Nate Hoffelder

The iPad is now known as one of the best-selling gadgets of of all time, so it might surprise you to learn that at one point Steve jobs didn’t think there was any market for it.

This dates back to 2003, when Mr Jobs was interviewed at the first AllThingsDigital conference. Walt Mossberg asks about Apple’s plans for mobile devices, namely tablets. Mr Jobs first says that Apple has no plans for a tablet and then goes on to explain why the tablet market was doomed.

You can catch his answer starting at about 7:30:

He’s not wrong.

While some might post this video so we can point a finger and laugh, I’m sharing it because it shows just how much everything has changed in the past 10 years.

Almost all of what made the iPad possible was invented after this interview, and very little was invented just to be used in a tablet.

For example, the original iPad’s price and battery life both came about as a result of the rise of netbooks. That was a market segment that didn’t exist in 2003, so there was no way to foresee how it would drive manufacturers to improve battery life and reduce the cost of components and manufacturing.

The iPad also benefited from smartphones and the way they drove improvements in touchscreens. Again, that is a market that largely didn’t exist in 2003, so there was no way to predict how smartphones would make onscreen keyboards possible.

Did you catch the part of the video when they discuss writing on a screen? That tells me that in 2003 they were assuming that you couldn’t type on a touchscreens, which means you needed a physical keyboard. That matches with what I can recall from that era.

If you have the time, I recommend watching the entire interview. It is a window into a different era, a time when there was no MP3 market, no Youtube, and almost no mobile device market (compared to today, at least).

The above video shows us just how wrong we can be when trying to come up with a simple explanation for things like Jobs being wrong when he said that tablets would fail. He wasn’t wrong in 2003, and it’s not valid to say he was wrong based on trends which didn’t happen until after he made the statement.

France’s answer to Walmart has just announced that they will be getting into ebooks and ereaders in a big way.

Carrefour, one of the leading hypermarket retailers in France (and globally), has introduced a pair of ereaders which they plan to start selling next week.

The NolimBook and NolimBook+ are rebranded ereaders which were originally designed by Bookeen.  Both models will have a 6″ epaper screen (600 x 800 resolution), Wifi, a touchscreen, 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and on-device access to the Nolim ebookstore. The Nolimbook+ will also have a frontlight and a slightly faster CPU.

They will be sold at 2 price points, 69 euros and 99 euros. Carrefour is going to start selling the NolimBook next week, and according to the announcement they also plan to remodel all 230 Carrefour stores in France with a new dept intended just to promote the new ereaders. This will be a place where potential customers will be able to try the new ereaders and seek assistance and support from a salesperson.

The NolimBook will also be supported by Carrefour’s new(?) Nolim ebookstore, which Carrefour is promising will be stocked with 100,000 French language titles from major French publishers. That is a considerably larger supply than the 36 thousand or so French language titles Amazon now offers in the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.

In other news Carrefour is also launching reading apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android. The apps appear to be brand spanking new, with the iOS app showing that it was just released yesterday. The Android app is showing that it has fewer than 10 users.

Carrefour is entering a crowded ebook market where all the major international ebookstores are present and actively trying to grow their market share. Based on what little solid info I have, the French ebook market is dominated by Amazon, Kobo, and Apple, with the 3 ebookstores accounting for about 85% of the market. Apple is in third place with Kobo and Amazon in a tight race for the lead.

On a related note, Amazon has dropped the price of the Kindle in France. They’re now selling the basic model for 59 euros, down from 79 euros.

eReaders.nl

Update: This post is now 10 hours old and in that time I have been told by at least 20 different people on 5 different websites that I am wrong in how I interpreted this contract. You might want to take this with a grain of salt.

Jeff Bezos likes to say that Amazon is agnostic on the topic of DRM, but if the boilerplate contract I have sitting in front of me is any indication then I think he might not be telling the whole truth.

