Today it was announced that some of the most important publishers in Spain have finally decided to enter the ebook market, and next July 15th they'll launch a joint project to distribute ebooks (the content, not the reader) to the stores, both brick-and-mortar and online. The new platform will be called
Libranda. Some data:
At first, there will be 2000 titles from 10 publishers, distributed to 5-8 stores. They expect reaching 10000 titles by the end of the year.
The price will be 20-30% lower than the paper edition (they don't say whether the ebook price will decrease when the mass-market edition appears). Sadly, VAT will be 18% for downloadable ebooks, but the Government will press the European institutions to allow applying low VAT to ebooks too.
They mention the back-catalogue should also be available, and new releases will be available in e- and p-form.
The format will be ePUB, with Adobe DRM
According to a publisher, digitizing a book costs between 300 and 400 euro, and the inversion is recovered with 50 copies sold (but I say this only makes sense for books already written and published).
The article in Spanish, from the newspaper
El País.