported and premium subscription memberships. At launch, the service has about 1000 titles, and although it's browser based the company says an iOS app is undergoing approval right now. Update: A commenter points out that currently anyone can sign up for the free ad-supported plan, including U.S. residents; the premium plan appears to be E.U. only. Here's a little more information from...

That's the title of an article in FutureBook by Jürgen Snoeren.  Here's a snippet: The 4th Editech Conference in Milan, held on June 9th, was mostly about the fragmented nature of the European digital market. That was not unexpected – the majority of the audience was Italian, and the Italian e-book market is among the smallest in Europe, small enough to say it is virtually non-existing. One of the conclusions of the conference was that with the exception of the UK, there is no real e-book market in Europe yet. Market shares fluctuate between countries where the first step has been made...

Let's Go Europe 2011 - Normally $21.95, FREE currently Let's Go Europe 2011: The Student Travel Guide (Kindle Ed.), is authored by Inc., Harvard Student Agencies whose Kindle books with more specific European locations cost between $9.66 - $9.99.  They're providing this Kindle book for $0.00right now, on what is likely a temporary 'price.' Released in January 2011, it has 9 customer reviews with 4 stars out of 5. It's quite large (at 1,232 pages), as most Kindle books that are mainly text average less than 1 meg, and this one is about 3 megs and will take longer to load, which indicates it...