With trumpets and fanfare, the eBook site
Libranda has opened as a Beta. Its proclaimed goal is to bring a convenient ebook selling platform to the Spanish market, with the support of the biggest and most prestigious national publishing houses.
What's the situation of the Spanish eBook industry?
The Spanish eBook industry is practically inexistent. To be quite clear, the legal frame which strengthens the right for a private copy and allows copyright-infringing distribution of books as long as no profit is sought, plus the strong leaning of Spaniards to ignore copyright as a matter of fact (Spain leads the statistics of so-called piracy in the European Union) is hell on earth for the big publishing companies who oligopolise the market. In fact, they have shown absolutely no interest on ebooks while devices like Jinke's Hanlin, Netronix' EB600 and Hanvon's N516 and N518 were being already sold locally by rebranders, aside of people acquiring Kindles and Sony devices from abroad.
The existing players like
Luarna and the big national retailer
El Corte Inglés have not (or can't have) devoted aressources into their ebook shops. In the case of ECI, they have mainly given effort in selling rebranded hardware (they're retailers after all), and in the case of Luarna they're simply too small to be a real game-changer. They don't have the big blockbusters, which are kept by the publishing houses.
As of today, any best-seller we can imagine is easily found on a myriad of websites... all of which are part of the so-called darknet. It is so not only because we Spaniards are prone to infringe copyright, but because of the sheer lack of offer. To add insult to injury, some books which have been amortized hundredfold are now more expensive in their electronical edition than in paperback. Libranda promises to solve that kind of problems.
To be continued...