Nate Hoffelder

Ask any news site and they’ll tell you that Google’s search engine and Google News are two of the best sources of website traffic.

Google doesn’t charge websites anything for all the free advertising, but rather than count themselves lucky every so often someone comes up with the idea that Google should pay for the privilege of providing free advertising.

This idea has been tried unsuccessfully in Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere, and now the Spanish govt has decided to provide an empirical example of the definition of insanity.

In February the Spanish cabinet approved a draft law which would revise Spanish copyright law. One of the several provisions in the draft would require Google and other aggregators to pay for the privilege of linking to news sites and posting snippets.

This story was well-covered in February in English by El Pais and Global Voices Advocacy, so I won’t repeat what they wrote. But I would like to add a few points.

This is the classic Google tax, and like past efforts it will almost certainly fail. Similar attempts at taxing Google have been tried in Belgium and Germany, and both failed.

A new copyright law went into effect last year in Germany which required Google and other aggregators to pay for the privilege of sharing a link and a snippet. Google preemptively responded by changing the Google News ToS to opt-in and then delisitng any site which wouldn’t agree to let Google have the links for free.

And in Belgium, in 2011 the newspaper rights management company Copiepresse won a 5-year-old lawsuit in which Google was accused of pirating content by sharing links. Google subsequently complied with the court order to remove the offending links, leading to cries of Google’s brutal retaliation. And eventually, Google negotiated a settlement and was allowed to link to the Belgian sites again with permission after making a token payment to the newspapers (believed to be around 6 million euros).

Google probably regretted that token payment, because in 2013 they negotiated a similar peace-making settlement in France. Google was trying to head off a law similar to the one passed in Germany and currently under consideration in Spain, and avoiding that law cost Google 60 million euros. The money is not described as a payoff so much as it is a fund to help French newspapers figure out how not to lose money online.

And now the Spanish government wants to repeat the mistakes made in Germany and Belgium as well as the partial success in France. If this isn’t a perfect example of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result) I don’t know what is.

But to be fair, it is not clear to me whether this draft law has been passed into law. I could not find any Spanish language coverage which could tell me whether the draft was defeated or passed, but I did find a story about the Google Tax being challenged in the Spanish Parliament. A competing amendment has been proposed which would, among other changes, remove that clause from the final bill.

So at this point it is too early to say what will happen.

Pocketbook released a set of screenshots this morning which inadvertently reveal more details about the Pocketbook Ultra, their upcoming high-end ereader which has yet to be officially announced.

The screenshots show the interface that Pocketbook will be using on their next ebook readers, and while there’s no specific mention of the model it does appear that these screenshots came from the Ultra.

The Pocketbook Ultra will be a 6″ ereader with a Carta E-ink screen and a rear facing camera and OCR capabilities. Or at least that is what the leaks have suggested and now the screenshots have confirmed.

If you flip through the screen shots you’ll see that they are in grayscale, just like what you would expect from an ebook reader with an E-ink screen. The text is in Russian Ukrainian, so there isn’t much that I can get out of it, but if you look at the first and the last screenshots you will probably notice the word "KAMEPA". If you phonetically translate that from the Cyrillic characters you will get the word camera.

That is about the limits of my abilities to read Russian Ukrainian, but the other screenshots show symbols which suggest features like text to speech. And if you can read it you will probably be able to pick up other clues.

The screenshots are embedded in a gallery below, and if you want to download a copy of the screenshots here is a ZIP file.

Do you see anything interesting?

The-eBook.org

The Chinese ereader maker Onyx continues to delight ereader buyers this week with the launch of a new model in Russia.

The Boox i63ML Newton is the third device to feature a Carta E-ink screen (following the Kindle Paperwhite and the Tolino Vision). It’s available today from a number of Russian retailers with a retail of 6,990 rubles (about $199 USD).

The Newton runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM. It has 8GB of internal storage as well as a microSD card slot. The 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024 x 758 and comes with a frontlight and an IR touchscreen.

