Germany is one of the most dynamic ebook markets in Europe at the moment, with various players in the traditional publishing business making a land grab for the nascent digital market. The result is an ebook market that looks like the early days of online music and online movies: competitive, fragmented and on course to see a lot of service closures even as it expands. However, as things stand, many of the major players are in the process of launching services trying to ensure their relevance in the digital future.

Germany's printed book market has two types of intermediaries between publishers and retailers: distributors, who simply stock and deliver the books that are still owned by the publishers, and wholesalers, who buy out printed copies from publishers, which they resell to the retailers. According to the German Publishers and Booksellers Association wholesalers currently stock up to 40 per cent of German book titles and, given their aggressive purchasing strategies of popular titles, can fulfil over 90 per cent of retailers' orders.

As ebook retail picks up, wholesalers are adopting both direct to consumer (d2c) and business to business (b2b) strategies. A b2b offer is available from wholesaler Umbreit, who has taken the white-label service route with its product UmbreitLoad launched in 2009. It is in this same part of the market where KNV sees the opportunity for its white-label solution, powering the online endeavours of smaller book retailers. However, it is not only the wholesalers looking at b2b store enablement. Ciando, which has been in business since 2000, for instance, has already signed on Deutsche Telekom for an ebook platform BooksOn. While txtr, the Berlin-based start-up, has both a b2b and d2c offer. The lessons from the digital music market suggest that long term there is not enough of a market for many b2b service providers to survive, particularly if they are focused on a single European territory, even one as large as Germany.

By contrast the d2c approach is being used by another major wholesaler: Libri operates its own ebook store, accessible on PC/MAC, Android (incl. Samsung Galaxy tab) and iOS devices; the company also markets a selection of ereader devices from Sony, iriver, Cybook, Hanvon, italica, Prestigio, Tekstor, PocketBook and Acer (models from the latter two manufacturers have an integrated ebook stores). But the competition here comes from major German book retailers who have already moved into ebook trade. Hugendubel, for example, runs an ebook store and distributes a selection of ereaders (though its ebook store is not accessible directly on any of these devices), while Thalia distributes a custom ereader Oyo and runs its own ebook store directly accessible on this device.

Nevertheless these established local brands may not have it plain sailing. Amazon selected Germany for the launch of its first non-English language Kindle book store and Apple has launched the iBookstore in the region. Importantly, the major international services have established integrated hardware plus software ecosystems that they can leverage, while many local players still do not have their ebook store well integrated with their device. But that alone is not a guarantee of the market being divided between Amazon and Apple (in the same way as German digital music is increasingly cornered) as a lot of how these major international players fare will depend to a great extent on how well they can supply Germany consumers with local content and it is there that the wholesalers potentially have an advantage if they can leverage their position in traditional publishing going forward.