A new world for the 'e-book'

The eBook is only 1% of the publishing market in Spain, but this figure could experience a boost thanks to the important developments announced in the last two weeks.

To begin with, the great libraries of our country, Casa del Libro, Fnac and El Corte Ingles, have submitted their own reading devices or e-readers. The English Court was so far the only Spanish bookstore sells its own apparatus and now his latest model will encounter serious competition. The cost of equipment, one of the big brakes for the development of e-book market, continues to exceed 100 euros, but solutions are emerging for two obstacles: the cost of e-books and technical complexity to buy and download it.

In these weeks, two publishing groups have taken a big step: creating digital stamps to launch e-books at prices that will revolutionize conventional rates.

On the one hand, the Grupo Planeta has launched Sapphire , gender, romantic, and Scylla , which publishes news of fantastic literature, horror and science fiction. Their titles are from 0.99 up to 4.99 euros , and its mission is to discover new talent not to mention established artists. For Jose Lopez Jara, editor of Scylla, readers, authors and publishers gain from this formula. "Authors and readers are assured that the texts published by eBooks Scyla follow the same rigorous process of selection and editing of paper books or Timun More Minotaur."

The authors also benefit from an international distribution and publishing, in turn, receives a feedback immediately (check at once the response from readers) and that experience can then feed the seals that publish on paper.

Specialization is also an asset: As with the romance genre, fans of science fiction and fantasy are loyal readers who read more than one book a month. "For them it makes little sense to buy an e-reader and read in digital form, at lower prices," says Lopez Jara.

For its part, Ediciones B has opted for a general label, B-Books , which offers catalog titles from 1.99 euros to a maximum of 9.99 euros , and in January released digitally unreleased titles. But what has come to talk about is that B Books has become one of the first publishers in the world that has removed the copy protection system (DRM) , which makes the buying process and need to install a separate program.

Thus, this new label paves the way to read e-book: it makes it as easy as shopping online for a printed book and allows your loan and can be read on how many devices you want (the DRM has been limited so far this aspect). However, his books are exposed to piracy, something not worry. "It has been demonstrated that DRM fails to stop piracy. The proof is that all books with protection within hours can be found on the Internet. The DRM does not block the piracy, only hinder the reader," says its editor, Ernest Folch.