I have a copy of an Amazon contract which says that Amazon will use DRM on Kindle ebooks unless they agree otherwise. This contract, which I am told originally came from an ebook distributor, was passed along to me by the editors of Actualitte, a French media blog. They had posted a detailed analysis of this contract earlier this week but were unable to share the contract publicly because of pressure brought by Amazon.

I have posted a copy of the contract as a PDF, and I want you to look at it and read the section on DRM:

Unless we mutually agree otherwise, we will use DRM in connection with the download of the eBooks, and we may use any available digital book DRM technology.

Please note that this is an Amazon contract and that Amazon is the one who is insisting on the DRM. That makes this an interesting contrast, IMO, with Bezos' statements that "If the rights owner wants DRM, we do DRM. If the rights owner doesn’t want DRM, we don’t do DRM."

The contract clause mentioned above is by no means agnostic on the topic of DRM. It unequivocally tells us that Amazon is the one who gets to decide whether the ebooks have DRM. It also tells us that Amazon _will_ be adding DRM to Kindle ebooks unless the other party can talk them out of it.

Amazon’s position (on DRM) in this contract is far from agnostic, and it is in fact much closer to their stated position for audiobook DRM. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, Amazon requires DRM on audiobooks and does not give content creators a choice in the matter:

Audible audio files cannot be converted to MP3 or any other file format because of security technologies used to protect both the intellectual property rights of our Content Providers as well as the Authors.

…

Audible justifies their policy with the statement that their proprietary audiobook format was required to provide the best listening experience for customers. This might be true, but it’s also not relevant to the fact that Audible doesn’t give creators the option of not using DRM. And that same policy applies to audiobooks sold on the Amazon website, so it’s not like Amazon can claim that a subsidiary was making different decisions.

I have contacted Amazon for a comment, but they have not responded. If they respond I will update this post.

Thoughts?

It seems Amazon’s 9.7″ ereader is back on sale again today, and that raises questions about just what Amazon plans to do with it.

The Kindle DX (graphite), an ereader which launched in July 2010, is now available for a mere $189.

That’s over a third off the asking price when I last checked in June, but don’t let that convince you to buy it. My competition was the first to catch the sale, and he thinks that this device is too old and too limited in functionality to be worth buying. I agree with him, and it’s not just that I think a $200 tablet would be a better value.

No, my main objection is the poor PDF support and the fact that this ereader is missing nearly all of the features found on current Kindles. The DX hasn’t been updated since 2010, and that means it doesn’t have cool features like KF8, X-Ray, Kindle Cloud, or Whispersync for Voice.

Heck, the Kindle DX doesn’t even make a decent digital textbook platform. That was why the first model was launched in 2009, and Amazon made sure to arrange for a number of pilot programs to promote the idea. Unfortunately for Amazon those pilots uniformly concluded that the Kindle DX was too slow and too feature limited to work well with textbooks. In fact, at this point it’s not nearly as fast as your average textbook app on Android or iOS, and it also has fewer features.

I think you’d be better off with a Kindle Fire 8.9 or some other tablet.

But even though I don’t think you should buy the Kindle DX in this sale I am still excited to see it go on sale. I am hoping that this is a sign that Amazon is going to release a replacement.

This goes beyond the usual tech blogger speculating on the latest news; I’m hoping for a new Kindle DX because one, new gadgetry is cool, and two, it would explain why Amazon brought the Kindle DX back from the grave earlier this year.

Amazon discontinued the Kindle DX in October 2012 and then revived the ereader 8 months later. This made little sense at the time, but today I have a theory to explain it.

I wonder if perhaps Amazon brought back the Kindle DX because they were responding to the Kobo Aura HD.  Kobo’s ereader has a head-turning 6.8″ screen with a jaw-dropping resolution of 1440 x 1080. I could see the possibility that Amazon might not want to be upstaged by Kobo so they decided to launch a larger Kindle again.