Weighing in at 238 grams, the Newton has a 1.6Ah battery and is about the size of other 6″ ebook readers. Like Onyx’s other models, it supports a wide variety of ebook formats, including PDF, Epub, FB2, PDB, and Mobi. The Newton also supports a number of document formats, including CHM, DJVU, HTML, RTF, and Doc.

There’s no mention of mp3 support (but OGG and BMP are listed) and it lacks a headphone jack/speaker, which means that the Newton _may_ lack the Ivona text to speech features found in other Onyx devices. But on the plus side this device does ship with Google Play. Given the combination of an E-ink screen and 3-year-old OS, I’m not sure how many Android apps will run on it but at least readers will get to try.

This is the third device to use E-ink’s latest screen tech, and it is quite the disappointment. I have been expecting Onyx to release an ereader with a Carta screen, but I was also expecting it to run Android 4.0 or above. Onyx has a smartphone and ebook readers that run a newer version of Android, but the Newton is one of the models that hasn’t been updated.

A $200 price tag is rather steep, and if the Newton had been running Android 4.0 that would have gone quite a ways to justifying the price. The newer version of Android would have enabled users to support more apps, and thus add more features.

Thanks, Leonid!

The ebook retailer formerly known as Sony sent out an email to its customers this morning, telling them that it plans to close the Reader Store in Europe and Australia in the middle of June.

It’s official: Sony is (mostly) getting out of ebooks.

Following just over a month after shutting down the NA branch of the Sony Reader Store, Sony is now shutting down the Reader Stores in Australia, Germany, the UK, and Austria. The stores will close by 16 June, and any existing customers will be invited to join their fellow ex-Reader Store customers and transfer their accounts to Kobo.

Oddly enough the Sony Reader Store in Japan has survived the extinction, or at least there is no notice on that site announcing the closure. Given that that site added features only a couple months ago I am not surprised it remains unaffected.

Having launched the Data Discman in the year 1990, Sony has a long and storied history with ebooks. This Japanese tech giant was one of the first companies to enter the commercial ebook market close to 3 decades ago, a market which for most of the 1990s it shared with very few companies. And with the US launch of the Sony Reader in 2006, Sony was the first company to enter the third wave of ebooks, preceding the launch of the Kindle by over a year.

You would think that Sony was poised to be a major player in ebooks, but that never happened. While Sony put a lot of work into developing beautiful ebook readers, they neglected to put equal work into their ebookstore or platform. The support software was terrible until well into 2010, and even as far back the PRS-500, some of the Sony Readers' best features were the work of 3rd-party hackers, not Sony.

And even at its height, the Sony Reader Store only operated in 7 countries. That’s not a sign of great interest or investment on the part of Sony.

Over the next few weeks Sony should be sending out an email to their customers with instructions for switching over to Kobo. For more details, visit the Reader Store help page.

As part of the hand over to Kobo, Sony will be releasing updates for the Sony Readers. These update will enable Sony Reader owners to buy ebooks from Kobo from the device. The first update was released in late March, but since it only cut the connections to the Sony Reader Store there is little reason to install it. A second update is in the works which will add the ability to sync purchases with Kobo, and it is expected to be released in late May 2014.

On a related note, it’s not clear how this update will affect customers in other markets where Sony never launched a Sony Reader Store. For example, Sony is selling the Sony Reader PRS-T3 in Spain and France even though they never opened a branch of the Reader Store in those countries. This update also offers no clue as to whether Sony will release a new ereader this year or next, but I don’t think that will be happening.

No publisher hates the first sale doctrine more than textbook publishers. Over the years they have tried numerous tricks to stop students from reselling their books, including releasing new editions containing minimal revisions, bundling licensed digital content, and convincing professors to create custom editions.

