Nate Hoffelder

There’s a survey circulating today that reportedly shows that ebooks aren’t nearly as popular as the latest market data would make you think. While some might report that this is a sign that ebooks were overhyped, I’m not so sure this story deserves any attention.

According to a new survey from Rasmussen Reports which was conducted this month, 75 percent of Americans still prefer paper books over ebooks. A mere 15% of the 1,000 respondents to the poll indicated that they liked ebooks over paper books, with about 10% remaining undecided.

That sounds like terrible news for ebook advocates such as myself, and it sounds like potentially the death knell for digital publishing, right?

Well, no. Take a moment and look at how the conclusion is phrased:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of American Adults would rather read a book in a traditional print format than on an electronic book-reading device like a Kindle. Fifteen percent (15%) prefer reading on an electronic device. Ten percent (10%) are undecided.

Do you see how it doesn’t say readers or book buyers? That could be an important detail. While I don’t have many specific details about the Rasmussen survey (it’s behind a paywall) I do know that there is readily available survey data that shows that the average book buyer likes ebooks.

BISG released a survey report back in April that showed a significant increase in preference among readers of ebooks for tablets over ereaders. That report also revealed that:

About 82 percent of Power Buyers (consumers who acquire e-books on a weekly basis) say they prefer e-books over print and nearly 70 percent of Non-Power Buyers say they now prefer e- over print.

You’re not supposed to apply any extensive cross analysis of data from different surveys (not without knowing more about the methodology), but it’s safe to point out that the data sets contradict each other and consider why.

If three-quarters of an undefined survey group likes paper but a majority of the actual customer base likes digital, what are the chances that most of that 75% don’t buy very many books in the first place?

I’d say it’s pretty good.

I would tend to think that the buyers are the only ones worth paying attention to, but given the extensive coverage the Rasmussen survey is going to get these next few day I might be the only blogger who figured that out.

Rasmussen Reports

P.S. If someone has access to the data behind the paywall, please let me know if that 75% reflects readers, book buyers, or the general population.  I would really like to know.

image by Roberto_Ventre, bfishadow

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has a new report out this week on the buying, non-buying, and reading habits of US college students. I only have the press release and not the full report (it costs $$$$), but if the report matches the driblets of info in the press release then I would be trying to exit the college textbook market right now.

According to the BISG, piracy (including photocopying of textbooks) is up among college students. A larger percentage of the survey group reported downloading pirated course content from an unauthorized Web site than in previous surveys. 34% of respondents indicated that they’d done this, from 20 percent when this was first measured in 2010. And just to make things even more interesting, the percentage of students saying they photocopied or scanned chapters of textbooks belonging to other students rose to 31% in this survey (from 21% in 2010).

Update: A friend passed me a few more details, and now I can tell you that this report indicates that faculty are seeing a decrease in adoption of core digital textbooks (30% in Feb 2012 to 16% in June 2013). I can also tell you that piracy has been trending upwards since at least November 2011, with the latest data from March 2013 showing an increase use of unauthorized websites (40%), scanning (37%), illicit sharing between students (28%), and outright piracy (26%).

I would think that the cause of the increase in piracy is obvious, but before I spell it out let me share with you the BISG’s explanation:

"This is important behavior to track, especially since it’s coinciding with other data that show declining student commitment to owning current editions of assigned texts," said Len Vlahos, Executive Director, BISG.

Yeah, that’s not what we’re seeing here.

Students are pirating more textbooks because they can’t afford to buy them. (Do you think they would go through the hassle of photocopying a textbook if they had another choice?) This is part of the reason why digital textbook purchases lag behind digital adoption.

Prices continue to go up every year in the core titles. This is one of the dirty little secrets in textbook publishing, according to one of my industry contacts:

Big pubs averaged approx. double digit price increases on active titles in the last 12 months. By the way, this is one of the publisher tricks when talking about pricing. They may say that their prices are flat or have only increased slightly, but they are including average prices of all books, front and back list, and they often discount or don’t raise prices on the majority of titles. But active titles – big sellers and gen Ed books that represent 80% for revenue – continue to see aggressive price increases.