If I am right then the current Kindle DX is just a placeholder for the new model (we can call it the Paperwhite XL). I would further speculate that the new model would have a 9.7″ screen with a touchscreen and a resolution higher than 1536 x 2048. That is the screen resolution that Bookeen teased us with in their contest a couple months ago.

The interesting thing about that screen resolution is that if it belonged to a 9.7″ screen then the screen would have sharpness about the same as the Aura HD (265 ppi).

Doesn’t it make sense that Amazon would want a Kindle with a screen bigger and sharper than the Kobo Aura HD?

I think so, but what do you think?

Update for 18 July 2014: With Amazon having launched the Kindle Unlimited service this morning, it was high time that I updated this post to reflect the changed market.

The following post matches up 5 different services that are available in the US or globally:

• Kindle Owner’s Lending library
• Kindle Unlimited
• Oyster
• Scribd
• Bookmate

Content

• Oyster offers 500,000 titles, but few are frontlist and few are bestsellers.
• Amazon boasts that the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library stocks over 550 thousand titles, most of which were added via KDP Select.
• Scribd has a catalog of over 400,000
• Kindle Unlimited has 650,000 titles at launch, many of which are also found in KOLL. There are also 7,300 audiobooks.
• Bookmate offers 400,000 titles, but they tend to be concentrated in certain markets.

Cost

• Oyster costs $10 a month for unlimited access.
• Kindle Owner’s Lending Library comes as part of an Amazon Prime membership, and in the US that costs $79 per year but includes other extras like free 2 day shipping and free streaming video. You are limited to borrowing a single ebook title each month.
• Scribd costs $9 a month for unlimited access.
• Kindle Unlimited costs $9.99 for unlimited access, but limits you to only having 10 titles at a time.
• Bookmate costs $5 a month, which is usually billed through a subscriber’s cellphone company.

Availability

Oyster and Kindle Unlimited are only available in the US. Scribd is available globally, and the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library is only available to Kindle owners in the US, UK, and other select markets.

Bookmate is technically available globally but the company is concentrating its attention on certain markets: Russia, the Ukraine, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. They plan to expand into Scandinavia and Latin America by the end of 2014.

Apps

• Oyster launched their pilot with an iPhone app, and later released iPad and Android apps.
• Scribd has iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and iPad apps, and you can read in your web browser.
• Kindle Owner’s Lending Library is only available on a Kindle.
• Kindle Unlimited is available on any Kindle device or app.
• Bookmate offers apps for Android and iOS.

Europe is rapidly replacing the Far East as the source of the most interesting ereader news and the ImcoV6L is no exception.

This ereader might look rather ordinary but it is running Android on 1GHz Rockchip CPU. It has 256MB RAM, 4GB of Flash storage, and a microSD card slot. It’s built around a Pearl HD E-ink screen with a resolution of 1024×758. It also offers a capacitive touchscreen, frontlight, speakers, a headphone jack, and Wifi.

According to the press release, this ereader will include support for DRMed ebooks and audiobooks (via the eLibrary WMA App). It will also let users install their own apps, though I am not sure that will be worth much. This ereader has a CPU comparable to a cheap tablet and a limited amount of RAM, so I am not convinced that anyone will really be that interested in installing apps.

The imcoV6L is expected to be available soon, and it will be sold in Germany at eBook.de with a retail of 99 euros.

That is the same price as the Tolino Shine, the 6″ ereader launched earlier this year in Germany. Both devices have about the same hardware specs and can similar support for DRMed Epub ebooks. They can even buy ebooks from all the same ebookstores.

eBook-Fieber.de

Newscorp’s entry into the education market, the Amplify tablet, didn’t receive a lot of user reviews before being sold to waiting school districts; that may have been a mistake.