Wolters Kluwer, via their law publisher subsidiary Aspen, has come up with a new scheme to discourage law students from reselling their legal casebooks. According to Josh Blackman, a law professor in Texas, they are attaching a license to the sale of paper books:

I recently received a bizarre email from Aspen, the publisher of the Dukeminier/Krier/Alexander/Schill/Strahilevitz Property casebook I use. In short, the next edition of the book will be have to be returned at the end of the semester, and cannot be resold. This temporary usage comes with a permanent digital version. In effect, buying the textbook gives the student a license to use the book for a single class, as well as a digital version. And it’s the same price! Of course, students are not going to actually return the book (BarBri offers a payment to incentivize that), but the book stores will not be able to legally resell it. This will instantly dry up the reused market for casebooks.

He goes on to quote the email he received, which says in part:

Dear professor,

Thank you for adopting Dukeminier/Krier/Alexander/Schill/Strahilevitz, Property text. We are pleased to announce that this title will be part of our new Connected Casebook program. The Connected Casebook program is intended to provide students access to a greater wealth of learning tools than offered previously, with no change in price. Under the Connected casebook program, your students will receive:

• A new, bound version of the casebook, which can be marked-up, highlighted, and kept through the length of the course, but which must be returned to us at the conclusion of the class.

• Lifetime access to CasebookConnect, a rich digital companion to the casebook, containing a full digital version of the casebook as well as selected proven learning accelerators, such as examples, explanations, and a collection of issue-spotting and hypothetical exercises

This almost certainly won’t stand up in court, but you have to give Wolters Kluwer credit for a novel attempt at rewriting constitutional law (and for using law students as its victim).

The thing is, this is not the first time that a publisher has tried to attach a license to the sale of a paper book. It has been tried before, and in 1908 a lawsuit over a similar license led to Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, the Supreme Court decision which formalized the First Sale Doctrine.

According to Wikipedia:

Bobbs-Merrill Company sold a copyrighted novel, The Castaway by Hallie Erminie Rives, with the notice, "The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a lower price, and a sale at a lower price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright" printed immediately below the copyright notice. The defendants, R.H. Macy & Co., purchased large lots of books at wholesale and sold copies of the book at retail at the price of 89 cents a copy.

That case is not identical with the trick Wolters Kluwer is trying to pull, but it is clearly close enough that it can be cited as a precedent. With that in mind, I don’t see how a student who buys their casebook online or via a college bookstore can be forced to give it up.

Sure, if the casebook is bought directly from the publisher it might be able to extract a contract from the student, and it is also possible the ToS for the website might also include a clause which would require the casebook be returned (and even that might not be enforceable; a student could simply refuse to use the site).

In any case, law students have a strong financial incentive to not go with the flow. According James Grimmelman:

Casebooks are a noticeable part of the cost of a legal education. Aspen casebooks now frequently cost upwards of $200. A student who used one in each of four classes a semester for three years of law school would spend nearly $5000 on casebooks alone. Students have quite understandably responded by turning to used copies—a practice Aspen now appears to be trying to stamp out. If it succeeds, the added cost will hurt students, schools, professors, and the legal profession. I hope that Aspen will reconsider this ill-advised move.

That’s a heck of a lot of money for a student, even for one who is already working a day job and going to law school at night.

Like almost any gadget maker, HP always has a bunch of tablets in the works, and past leaks and rumors have hinted that some of the upcoming tablets include the HP Slate 8 Plus and the HP Slate 7 Beats Special Edition.

Yesterday the font of all leaks @evleaks posted a set of images which show a couple of HP’s new tablets.

The tablets are unnamed and lack any clearly identifying details, but it looks to me like there are only 2 models shown (unless the angle shots are throwing my guesstimates). We could be looking at the 7″ and 8″ models mentioned above, but HP has released 6″ and 7″ models elsewhere in the world, including models which have shown up at the FCC.

Do you have any guesses as to what we’re looking at?

