[CommanderROR]

Calm down everyone...

I think people in Germany read a fair bit more than, for expample, people in the US. I'm German myself and a devourer of books, so I'm sure my opinion is biased, but I don't think the trend is as negative as some, like Mr. Jobs, pretend.
All you have to do is go to town and look at how busy some of the big bookstores (like Hugendubel and Thalia) are. Also, Amazon.de is still around and selling books (although these days they sell just about everything else as well).
Ebooks have been a bit of an oddity in Germany so far, mainly because there were no devices readily available before the Sony Reader popped up on shelves earlier this year, because Germans tend to be a bit "traditional" and don't pick up new habits as quickly as some other nations, but mainly (as I have stated before) because there were hardly any books worth reading available in eBook formats. You could get stuff as PDF files, mostly self-help and non-fiction, but the stuff most people crave (fiction) was often unavailable for our language. The next big hurdle is going to be prices, because the reading devices are expensive and the ebooks aren't really cheap either. German publishers want to make as much of a profit as they can out of ebooks, so they price them (at least) as high as paper books...hardcover price of course...as long as they can get away with it.
I'm pretty confident though that all that and the geo-restriction stuff that has recently started plagueing the eReading world will resolve itself over the course of the next few years. Those manufacturers that can survive the initial meagre returns will start shoveling money in a few years time and so will the publishers IF they manage to see the light of reason and follow the example of iTunes and similar systems.