The Dutch eBook market has seen excellent growth in the last two years and recent Q2 financial figures from the publishing industry has seen it increase by 18%. We now see eBooks accounting for 26% of all sales, but print books are still strong with 74%.
The Netherlands has a different dichotomy than North America in regards to the way encryption is handled. Only 1 eBook in 50 has the standard DRM, with the vast majority relying on digital watermarks. In North America, the trends are basically reversed with publishers exclusively relying on DRM to safegurd against piracy.
Ditch publishers are certainly seeing eBooks as being viable, despite the fact they only account for 4.7% of book sales. In the first half of 2013, the Dutch eBook market had three million titles digitized and at the midpoint of 2014 there are over five million.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.