Update: Mike Cane has pointed out that at least one of these tablets bears a striking resemblance to the HTC One. He also suggests that HP could be licensing the Hauwei MediaPad M1 design. It’s close enough that I wonder if he is right (please excuse the bad image editing):

Update: a reader has pointed out that both of the new HP tablets resemble the Hauwei X1 and M1 tablets which were launched at Mobile World Congress in February. (Thanks, jjj!) I think jjj is right, and so is Mike Cane; HP is licensing these designs (or @evleaks has been had, which I doubt).

The M1 is an 8″ tablet with a screen resolution of 1280 x 800 and X1 is a 7″ tablet with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1200. Here’s the X1 side by side with the leaked HP tablet:

Liliputing

Over the past few days this blogger has been working on a post for the International Day Against DRM, which is coming up on Tuesday, and while I was double-checking some information on DRM removal tools I discovered that one such tool had vanished.

In January 2014 I wrote about a Chrome plugin which enabled a user to download and strip the DRM from digital comics which had been legally purchased from Comixology. Sadly, that plugin is no more. According to a takedown notice dated 2 April, the plugin has been removed from Github at the request of Comixology.

The plugin had been online for about 3 months, enabling users to backup their purchases, before being taken down. To be honest it was really only effective up until that security scare in early March, when Comixology discovered that their servers were hacked. Whatever they did to tighten security also broke the the Chrome plugin.

This is at least the second such tool to be vanished by Comixology; I also found mentions of a previous tool which briefly made an appearance in May 2012 before it too was DMCA-ed by Comixology:

Earlier this week, some dude posted to the Reddit Comic Book board that he had written a short Bash script (for the technologically challenged, think an old Windows batch file with ambition) that would allow you to download any digital comics you purchased from ComiXology, strip the DRM, and convert them to a format you can store locally and read on anything. Clearly this is a young man with plenty of free time to spend frittering on coding and hanging around in courtrooms.

The script author even posted a copy of the script with detailed instructions on how you could use it to download copies of the books you bought from ComiXology. Isn’t that nice? Oh, don’t go searching for it – ComiXology caught wind of it and asked the kid to delete the script.

I was hoping to link to a Comixology DRM removal tool in my post for Tuesday, but at this point I don’t know where to find one.

If you know where I should look, please send me an email or leave a comment. As we have been reminded many times over the years, no platform lasts forever. The only way to keep our purchases safe is to exert true control by downloading a backup copy and removing the DRM.

If you thought Kobo was the only one with a 6.8″ ebook reader then you’re in for a shock. Charbax caught up with Onyx a few weeks ago at the HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics Fair and got us our second look at the Onyx Boox T68.

This device, which I first reported on last October, runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHz Freescale CPU. It’s been under development for nearly a year now, and according to one of my sources it is just about ready to enter mass production (this confirms what is said in the video).

The T68 is in many ways an Android tablet, and with a weight of around 250 grams it has the mass of one as well. It comes with a frontlight and touchscreen, and under the hood it packs in 512MB RAM, 4GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, a headphone jack, Wifi, and Bluetooth.

Best of all. the Boox T68 is equipped with a 6.8″ Pearl E-ink screen – the same screen as on the Kobo Aura HD.This screen has a resolution of 1440 x 1080, and it also features E-ink’s latest partial and full screen refresh tech.

The video is rather short, but at least it does tell us that the T68 should enter mass production in June.

Later in the video Charbax gets his hands on the M96. This is Onyx’s newest 9.7″ device, and it too runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHz CPU. And like the T68, it will ship with Google Play and access to all the apps sold there.

There is no guarantee that the apps will work on either device, but just the possibility that they could work adds a lot of value to what would otherwise be a very expensive ebook reader.

Boox T68 product listing

Defective by Design’s International Day Against DRM is coming up next week, and fortuitously Amazon has given us another example of why DRM is harmful.

Early this morning I got an email with an ebook I have been waiting for. It was Mytro by John Biggs, which I had backed in the Kickstarter campaign, and the email delivered the DRM-free ebooks I had bought. I’m not one to wait, so i immediately downloaded the ebook and tried to open it in the Kindle app on my PC.