One school district in NC put their 1:1 program on hiatus just one month into the school year. They discovered that some 10% of the Amplify tablets issued to students were being returned with cracked screens or suffering from malfunctioning power supplies. Guilford County Schools, a public school district that serves 71,000 students in and around Greensboro, NC, announced on their website on Friday that they had withdrawn all 15 thousand Amplify tablets that had been issued to students. The tablets were distributed as part of the PACE pilot program, and were funded by a $30 million grant from the Dept of Ed. Race to the Top-District program.

GCS says that they pulled the tablets after receiving 175 complaints of malfunctioning power supplies, some 2,000 complaints about defective cases, and after 1,500 Amplify tablets were returned with broken screens. That is a 10% breakage rate, and it is almost unheard of in consumer tablets.

Of course, that 10% doesn’t mean anything without context, so I did a little digging.

SquareTrade, the 3rd-party warranty service, reported in early 2012 that 9.8% of iPad 2 and 2.8% of original iPad tablets broke in their first year of use. This means that the Amplify tablet broke at a rate 12 times as great as that of the iPad 2, and yes you can draw a conclusion about the relative build qualities.

Update: A couple people have taken me to task for my misuse of statistics. Clearly I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did.

On a related note, I have also been told that Worldreader, the nonprofit that distributes Kindles to remote schools in Africa, saw a 30% breakage rate when they first distributed Kindles in Ghana in 2011. Susan Moody Pietro, a spokesperson for Worldreader, told me that in order to fix the durability issue:

So we did a couple of things.  We did in class exercises to teach the students that e-readers are delicate devices (one example is that we had the kids drop an egg and we showed them that the screens were breakable, like an eggshell.  And we sent the broke Kindles to Lab 126 and they got to see that the screen needed reinforcement, which came out in the next launch of Kindles.  I should mention that the breakage rates we were seeing at the time matched a similar school program in Clearwater Florida, so it wasn’t a developing world vs. developed world issue.

Amazon responded to Worldreader’s high failure rate by figuring out how to build a better Kindle, and between that and Worldreader’s training program I was told that Worldreader’s breakage rate was now under 4%.

In the end most accidental damage to tablets is caused by either user error, random bad luck, or poor construction. And that brings me back to the Amplify tablets bought by GCS.

According to the product page, the Amplify tablet has a 10″ screen and runs a modified version of Android 4.2 on a Tegra 3 CPU with a 5MP rear-facing camera, wifi, and a microSD card slot. It is leased to schools at a princely $200 per year for 3 years, but curiously enough only comes with a 1 year warranty.

This tablet was always intended to go into schools, and that is why it was supposed to have been built with a layer of Gorilla Glass over the screen. This was in the contract that GCS signed, and it was also mentioned prominently in the early news coverage of this tablet. According to the school district, none of the Amplify tablets that they bought had that protective layer, which might help explain why so many tablets broke.

Or to put it another way, the absence of Gorilla Glass is a sign that someone cut corners on the build quality for this production run. Given that there were also complaints about misfitted cases and defective power supplies,  I am not terribly surprised.

But do you know what does surprise me?

I was frankly surprised to learn that the Amplify tablet is supposedly based on the Asus MeMO 10″ tablet, and that Asus was supposedly involved in producing the tablet. Asus isn’t known for such obviously shoddy build issues, so I have to wonder just how much they had to do with producing the Amplify tablet.

Also, that MeMO Pad 10″ tablet costs under $300, which means that schools are paying at least an extra $300 just to get the software from Amplify. I wish I could say that I was surprised.

As I reported when the Amplify tablet debuted in March of this year, this tablet is NewsCorp’s "solution" to the "problem" of education:

This 10″ Android tablet is the focal point of a new educational platform whose goal is to move more money from the $500 billion K-12 education sector and put it in Newscorp’s pockets.

And here I thought I was being snidely cynical when I wrote that back in March. Nope.

If you got an email from Adobe this weekend with a subject line that mentioned something about a password, I suggest that you take it seriously.

