German Publishers Recoil from E-Books

Amazon aims to kick up Kindle sales in Germany on Oct. 19. But publishers are leery, so don't expect many books to be available online

By Joachim Kronsbein

The inconspicuous object weighs as little as three bars of chocolate and is no bigger than a very thin paperback. Though small, it is about to revolutionize the way Germans read.

It's called Kindle, and it's marketed by the American online retail giant Amazon (AMZN). You can use it to purchase and download all kinds of texts using a free UMTS wireless connection. Books purchased in this way are call e-books (short for electronic). This means of obtaining reading material is becoming more and more popular in the US, but some see it as a threat to the world of printed material.

In recent years, there's been a lot of talk about this new technology in Germany, but it has yet to gain widespread popularity. But Amazon plans to change that. Beginning on Oct. 19, right after the Frankfurt Book Fair comes to a close, it will flood the German market will the gadgets. In the US, they cost about $279 (€187). The German buyer will pay €250 ($374), including tax, shipping and customs duties.

Although prices vary greatly in different regions with different laws, there are 100 countries across the world in which customers can use the Kindle to purchase and download books from Amazon at the click of a button. Over the past few weeks, 104 out of the 112 books on the New York Times bestseller list have been made available in the US in the e-book format for $9.99.

Of course, this includes "The Lost Symbol," the latest thriller by Dan Brown, a somewhat long-winded thriller involving the secret power and cryptic symbols of the Freemasons. The book hit the shelves in Germany on Wednesday, just in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair—and, incidentally, just after the arrival of the futuristic thriller "Limit," written by Frank Schätzing, Brown's German-language competitor.

A new gadget, a market with a very promising future and two guaranteed bestsellers? You'd think it sounds like the perfect conditions for introducing a new media device. But will it happen? No.

Economic Fictions

While people in the US can purchase Dan Brown's book online—and in the blink of an eye—for less than $10 dollars, Germans have to fork over €26 ($39) for it—and only in bookstores. Although publishers have deemed it worthy of being printed in a first run of 1.2 million copies, they don't plan to offer it as an e-book. Even Schätzing's novel, which will have a first run of 400,000 printed copies, will only be made available online next year.

The German book industry is a stranger to this new digital world. According to the estimates of Goldmedia, 10,000 readers have already been sold in Germany. But, according to the GfK Group, a leading market-research company, in the first six months of 2009, only 65,000 e-books were sold, excluding specialist works.

Unlike in America, the cost of downloading an e-book in Germany is also frighteningly high. The Kindle's main competitor, the Sony Reader, has been available in German bookshops for a while now for about €250. But the Sony (SNE) device cannot directly download e-books from the Web. And since e-books are just as expensive as their cheapest printed versions in Germany, they are still fairly expensive when compared to the price of the required hardware.

In fact, the price of an e-book can only go down once the paperback edition has hit the market, which usually takes about two years. Ironically, even Schätzing's "Limit"—a science fiction novel that celebrates the technology of the future—has not been able to get past these policies of blockade.

The novel takes place in 2025. In it, the distance between the moon and the Earth has been shortened by the establishment of a kind of space elevator. The moon has also become much more worth visiting because it is rich in the isotope Helium-3. Once transported down to the Earth, the novel's protagonists hope, the isotope will completely solve the planet's serious energy shortage.

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