tion and a considerable buying power.
             Traditionally, the German book trade is very dispersed: hundreds of publishers generate 80% of sales (17 billion marks per year) whereas the two big players Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck have a market share of nearly 10%. But the industry is changing, and concentration is expected to rise. Book prices are bound which means that a book is sold at the same price throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This practice is increasingly criticized, especially by the European Commission who wants to liberalize the market to allow pricing competition between companies. The share of translated books in Germany is comparatively high: 40% for adults (belletristic literature) and 30% for children's books. Two-thirds of translated children's books are of Anglo-Saxon, 10% of French and another 10% of Swedish origin. Children's books have a market share of about 8% which corresponds to a sum of nearly 1 billion €. The majority of these sales comes from magazines for kids and teenagers and only 25% from classic books. The average price of a children's book is 8.36 € compared to 20.69 € of an adult's book.
             A specific characteristic of consumer behavior for children's books is the fact that not the target group itself, but adults buy books. So, the typical buyer is either a parent, a relative or a teacher and rather female. The majority of the hundred publishers for children's books in Germany exclusively produce for this segment and are small or medium-sized companies. Given this background information, we will now analyze how the children's book Harry Potter became one of the top global bestsellers.
             3 The Global Success of Harry Potter Books
             Let us start from the very beginning. Mrs. Rowling had difficulties finding a publisher for her first book. The companies claimed that the story with its 300 pages was too long and too complex for the target group of 9-12-year-old children. In June 1997, the...