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One Year of EAA Enforcement in Publishing: Has Any Publisher Actually Been Sued?
When the European Accessibility Act became legally enforceable on 28 June 2025, publishing was one of the few sectors the law named directly rather than caught by accident. The Act's technical annex sets out requirements for e-books, and for the reading software, the e-readers and the online shops that sell them. Fourteen months on, publishers, distributors and platforms keep asking me the same question, and it is the one that matters commercially. Has anyone in the book trade actually been taken to court over an inaccessible e-book, or did the deadline pass without consequence?
The short answer is no. No publisher, bookseller or e-book platform is known to have been fined or sued anywhere in the bloc over e-book accessibility in the first fourteen months. The more useful answer is that this silence tells you much less than it seems to. The sector is not quiet because it is compliant. It is quiet because it has stronger reasons than almost anyone else to keep a dispute out of a courtroom in the first place.
What the Act actually asks of publishers
Scope is where a lot of the anxiety in the sector comes from, and much of it rests on a misreading. The EAA does not touch print. It regulates the digital book and the chain that delivers it. Four things sit inside the perimeter. First, the e-book itself, which the German transposition defines as "the service consisting of providing digital files that transmit an electronic version of a book". Second, the dedicated reading software. Third, the e-reader as a piece of hardware. And fourth, the e-commerce sites, whether run by a publisher, a bookshop or a library, through which e-books are sold.
For the file itself, Annex I, Section IV of the Directive sets six requirements, which the W3C has mapped onto the EPUB standard. Where an e-book contains audio as well as text, the two have to be synchronised. The file must not stop assistive technology from working. Content, navigation and layout have to be accessible and flexible in how they are presented. The book has to be interoperable with assistive technologies. Its accessibility features have to be discoverable through metadata. And digital rights management must not switch those features off. In practice the EPUB Accessibility standard does the heavy lifting here, which is why "born accessible" has become the shorthand for compliance. It is far cheaper to build an accessible EPUB at the point of creation than to go back and remediate one later.
The obligation does not stop at EU publishers. As the International Publishers Association has pointed out, it attaches to any publishing house that offers titles on the EU market or sells directly to EU customers, wherever that house happens to be based. A US or UK publisher selling e-books into Europe is inside the regime, something I have looked at more closely in Navigating eBook Accessibility Across Borders.
The exemptions publishers are leaning on
Three exemptions are carrying most of the weight in the sector's planning, and each one has a catch.
The microenterprise exemption takes out service providers with fewer than 10 staff and turnover or a balance sheet no higher than €2 million. That covers a lot of independent and self-publishing operations. What it does not do is travel up the supply chain. The moment a small publisher's titles are sold through a larger distributor or retail platform, that platform carries its own obligations, whatever the size of the publisher behind the book.
Disproportionate burden lets a company step back from specific requirements where meeting them would impose an excessive organisational or financial burden. It is not a box to tick. In the German transposition it sits in §17 BFSG, and it has to be documented and defended to the market surveillance authority. Filing the assessment is not the same as winning the argument, a point French courts have already made bluntly in the retail context, as I have written elsewhere.
Fundamental alteration (§16 BFSG) is the exemption peculiar to publishing. Where making a work accessible would change its essential character, the requirement can be set aside. The IPA reads this as reaching heavily visual works, things like comics, illustrated children's books and art books, where a full accessible rendering is genuinely contested. This is the likeliest ground for the first real publishing dispute, because the line between a book that cannot be made accessible and one that is merely expensive to make accessible is exactly where the argument sits.
So who has actually been sued?
The honest answer is more useful than a reassuring one. The litigation the accessibility world has been watching since June 2025 is not in publishing at all. It is in grocery retail. The two French decisions everyone quotes, which I covered in detail in my note on the first year of EAA enforcement, both concern supermarket e-commerce. In the first, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour to bring its site into conformance under a penalty of €500 a day. In the second, the Tribunal judiciaire de Lille dismissed a parallel claim against Auchan on a threshold technicality. The outstanding E.Leclerc and Picard matters are cut from the same cloth. No e-book, publisher or bookshop appears in any of them.
No regulator has published a fine against a publishing business either. Austria, which releases the most detailed figures, reported 84 formal proceedings opened in its first year with no penalty yet imposed, and none of the sectors it has singled out is publishing. Italy's AgID, Germany's new joint market surveillance body and France's designated authorities are all still in the complaint and surveillance phase, and the book trade is not where any of them has chosen to make an early example.
Why publishing may be the quietest sector of all
An empty court list is not proof that the sector is compliant. The better explanation is who the players are. Universities, libraries and publishers are among the most reputation-sensitive institutions in the economy, and accessibility is not a side issue for any of them. It sits at the centre of what they exist to do. A university's whole public identity rests on widening participation and equal access to knowledge. A library's founding purpose is that everyone can read. A publisher's brand is its relationship with authors and readers, and those readers would not forgive being told that some of them do not count. For all three, a public lawsuit alleging that they shut disabled readers out is not simply a legal exposure. It is a reputational one, and it goes to the core of the brand.
