Businessweek picked up on the subject (euro ebooks, not vegetables):
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...nt-ebook-sales
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Germany isn’t alone in showing disinterest in digital books. The same is likely true in the rest of Europe (except the U.K.), where the rate of e-book sales tends to hover around just 1 percent, if that, according to a Global eBook Market report (PDF) compiled for the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair. The report notes cultural barriers in France, where e-book sales are estimated to be about 1.8 percent: “Defending a diversified cultural infrastructure—notably, a tightly knit network of bookstores—resonates in various and continuous media reports and political activism aiming at curtailing a supposed negative impact from both online sales of books and the emergence of e-books, which is seen as an imminent threat to smaller libraries [bookstores],” reads the report.
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Sounds like an organized campaign by the entrenched powers to keep the tech at bay and prices high.
Hope springs eternal:
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It’s likely things will change with time. “In Germany we’re still at 1 percent, but that’s already an increase of 77 percent from the previous year,” says Pleimling. “If the growth rate continues like this, we’ll have similar rates as the U.S. in a few years. You can buy the Kindle here, the iPad is very successful in Germany, iPhones are very successful, and now Barnes & Noble is coming to Germany, too. If these devices keep getting cheaper, more and more people will buy them, and everything may change very quickly.”
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