Many German book retailers have teamed up with Deutsche Telekom to create a new eReader to fight the dominance of Amazon.com in the ever expanding market for digital books and other electronic media. The companies include Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel and Club Bertelsmann that partnered with the German media giant for the new technology.

Dubbed as the 'Tolino' eReader, the tool would be made available by March 7 and would have over 300,000 electronic books available to download. The machine is designed to be an alternative to Amazon Kindle and the Apple line of tablets.

There is much pressure to deliver, with Thalia, the largest book retailer in Germany, currently undergoing restructuring. It is closing down branches as sales fell by two percent to just Eur915 million or US$1.2 billion by September 2012. The total market for eBooks in Germany is just 3.2% of the total revenue market, but this is expected to grow to seventeen percent of total market share by 2015.