That email wasn’t a phishing attempt or some attempt to trick you; Adobe revealed late last week that they had suffered a security breach which affected up to 2.9 million customer accounts:

Cyber attacks are one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today. Given the profile and widespread use of many of our products, Adobe has attracted increasing attention from cyber attackers. Very recently, Adobe’s security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of customer information as well as source code for numerous Adobe products. We believe these attacks may be related.

I haven’t bought anything from Adobe so I haven’t given Adobe any credit card info, but I still got an email on Saturday. I am taking it seriously, and so should you.

If you have ever downloaded a DRMed Epub ebook and then transferred it from your computer to another reading app or ereader then you have probably used your Adobe ID somewhere in the process. This ID consists of an email and password, and it is this info that may have been compromised when Adobe’s server’s were hacked.

And now that password may or may not be in the hands of a hacker.  This is no reason to panic, but a prompt response is warranted. I suggest that you read the email from Adobe and follow the instructions. I don’t think it’s very likely that your financial info will be compromised but I also believe that it is better to be safe than sorry.

Update: And while you’re at it you might want to also consider whether you also used the same password/email combination on other sites. You should change those as well, especially if they have credit card or other payment info attached. Thanks, Alexander, for the suggestion!

P.S. I know that many in the anti-Amazon crowd like to talk about how the Epub ebook market is not locked down to a particular ebookstore, but the reality is that all the ebookstores, apps, and ereaders that support Adobe DE DRM all have the same weakpoint: Adobe. Tell me, how exactly is this better than being locked to a single ebookstore?

Sony launched a new version of the Sony Reader app for iOS earlier this week, and for the first time the app now offers limited support for Epub3. But only if you buy ebooks in Japan.

As odd as it may sound, Sony has released a new reading app which is only available in iTunes Japan, and it appears to only work with the Sony Reader Store in Japan. If you try to download the app from the US iTunes you will get the older app, which was made by Bluefire.

While the Sony Reader Android app has had limited support for Epub3 since early 2013, their iOS app has lagged behind and was only updated this week. According to my source (and confirmed in iTunes), the new app only added support for the Epub3 fixed layout spec.  This is going to enable readers to buy from a catalog of 20 thousand manga and magazine titles.

I don’t have any info yet on when Sony plans to release this app in other markets or add more support for Epub3, but I do know that the new app offers less support for Epub3 than Sony’s Android app. That app supports media overlay, fixed layout, and javascript interactivity.

Sony has been pursuing their own ebook agenda for the past several years, and that includes opening several ebookstores in more markets (Australia and Germany, for example) and continuing to invest in developing their reading apps. But it does not include joining in the ereader arms race with Amazon, Kobo, and other companies; instead Sony has released basically the same ereader for 3 years running.

iTunes

ITMedia

My 2013 Kindle Paperwhite arrived yesterday and now that I have spent a few hours with it I can confirm that the early gushing reviews weren’t wrong; this is a nicely improved ereader.

I would not go so far as to say that it is now great and wonderful, but I can see that Amazon polished some of the rough edges and refined the design.

I have both model years sitting on my desk, and when they are sitting there powered off it’s almost impossible to tell the difference. Last year’s model is more scuffed but that is merely age and use; had they come out of the box on the same day it would be easy to confuse them. The new model has a slightly blacker shell and the word Kindle is printed in a less-bold font, but just about the only way to tell the difference is to flip them over.

The 2012 model says Kindle on the back while the 2013 model says Amazon (the FCC statement is also different).

But while the differences aren’t visible at first once I turned them on I immediately knew which was which. You turned on last year’s model by pressing the power button; the new KPW requires that you also swipe the screen.

Update: A reader pointed out that the extra swipe was probably due to one device having ads and the other not having ads. Thanks, Anne!

And once they’re on the differences are more obvious – except for the screen. The 2013 KPW has a screen that is at times slightly whiter and slightly grayer than the screen on last year’s model. I know it sounds weird but that’s what I am seeing.

