Netherlands

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

A Dutch web firm that sells second-hand e-books has complained to the country's competition authorities that it is being boycotted by three of the largest Dutch publishers.

The bookseller Tom Kabinet claimed the publishers VBK, Meulenhoff/Lannoo and WPG have blocked it from selling their e-books through its website, and alerted the authority for consumers and markets in the Netherlands.

Tom Kabinet has been something of a trailblazer in its field. According to standard terms and conditions for digital media

Rakuten-owned Kobo has launched its new high-resolution display ebook reader, the Glo HD. The device will be hitting shelves starting May 1 in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; May 22 in France, and June 1 in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain at $129.99 (roughly Rs. 8,000).

The Kobo Glo HD e-reader features a 6-inch (1448x1072) display, the highlight of which is a 300ppi pixel density, the same as its closest competitor, the Kindle Voyage - which also features Carta E-Ink technology.

Oyster, Scribd and Amazon's Kindle Unlimited may well be household names, but an earlier player in the e-book subscription market was Danish company Mofibo. Already established in Denmark and Sweden, and launching in the Netherlands this summer, Mofibo now has its sights set on the UK market.

The Copenhagen-based company is led by c.e.o. Morten Strunge, who could fairly be described as a prodigy. At 19, Strunge started mobile operator Onfone. He sold it five years later for £31m and in 2013, at the age of 26, he launched e-book subscription site Mofibo.

Dutch universities have vowed not to soften their groundbreaking demands for publishers to permit all papers published by their academics to be made open access for no extra charge.

In January last year, Sander Dekker, the Dutch minister for education, culture and science, decreed that 60 per cent of Dutch research articles must be open access by 2019 and 100 per cent by 2024. Dutch university presidents responded by agreeing to make their renewal of subscription deals dependent on publishers taking steps to realise this goal.

French publishers saw strong foreign rights sales for several titles in 2014, and the Nobel Prize for Literature went to French novelist Patrick Modiano, who is published by Gallimard.

Not an easy read, Modiano often treats themes such as identity, memory and the German occupation in France during World War II. His book Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (So that you won't get lost in the neighborhood) which was published the week before the Nobel Prize was announced, has so far sold 305,000 copies

I hope no Dutch uncle is going to get me in Dutch over all my Dutchisms (or should they be Netherlandisms?) in this article, but how else to convey the news that Amazon has opened a Dutch website, Amazon.nl, offering its wares in the Netherlands? This already includes extensive Kindle ebook offerings in Dutch as […]

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