And that’s when I saw this error message:

For those who can’t read the text, it says "The version of the Kindle application has expired and can no longer be used. Please update to a newer version."

You see, every so often Amazon likes to disable existing Kindle for PC apps and force users to upgrade. This is the first time I encountered it, but according to the support forums thread I found Amazon has been pulling this trick since at least 2012. I’m not the first person to be surprised when my Kindle app refused to run, and I am probably not even the 41st.

I was able to download and install the updated Kindle app, so this was only a minor inconvenience – today. Luckily I had a functional internet connection; if I were traveling, at a conference, or anywhere away from my home, I might have been out of luck.

And this time around I was also lucky in that the update didn’t bork access to my ebook library. Back in 2011 Amazon pushed out an update for the K4PC app which was simply broken. I, and many other Kindle users, lost access to every Kindle format ebook on our PCs, including stuff we bought elsewhere as well as any annotations or notes we made in those other ebooks.

And that, folks, is what makes DRM, and especially Amazon’s DRM, so utterly pernicious. Not only was Amazon able to block me from accessing the content which I licensed from them, they also cut me off from content I own and content I created myself.

So when the Day Against DRM rolls around again next week, it might be worth your time to make sure your content is safe. Like Cory Doctorow says:

If you can’t open it, You don’t own it!

The American Association of Publishers issued a new Statshot report this morning, and it looks like Amazon has once again failed to kill the publishing industry.

According to the AAP, the 1,218 publishers who contributed revenue data to the AAP in January 2014 saw a 10% bump in revenue over last year ( from $500 million to $550 million).

The adult segment was up 2.8% (to $362 million from $352 million). The YA/kids segment saw impressive growth of 43.7% (to $144 million from $100 million), but the religious presses saw a drop in revenue of about 7.4%.

I of course have embedded the full charts below, and the news is generally good. Both the adult and kids segments showed increases in most categories, with the exception of adult paperback books. This comes as no surprise given the general decline of paperback sales as they are being replaced by ebooks.

Speaking of ebooks, ebook sales across the 3 segments grew slightly faster than the market average in January, and were up 12.8% (to $142 million from $125 million). I would like to crow about this being great news but in all honesty it only slightly beat the market rate, making this more of a fluctuation than actual growth.

Still, I’m going to wait until next month before popping the champagne.

Amazon ignited a storm of protest when they removed the in-app store from the Comixology app on Saturday, but the story isn’t over yet.

Numerous comic fans have reported on Twitter that the new Comixology app has lost many of their existing purchases. In addition to no longer being able to buy content inside the app, they are no longer able to even read some of the content they already bought!

I have no information on how widespread this problem is, but in the space of only a few minutes I found 5 different tweets complaining about this problem, ranging from a few titles missing to whole swathes of content lost.

@comiXology have update their app and dropped iOS in app purchases AND lost my most recent purchase in the process!Not a good start @amazon

— Marc Godsiff (@marcgodsiff) April 27, 2014

@SleepingCobrox @comiXology I lost several comics that I can’t even prove I owned cause my ComiXology account has the only say in it.

— Haiku Oezu (@Haiku_Oezu) April 27, 2014

@comiXology all my purchases from 2013 have disappeared from my account!!!!

— Paul Blachford (@bobbdobbs) April 28, 2014

Regardless of @comiXology supporting IAP, the update lost all my comics and restore (after mandatory account creationt, grr) does not work.

— Kendall Gelner (@kendalldevdiary) April 27, 2014

@calreid I just personally experienced it, having spent a VAST $$$ through app — I also lost many many many back issues

— Matt Cavnar (@mattcavnar) April 28, 2014

If you have not checked your Comixology app yet, I suggest you do so. Based on the pattern of Comixology’s responses on Twitter I am not sure that they are aware of a systemic problem, and I don’t think they will notice until more people complain.

I have of course contacted Comixology with a heads up concerning this post, but I have not received a response.