I think whatever new tech E-ink added to the 4th-gen Carta might still need the bugs worked out because it is not a clear and obvious improvement over the previous generation.

Update: I’m told that the issue I was seeing before was the result of a partial screen refresh. I turned it off and now I think that there is very little difference between the screens.

But once I got to using the new KPW I was able to see how it had been improved. The biggest difference is in the speed. The 2013 KPW is noticeably faster to turn the page, and it is also more responsive in the menus. How much faster?

Well, when I was testing it I noted that the new model was done turning the page before the old model even started to turn the page. It’s that much faster.

And then I turned on the frontlight and the difference became even more clear. My 2012 KPW has a very splotchy frontlight, while the 2013 model has a much more evenly lit frontlight. It was also visibly brighter.

These details might not be visible in the photo but they can be seen with the naked eye.

Opnion

All in all, this is a nicely improved ereader. If you were thinking about getting last year’s KPW I suggest that you get this one instead – even if you have to wait for it. I also feel that the new model is worth upgrading to (assuming you can resell or rehome last year’s KPW).

Update: My competition isn’t all that impressed with the KPW, and he can’t really see any improvement to the Carta screen. He recommends against upgrading.

P.S. In the long run the 2 models will probably have the same software features thanks to Amazon’s policy of updating old Kindles long after they’ve been replace. That means the cool new features like Goodreads integration and Freetime (for kids) aren’t affecting my decision.

P.P.S. It is very nice. But do you know what would make it better? A 6.8″ screen.

Rumors have been circulating for well over a year now that Amazon is working on a smartphone. I’m not sure how many of the rumors true or even vaguely accurate but I do think that even the untrue rumors are circling around a real product.

Yes, I think Amazon is working on a smartphone.

This topic came to my attention today as a result of new rumors posted by Techcrunch. They say they found and verified an anonymous Hacker News post from some Amazon insider. I’m still not convinced that the technical details are real, but they’re saying that:

Amazon is planning two devices, the first of which is the previously rumored ‘expensive’ version with a 3D user interface, eye tracking and more. Both devices were under the ‘Project B’ moniker before the news was leaked on WSJ earlier this year. The expensive model’s code-name has since been changed to ‘Duke’ and now ‘Smith’ — and a release is not planned this year.

…

The ‘Smith’ project includes a device that sounds like a bit of a hardware beast. The screen itself is not 3D but the device features four cameras, one at each corner of the device that will be used to track eye and head motions in order to move the interface around to ‘give the impression’ of 3D. Instead of using the phone’s internal sensors, like Apple does with iOS 7, it would base the movements off of the user’s point of view. Theoretically, this will provide a more accurate 3D representation of the screen’s contents.

The Smith smartphone sounds like the hardware is so complicated that it might never see the light of day. And if that doesn’t kill it, the anonymous Hacker News source says that the development team has been having problems with retaining staff:

They wanted to have it launched already but had difficulties with both software and hardware, and then lots of key players left the company – a common problem at Amazon is retention, having the lowest record of any tech company.

But even if that smartphone never sees the light of day I still think we’ll see a Kindle smartphone. That’s what the original anonymous source says and I believe it.

My belief in a Kindle smartphone stems not from rumors but from 2 widely available facts:

1. Amazon sees their gadgets as a means to sell more stuff, and
2. More and more stuff is being bought from smartphones than ever before.

Tell me, have you ever read an interview of Jeff Bezos? One thing you’ll find in almost every interview is a statement along the lines of:

Bezos said Amazon does not make money on the devices themselves, but the company does hope they will usher users toward Amazon’s main business: creating and delivering digital content, like Kindle e-books, movies, TV shows, and music.

"We think we’re better aligned with our customers if we make money when people use our devices, not when they buy them," he said. (source)

That’s been Amazon’s policy ever since they dropped the price of the Kindle in mid-2010, though I don’t know for sure that it was an expressed policy until the Kindle Fire launched in late 2011.

