France
France has a strong track record of spearheading digital dissemination. The national digital library (Gallica) has 1.5 million digital documents on display. The publishing industry's trade association (SNE) has often joined forces with the government to defend the French book industry against some global marketing drives. There has been some opposition to Google's digitisation programmes, while other publishers have reached agreements with the firm. Localised Kindle, Kobo and Google Editions stores are scheduled to open in France.
Italy
The Italian e-book market is in its infancy but steady growth is expected, and up to 7% market share by 2015 is predicted. Amazon's localised online platform opened in 2011, and localised Kindle and Kobo stores are expected to appear before the end of 2011.
(Further country by country analysis, including Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Slovenia, Poland, Brazil and China is available in the O'Reilly report).
What does this mean for library and information services?
It seems likely that library customers will drive the demand for e-books, and will expect them to be delivered to a wide range of devices. Key challenges include aquisitions models, licensing and pricing.
Kate Worlock will be speaking at Internet Librarian International on Thursday 27 October. You can follow the conference via Twitter #ILI2011.
The O'Reilly report on e-books can be downloaded free of charge.
A number of blogs and other publications have been following the Frankfurt book fair. The official blog has covered many of the leading stories.
Image courtesy antonioxalonso via Flickr.