I must say that I am disappointed with Comixology and Amazon. When the news broke a few weeks ago that Amazon bought Comixology, I expected Amazon to make the Comixology platform more robust and make the apps more reliable. Instead their first move, before the ink was even dry on the contract, was to muck everything up.

Not cool.

To Kill a Mockingbird became an instant classic when it was published in 1960, earning it a special place in libraries and classrooms everywhere. This title also had a unique status in ebooks; it was one of the few great titles there were not available to buy digitally (pirated copies are another matter), but that’s going to change soon.

HarperCollins announced on Monday that Harper Lee’s first and last novel will soon be available as an ebook. Starting 8 July, readers will be able to find this ebook in ebookstores. The audiobook, which is currently available on a CD with narration by Sissy Spacek, will also be re-released as a digital download.

Harper Lee had long been a digital holdout, but recently she changed her mind (I wonder if the contract was coming up for renewal). "I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries," Lee, who turned 88 on Monday, said through her publisher. "I am amazed and humbled that ‘Mockingbird’ has survived this long. This is ‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation."

Following Ray Bradbury and JK Rowling, Harper Lee is but the latest author to acquiesce to market pressure. With Mockingbird now set to be released as an ebook, the list of books that cannot be bought as ebooks is down to a handful of titles The Catcher In the Rye, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. (edit: this last title is available digitally outside the US).

All of those works are available as a pirated copy only a Google search away, but of course we knew that already.

AP

Here’s the perfect gift for anyone powered by caffeine: a coffee mug with an E-ink screen powered by hot coffee.

Last week Paulig, a specialty coffee roaster based in Finland, unveiled a new coffee mug design called the Muki. This mug features a small and simple E-ink which is powered by pouring hot coffee into the cup. (Or at least that is what Paulig claims; if you look at the photos of the prototype you’ll see that there is also )

The Muki is probably the world’s first smart mug, which in this case means that every time you fill it up the mug can sync with your smartphone over Bluetooth, enabling you to transfer an image and update the screen. The Muki also has a temperature sensor, and it will report back to the paired smartphone app with the current temperature of the coffee.

Here’s the promo video Paulig released last week:

I can’t find any details on the size of the screen, and it’s not easy to judge from the photo. I do know that E-ink offers a couple screen sizes under 4″ and that Pervasive Display also offers several E-ink screen sizes ranging from 1.4″ to 2.7″, and it might be any of the screens over 2″.

There’s also no info on cost, but I do know that the Muki is still under development, and is expected to be released next year.

Mashable

The grandaddy of all modern ebook readers shipped 10 years ago this week in Japan.

The Sony Librie was certainly not the most successful ereader, but it paved the way for all that came after. Its influence can be seen in everything from the keyboard on the original Kindle to the 6″ screen found on most ebook readers today.

Weighing in at 10.6 ounces, the Librie sported the first commercially available 6″ E-ink screen, with the now standard 800 x 600 resolution. It had a keyboard, page turn buttons, a paltry 10MB internal storage, and a card slot for a Sony Memory Stick. It was powered by 4 AAA batteries, and read Sony’s proprietary BBeB ebook format (later used on the Sony Readers).

Retail was a not too unreasonable 41,790 yen (about $410). While that is damned steep by today’s standards, computers and other electronics cost 3 and 4 times as much back then as they do now.

The Librie never amounted to much, and this was probably due to the lack of available content and the DRM. This ereader was tied to an ebookstore where the ebooks were rented and not sold, and they expired in 60 days. (The lack of tools to make your own ebooks probably didn’t help either.)

But in spite of the Librie’s lack of success, it still influenced all the ereaders that came after it. It used a 6″ screen which was developed by E-ink, Sony, and Phillips (and manufactured by Toppan).

I was told by a contact at Toppan that this screen geometry was chosen because it closely resembled the dimensions of a standard size for paperback books in Japan. Sony funded the development just so it could be used as an ebook reader, and it is not unreasonable to say that without Sony’s funding this particular screen geometry might never have existed.