And when you combine that policy with the latest news about mobile purchases the conclusion is obvious:

Mobile transactions on Adyen’s third-party payment platform grew 27 percent from May to August, as the Amsterdam-based company reported that such transactions now account for 17.5 percent of all worldwide digital purchases processed via its global payment solution.

Worldwide purchases originating on mobile devices represented just 13.8 percent of all digital purchases on the Adyen platform at the end April, the company said.

Amazon is working on a smartphone. In fact, I’m kinda surprised that we haven’t seen one already.

After all, it wouldn’t take much effort for Amazon to license a smartphone design and slap their logo on it. It might not work too well, but that didn’t stop the Kindle Fire, did it? Furthermore, Qualcomm is on good terms with Amazon and they are used to licensing their smartphone designs to hardware companies. I’m sure they would be happy to help Amazon build a decent cheap smartphone.

And yes, I know that in the past I have denied or disbelieved the rumors. That was before I knew for sure that Amazon could make money by selling stuff via the smartphone. It was the piece of the puzzle that was missing.

I half expected to see a Kindle smartphone at last year’s launch event, but was disappointed. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason why I expected to see it but now I think I know.

It just makes too much sense.

Sainsbury’s, a UK grocery store chain, made their interest in ebooks clear in June of last year when they bought a controlling interest in the social ebookstore Anobii, and today they started making their presence felt.

They’ve just launched a 99p ebook sale. It’s not quite as ambitious as the book price war that Overstock launched here in the US a couple months ago but it should still draw in prospective customers.

Over 100 popular titles in a variety of genres are included in the sale, which will go on until the end of the month. It will consist of a mix of 1-day specials and month-long offers. Some titles, including The Racketeer and several other ebooks by John Grisham, will only be offered as a 1-day sale.

Based on today’s offering (12 mystery and suspense titles) I think Sainsbury’s might be planning to focus on particular genres for each of the one day sales.

Sainsbury’s bought Anobii in June 2012 but it wasn’t until Jan 2013 that they renamed Anobii’s ebookstore to eBooks by Sainsbury’s. The acquisition and rebranding was a smart move on their part because it offers Sainsbury’s a shot at earning a better return on ebook sales than WHSmith or Waterstones, 2 UK bookstore chains that partnered with Kobo and Kindle, respectively. Those chains are earning an affiliate commission, while Sainsbury’s has the potential to earn up to 30% or more of an ebook’s sale price.

Along with Tesco, this is one of the ebookstores to watch in the UK market, IMO.

The Bookseller

Scribd has come along way since they launched as a document storage site in 2007. First they added better anti-piracy measures, then they launched a content marketplace in 2009, and today they launched an ebook subscription service.

Scribd’s new ebook subscription service costs $8.99 a month and promises to offer a selection of ebooks from a number of publishers, including HarperCollins, E-Reads, Kensington, Red Wheel/Weiser, Rosetta Books, Sourcebooks, and Workman.

That’s not quite as broad of a selection as the recently launched Oyster (HMH isn’t mentioned, for example), but Scribd is charging less and they’re offering better platform support. While Oyster is only available on the iPhone, Scribd has apps for for Android, iPhone, iPad, and (if press reports are correct) you can read the ebooks in your web browser.

That’s great news for me; I loved Oyster but like a lot of its detractors I don’t own an iPhone and abandoned the service for that reason alone. I can’t wait to try Scribd. I have not yet had a chance to do so, and I plan to head over today and start my free trial.

Scribd’s service is reportedly available globally, though it’s not clear how many titles will be available internationally or even in the US. A global launch was a smart move for Scribd; it let Scribd benefit from their existing userbase.

Scribd boasts that they have amassed more than 80 million active users in 100 countries and 80 languages worldwide who have built up a global library of more than 40 million books and documents. The existing users give Scribd an advantage that makes them potentially a first-tier competitor in the ebook market.

