Publishing Perspectives has a report on this. Here’s a snippet:
Libranda launches in beta on July 15th with 2,000 titles from 10 of the participating publishers, sold through up to 8 online stores. The full launch (with another press conference) will come on September 15th, with titles from all 15 of the publishers currently signed up to use the platform, offered through 21 online stores.
The small number of titles at launch is due in part to a bottleneck in digitization – publishers are scanning books but also adding Onix 3.0 metadata and in some cases may insert enriched content, according to Planeta CEO Jésus Badenes
Much more detail in the article.
Paul, it is very depressing. They are delaying ebooks as much as they can in order to protect their old business model. 2.000 titles is a sad joke… but they say, Anyway, the most read titles are as few as these.
What about long tail? What about recovering outpublished titles?
Here in Spain we don’t have any actual motives for optimism about ebooks 🙁