It is Official: an E-book is a Book

Back in 2012 a study “E-Lending Public Libraries”, carried out on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of OCW (Education, Culture and Science), concluded that the existing lending right regime of the Dutch copyright act did not apply to e-books. Moreover the study also concluded that the current European law and regulation framework does not offer…

E-book Loans Drives E-book Adoption

In July the Centraal Boekhuis published an infographic on the progress of Dutch language e-books in the Netherlands. In spite of the upbeat tone of the accompanying text  stating that the e-book market is developing rapidly, the reality is that the Centraal Boekhuis expects some 2 million e-books to be sold in 2014 against some…

Tom Kabinet Lives Another Day

Amsterdam Court ruling on the Tom Cabinet case:”Selling second hand e-books through the Tom Kabinet website may for now continue” A month ago we wrote about the second hand e-book site of Tom Kabinet which was accused  of copyright infringement and supporting e-book piracy by the Dutch Trade Publishers Association GAU.  Although odds were against…

The Curious Case of Tom Kabinet

In the recent past The METISfiles reported on traditional content publishers. We think they are an endangered species because they don’t seem to be able to come up with digital publishing value-add.  And now there is Tom Kabinet, another challenger to the publishing industry. In the world of books an e-book format is considered a…

Return of the Library

A few days ago the AD newspaper reported that Dutch citizens hardly buy e-books but apparently download them from torrent sites by the dozen. Considering that there is an installed base of over a million e-readers and some seven million tablets, there definitely is a digital reading platform that covers most of the Dutch reader…