Without the Librie there would have been no screen for the Kindle to use when it launched in 2007. Sure, there’s a chance that Amazon might have funded the development of an E-ink screen for the Kindle, but your guess is as good as mine what the Kindle would have look like.

Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that Amazon will only get into a market when they know that they can outperform the existing players. I would not be surprised if the original spark of the idea of a Kindle with an E-ink screen was ignited when someone at Amazon looked at the Librie and said "we can do better".

Sure, it has been widely reported that Bezos influenced the design of the original Kindle so it looked more like his Blackberry, but the original idea of having a 6″ E-ink screen and a keyboard?

That was probably influenced by the Librie.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Amazon would have used ebooks to disrupt the book industry at some point, but I also think that without the Librie Amazon might have taken a very different path.

The Librie was not the only ereader on the market during that era, so if it had not existed Amazon would still have been inspired by other devices – like the Rocketbook, for example. This was launched in 1999 by Nuvomedia. While it didn’t amount to much, later models based on the RocketBook were still on the market in 2004, 2005. Those devices had a 5.5″ LCD screen with a touchscreen and stylus.

If the Librie hadn’t existed, Amazon could well have decided to give the first Kindle an LCD screen. Battery life would have been terrible, but if the alternate Kindle still managed to keep all of the features then I for one would not have cared.

So folks, if you like the screen on your ereader, and if you like the weeks or months of battery life, and if you like the option of comfortably reading outside, then tonight I would raise a glass to the Sony Librie.

P.S. In case you’re interested, I missed the anniversary of the press coverage by 3 days.

The BBC is reporting this week that Amazon has half of Britain’s online retail market, but I’m not so sure that there are enough facts to back up the claim.

On Sunday the BBC broadcast and published a documentary that examined Amazon’s dominance of UK retail. The text version of the piece led with a startling claim:

On average, every person in Britain spends just over £70 a year on Amazon. That’s more than half the country’s entire online retail spend. It’s an impressive result for a business started on a couple of computers exactly 20 years ago.

This is quite the newsworthy story, but when I went to confirm the story and find details which would put it into perspective I ended up with new information that made me doubt whether the BBC is correct.

Update: And I just received confirmation that this detail was not correct:

@thDigitalReader You’re right. We misread info we got from ONS – then thought they’d confirmed our line. Have asked for cut. Thank you.

— Charles Miller (@chblm) April 24, 2014

According to The Independent, Amazon’s revenues for 2013 were under £5 billion:

Analysts said Britain’s biggest online retailer was feeling the squeeze as traditional players such as John Lewis and Dixons raised their game — particularly with “click and collect” services.

Accounts filed by the US parent company show Amazon’s UK sales were $7.29 billion (£4.46 billion) — a rise of around $800 million on a year earlier. British revenues rose by $1 billion to $6.48 billion in 2012 and by $1.4 billion to $5.35 billion in 2011.

Depending on your perspective, that could be a large sum. But before I posted I went looking for details on the overall retail spending in the UK, which I thought would present a useful perspective on Amazon’s share of UK retail.

I was aiming for a post similar to the one I wrote on Friday which compared Amazon’s revenues to other US retailers, but instead I ended up with information that lead in a completely different direction.

According to the latest estimates, online retail in the UK were a lot larger than the BBC would have you believe:

UK shoppers spent £91bn online in 2013, according to new figures.

The internet retailing market grew by 16% during the course of the year, according to the IMRG-Capgemini eRetail Sales Index for December. It was capped by a final month in which online sales rose by 18%, with £11bn spent up from £9bn in December 2012. Twice as much was spent via mobile devices as was spent using them in December 2012. The figures beat IMRG’s original estimate, last January of 12% growth.

The BBC said that Amazon accounts for "more than half the country’s entire online retail spend". I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t add up. There isn’t even any way to massage the numbers and make that statement come out true.

Does anyone have a clue as to why the numbers don’t add up?

I will admit to being baffled.