Both indie publishers and readers found a special treat behind the first door of their advent calendars today, because Amazon has opened two more Kindle stores in Spain and Italy respectively.
The most important thing about this announcement is that readers in Spain and Italy (and presumably Andorra, San Marino and the Vatican State, should the Pope experience a hankering for e-books) can now purchase the basic Kindle for 99 Euros and any e-book available in the Kindle store without having to pay the two US-dollar Amazon surcharge. It’s good news for indie publishers as well, because we now earn 70 percent royalties for sales to Spain and Italy (yes, Amazon charges international readers more and pays writers less). The 15% VAT rate still applies though for all EU sales.
David Gaughran has a bit more background as well as an outlook what will come next.
Author pages don’t seem to be available at Amazon Spain and Italy yet, but here is the full listing of all available Pegasus Pulp e-books at Amazon Spain and Amazon Italy. I have also added the purchase links for Amazon Italy and Spain to the individual book pages.
I don’t know about Spain, but I know that I have at least one reader in Italy, so this is good news.
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I’m so happy Amazon has opened Italian Kindle store, for two different reasons:
– I’m glad I can purchase books in foreign languages at a lower price (Amazon surcharge was quite baffling and not justified at all)
– Eventually there’s a good offer of books in Italian (now the offer of Italian books was very limited and most of it in DRM epub format)
I’m just perplexed about the VAT rate: the VAT in Italy is 4% on paper books and 21% on most of goods, including ebooks (like they were not books! Totally illogical, and it’s like that in many European countries, but I know the EU is thinking about changing it). Where the 15% comes from?
Good news for authors too, especially the higher royalties!
I think this move by Amazon can really help expanding ebooks market in Italy and Spain.
I suppose Amazon.it did very well in the past year, if they are opening the Italian Kindle store now, even if the economy it’s not very good at this moment.
Italian book market is pretty strange: a big percentage of Italians don’t read for leisure at all, but a good percentage of Italians read a lot, making a very good book markets; basically there are two extremes, while Germany for example has a more homogeneous market and a bigger number of readers. (I suppose there are a lot of historical reasons behind this).
I’m very curious to see ebooks market evolution in Europe in the next year!
Your link to David Gaughran post was very interesting, thank you!
The 15% VAT rate comes from Luxembourg, where all European Amazons (i.e. Amazon UK, Germany, Italy and Spain) are headquartered. Luxembourg famously has some of the lowest tax rates in the EU, which is why it’s known as a tax haven, though the Luxembourg VAT rate is still higher than the reduced rate that would be charged for books in many countries. Besides, many European countries don’t tax e-books as books but as software, which is absurd. Some French publishers started a petition to the European government to treat e-books like print books tax-wise and there are local petitions in some countries such as the UK. I don’t know if there’s one in Italy or if online petitions even work in Italy, since they are very difficult in Germany.
Anyway, I’m glad that the people of Italy (and San Marino and the Vatican State) finally get to enjoy the services of Amazon and the Kindle store without the two dollar surcharge, which was difficult to justify anyway. I hope that in the future there will be a general Amazon.eu, particularly as many EU countries are too small to support an Amazon of their own. For example, the Netherlands are actually fairly far ahead in the adoption of e-books, but since the country is too small, they don’t get an Amazon of their own.
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