That shapes how they behave the moment a complaint or a warning lands. A supermarket might litigate a threshold point through two instances. A university press or a library consortium is far more likely to move quickly and quietly, remediating the file, settling the matter, agreeing a timeline, precisely so that it never becomes a reported case with its name attached. The likely result is a sector generating disputes at much the same rate as any other and resolving almost all of them before they ever surface. So the empty court list is not the reassurance it looks like. It is the visible sign of an industry working hard to avoid being the defendant in the first accessibility judgment against a publisher, and that quiet effort is a large part of why we have not yet seen one.
In public, that effort shows up as a wave of accessibility statements and conformance commitments, especially from the big education and academic platforms that sell into EU universities and libraries. The exposed houses are the ones producing neither a settlement nor a statement, and simply hoping the file never comes up.
Germany: the channel that does reach the book trade
There is one enforcement route already reaching publishing, and it does not run through a regulator at all. About six weeks after the German BFSG took effect, the first competitor cease-and-desist letters, the Abmahnungen, started landing on online shops, alleging unfair competition by reference to the accessibility rules. Any publisher or bookseller running its own web shop sits squarely in the class of businesses these letters target, and a number have received them.
My advice here is the same in publishing as in any other sector. Do not ignore one, because the deadlines are short and an injunction is possible. But do not rush to pay either. Whether a BFSG breach is actionable as unfair competition at all is still unsettled in the German courts, and whether the sender is genuinely a competitor is often the weakest link in the letter, a point German law firms advising on these have made repeatedly. There is a real compliance obligation on your web shop, and there is a partly opportunistic enforcement industry growing up around it. The two should not be confused. The German booksellers' and publishers' association, the Börsenverein, has been briefing its members precisely because the letters have reached them.
The regulators watching, and what a fine would cost
The ceilings differ enough between countries to matter for anyone selling across borders, because the Act leaves penalties to each member state.
In Germany, the staged regime under the BFSG runs from a demand to correct, through a restriction on market availability, to an outright ban on the product or service, with fines of up to €100,000 for certain breaches (§37 BFSG). In Ireland, the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023, enforced for e-books and e-commerce by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, provide on summary conviction for a Class A fine of up to €5,000 or up to six months in prison, and on indictment for a fine of up to €60,000 or up to eighteen months. In France, enforcement is split between designated authorities by sector. For online services the digital regulator Arcom can levy up to €50,000 for failing to meet accessibility requirements and €25,000 for missing the accessibility declaration or the multi-year plan, within the framework the French government has set out. Italy's transposition provides for administrative fines and gives AgID the power to suspend a non-compliant service.
In every EAA matter I have handled, though, the ceiling is rarely the number that actually hurts. The expensive part is the remediation the publisher was always going to have to do, now compressed into a regulator's or a claimant's timetable, with legal costs on top, and in the retail cases that show where publishing is heading, a daily penalty running against a court deadline. And for a university, a library or a publisher there is a further cost that appears in no statute at all. It is the headline, and it is uninsurable.
The backlist question nobody has answered
One question sits under all of this and is still genuinely unresolved. What happens to the titles already published? Germany's federal accessibility agency takes the clean view that there is no retrospective obligation, so only new or updated releases from 28 June 2025 have to comply. But the way the Act's 2030 service-continuity transition interacts with the e-book backlist is still unsettled from one member state to the next. For a publisher with a deep catalogue, the gap between "new titles only" and "the whole list by 2030" is the gap between a manageable change to the workflow and a multi-year remediation programme. Anyone banking on the generous reading should remember that the assumption has not yet been tested.
Conclusion
Fourteen months into EAA enforcement, no publisher, bookshop or e-book platform has been fined or taken to court over an inaccessible e-book. It would be easy to read that as permission to relax. I read it the other way. The French retail cases have already shown how these disputes actually arrive. A formal notice from a disability organisation comes first, then a court date, and along the way the disproportionate-burden defence gets rejected and partial compliance is held to be no defence at all. Publishing has been spared that so far, and not because it is compliant. It has been spared because universities, libraries and publishers have the strongest reputational reasons of any sector to settle quietly before a claim is ever filed. That only works for as long as the files underneath are actually being fixed.
The publishers in the strongest position this time next year will not be the ones who noticed there was no lawsuit. They will be the ones who used a quiet first year to get their EPUBs born accessible, their accessibility metadata filled in, their web-shop conformance documented and their backlist plan written down, so that when a regulator, a competitor, or a reader who simply could not open the book comes asking, the answer is already on file and the matter never has to reach a court.