"It is the time for necessary enemies"

"He who has seen the history of Gilgamesh / He who knows all that has happened to him / He who has seen all kinds of wisdom / knows the mysteries and has seen what is hidden / he bringeth news dating farther back," are the opening words of the Epic of Gilgamesh , one of the first known literary works, which was discovered on clay tablets.

Thirty-five centuries later, books are experiencing their fifth transformation: after the tablet, the papyrus scroll, the codex and the printed book, we are now witnessing the emergence of the electronic book. And this technological Big Bang is taking place in a remarkably competitive environment.

The war between three giants of digital culture has accelerated the development of the printed and electronic book business, and the consequences are revolutionizing a century-old model. And the latest battle is being waged not for territory, but for the Spanish language, with a potential readership of 500 million.

The imminent Spanish landing of Amazon, Google and Apple - three global companies at the forefront of change in the way knowledge is disseminated and culture is consumed - is already altering the way the Spanish publishing world works.

The mere announcement of their arrival has made publishers and bookstores rush to adapt to the new times, lest they be left behind, bought up or simply disappear, like certain ventures in the United States. All three corporations have modified the book's value chain, not just through their leadership and success in their own areas of expertise, but because they have extended their business to the point that they now control several steps of the process that takes a book all the way to the reader. In doing so, all three have stepped into the competition's territory.

In this battle for supremacy, two of the sector's worst fears have recently come to pass: Amazon, the largest online bookseller and owner of the Kindle proprietary e-reader (as well as a tablet about to hit the market), has realized its plans to become a publisher in its own right. Meanwhile Google, the largest media company in the world, and owner of the most popular search engine and the widest literary selection, is reaffirming itself as a cellphone manufacturer with the purchase of Motorola. It may also improve its reading app on Motorola smartphones, which have a lot of potential in Latin America.

"Google eBooks will hit Spain before the end of 2011," says Luis Collado, director of Google Books for Spain and Portugal. "After the launch in the US in late 2010, we worked intensively to adapt the program to the legislative, fiscal and commercial realities of Europe and Spain, and that will bear fruit in the launch. We will work in the Spanish-language market, that is Spain and Latin America, which we see as a great opportunity that needs attending because of its user potential. Our goal and the work we are doing focus on partnering with key agents in the publishing world, publisher and bookstore owners."

Last but not least, Apple, the company that made access to digital culture friendlier, revolutionized commercialization processes and is now investing in its online library, may reach a deal with Microsoft, and plans to open a store in Madrid's Puerta del Sol.

For Sandro Pozzi, the EL PAÍS financial correspondent in New York: "This is a time for looking to the future and for making alliances, because old-industry businesses can only survive if they join forces with new technology businesses, and vice versa. This is the time for necessary enemies."

In Spain, in principle, all three companies will work as virtual bookstores, as middlemen between the publishers and the readers, and they will implement the US catalogue sales model. It's the triumph of the one-click system and impulse shopping.

The market will be dual, print and digital, but the offer will not be the same. There is no problem when it comes to traditional books, because a buyer can request a Spanish title from a bookstore and have it mailed home, the way they always have.

But it's a different story with the digital formats, because publishers are lagging behind with their digitalization processes (which depend to a great extent on negotiations with writers and their agents over rights). That means losing clients, and makes it easier for piracy to take hold.

And so, standing on the brink of the future, the industry is prey to new or expanded fears. "The sector is scared about the online notion of 'free-of-charge' and it is not clear on the definition of the new business model, nor does it know how to handle the transition to a dual market," says Milagros del Corral, president of the Scientific Committee of the Unesco Focus Forum 2011.

"They also worry about digital piracy; about bringing VAT on digital books, which is 18 percent, into line with VAT on print books, which is four percent; they want to avoid positions of monopoly and they see a need to reconsider the book's chain of value."

However, today's immediate challenges are not just related to new technologies and the creation (or reinforcement) of digital structures. They also lie in the search for the necessary coexistence between the old world and the emerging one.

One of the reasons for this is that most people still prefer to read paper books (except for legal, scientific or economic texts). Another is that few e-readers have been sold in Spain to date. Also, the percentage of Spaniards who read enough books in a year to make it worthwhile to invest in such a device is low (58 percent of Spaniards say they read, and the average is 9.6 books a year). An option would be to buy a tablet with several applications, not just reading, but they are more expensive.

"The arrival of Apple, Google and, above all, Amazon will change the publishing industry definitively," says Fernando Esteves, international director for General Editions for the publisher Grupo Santillana, which belongs to Grupo PRISA, which also owns EL PAÍS.

"The paper book will increasingly yield ground to digital content, and the book's chain of value will have a new configuration. There will be fewer bookstores, greater possibilities for self-publishing, a broader, more varied offer, ease of access to content, and greater knowledge about the market, reading habits and buying habits.

"The traditional publisher will have to stress the selection, publication and promotion processes, since as a distributor it will no longer add any value."

"The really big change is in distribution," confirms Jesús Bádenas, director general of the bookstore division of Grupo Planeta. "Amazon, for instance, has been in France for 10 years and it has a market share of between five and 10 percent. We will adapt, and if we take advantage of it we can come out on top."