Further Reading:

• The New Scribd (The Scribd Blog)
• Scribd Launches E-book Subscription Service (PW)
• Here comes another ‘Netflix for books,’ this time from Scribd (PandoDaily)
• With HarperCollins Deal, Scribd Unveils Its Bid To Become The Netflix For Books (TechCrunch)
• Scribd launches digital book subscription service (CNET Reviews)

ComiXology maintained their position as the leading digital comics platform last week when they reached a new milestone. According to Crain’s NY, the iTunes of comics passed 200 million downloads.

ComiXology got its start in 2007 not in digital comics, but in proving technical services to comic bookstores and fans. The first comiXology reading app didn’t launch until July 2009. It took just over 3 years to reach 100 million comics downloaded (October 2012) and just short of a year to double that figure.

 ComiXology grew out of Mr. Steinberger’s love of comic books and the enormous collection he told his wife he would finally sell. A Juilliard graduate enrolled in NYU’s Stern School of Business at the time, he decided first to catalog the copies, and found there was no software available to help him.

Comics' disconnect with technology struck him as a business opportunity. He and two fellow M.B.A. students put together a proposal that won a Stern School business-plan competition in 2007.

ComiXology soon launched as a website that kept readers abreast of new releases and forged relationships with publishers, such as Manhattan-based giants DC Comics and Marvel, that would come in handy when it rolled out its iPhone e-reading application in 2009.

ComiXology was not the only digital comics reading app on the market when it launched in 2009 (nor are they alone in the market now). There were other comics apps for the iPhone with similar features, and other companies were experimenting on other platforms. Sony, for example, launched a digital comic app in late 2009 for the Sony PSP.

But comiXology came out on top, and that can probably be attributed to their relationships with comic book publishers. The 6 year old company now dominates a market and offers a catalog with more than 40,000 titles, including a number of exclusives. Marvel, for example, is under contract to distribute their single issue comics only through comiXology.

The Ukrainian ereader and tablet maker Pocketbook announced yesterday that they will soon be copying one of the Kindle’s more clever features.

They’re calling it Send-to-Pocketbook, and it is going to be available starting in October. According to Pocketbook:

The feature will allow users to send documents to their PocketBook eReaders as an email attachment. The documents will be downloaded to the device over Wi-Fi.

Send-to-Pocketook supports a large number of formats such as PUB DRM, EPUB, PDF DRM, PDF, FB2, FB2.ZIP, TXT, DJVU, HTM, HTML, DOC, DOCX, RTF, CHM, TCR, PRC (MOBI), JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF.

The service will also include security features such as “White List”, which is a list of e-mail addresses from which the eReader will receive documents to avoid spam mails.

When Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007 their automated email conversion service was one of the many useful and clever features that helped the $400 ereader succeed. It saved inexperienced users from having to bother with converting documents and transferring them to a Kindle. It made the Kindle easier to use for the non-tech-savvy and is a feature that I am frankly surprised that (almost) no one else copied.

I say almost because a number of smaller ebookstores added a Kindle-centric email delivery option for DRM-free ebooks. Fictionwise, for example, added it in late 2007, and Baen also supports a similar delivery option. Also, Smashwords just announced a beta-test for a send to Kindle/Dropbox service.

And Pocketbook’s service isn’t quite a copy; they won’t convert to or from any formats. But that’s okay because their ereaders already supported enough formats that conversion is not required.

In fact, I like the fact that Pocketbook doesn’t convert the content to Epub; the main reason I stopped using the Kindle’s automated conversion service was that it kept converting a Kindle ebook to a Kindle ebook and mucking up the formatting. This is immensely annoying when you are sending a carefully crafted ebook.

The Pocketbook Touch Lux will be the first device to get the new feature. Pocketbook will release an update for the Touch Lux in October, and other Touch ereaders will receive similar updates in the coming months.

Pocketbook has indicated that their Touch ereaders will be getting this update; I do not yet have any info about their other models.

The-eBook.org