If I were in textbook publishing I would be getting out of it right now. Thanks to the major textbook publishers, the college textbook market is in a bubble. This is a trend that has been going on for over a decade now as textbook prices rose faster than the CPI, faster than the housing bubble, and even faster than healthcare:

That is not a sustainable trend. And so long as prices continue to increase, the various efforts to encourage adoption of digital textbooks (like the volume license pilot programs of this past school year) will slowly meet with greater and greater resistance as students realize they cannot afford to participate.

Textbook publishers are pushing more and more into digital textbooks and digital textbook rentals. They’re doing it for the obvious reason; there’s no used digital market so there’s no competition from former customers selling off old books.

But as you can see from the survey data earlier in this post, students can’t afford to prop up an unhealthy industry. Instead they are finding other sources, including piracy.

image by allaboutuni2307

The AAP has put out a new press release today with some tidbits on the the state of the US book market. The data is drawn from the StatShot report, and while I don’t have all the stats available but what I do have is a little startling.

Update: If you came to this post via one of the articles which argued ebook sales are flattening, don’t believe it. That conclusion is wrong, and I can prove it.

The AAP is reporting that the 1192 publishers which submit their sales data to the AAP did not see a significant increase in the ebook market in the first quarter of this year. Sales of adult ebooks increased by 13%, but children’s ebooks dropped by 30% (religious ebooks held steady).

The overall ebook market grew from $374.8 million to $393.6 million, or about 5%. That is far below the growth reported in previous years, but it is still good news. The AAP also reported the total reported book sales dropped by 4.7% (from $1.5 billion to $1.4 billion) thanks to a severe drop in the children’s and YA segment (24.6%).

In that context the 5% growth is not bad. Audiobooks also increased by 14% ($24.8 million to $28.3 million), so there is some good news.

In spite of the spectacular growth of ebooks in 2008 to 2011, we all know that eventually the ride would come to a stop as the growth of ebook market share slowed. TBH I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.

Of course, these statistics only represent publishers sending their data to the AAP and not the entirety of the US ebook market. One can still hope that indie pub saw better growth than this.

For those who are interested, here is the data:

image by historygradguy

It’s only been a couple days since E-ink disentangled themselves from the infringement lawsuit filed by the patent troll Copytele, and it looks like E-ink is back in the thick of it again.

A new lawsuit has just been filed by Research Frontiers. This is a publicly traded research firm based in Woodbury NY, and they are claiming that E-ink’s screen tech infringes upon a couple patents owned by Research Frontiers:

In this lawsuit, Research Frontiers asserts infringement by the named defendants of United States Patent No. 6,606,185, entitled “SPD Films and Light Valves Comprising Liquid Suspensions of Heat-Reflective Particles of Mixed Metal Oxides and Methods of Making Such Particles,” and United States Patent No. 5,463,491, entitled “Light Valve Employing a Film Comprising an Encapsulated Liquid Suspension, and Method of Making Such Film.”

You can find the patents here and here. I skimmed the filings, and the technical details describe a technology that is so different from what I know of E-ink’s screen tech that  it’s not clear to me how E-ink’s  screen tech infringes (or even if the tech infringes at all).

Other details are easier to explain, though. For example, E-ink’s customers are being sued for contributory infringement (definition).  This lawsuit is based on the theory that Amazon, B&N, and Sony bought screens from E-ink knowing that the screens infringed on the patents.

Or at least that is what Research Frontiers would have you believe; this also has the appearance of a troll going after the deepest pockets. (Why Rakuten/Kobo was left out, I do not know. Perhaps they settled.)

E-ink reported revenues of close to 900 million USD last year, with a gross profit of around 93 million USD (according to Bloomberg). The revenue is down from a peak of 1.3 billion USD in 2011.

I unfortunately don’t have any first hand knowledge of whether this lawsuit has any merit, so at this point I will invite comment from anyone in the screen tech industry.

But one detail I can provide is that this lawsuit isn’t as newsworthy as it might appear. This type of lawsuit is so common in tech that it is almost background noise for the major tech companies like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. Check out the 10-k filings for those companies and you’ll find boilerplate mentions of being sued for patent infringement. In fact, this is so common that I think Amazon is the only one that even lists the ongoing lawsuits any more.

image by saschapohflepp

E-Ink.info

It looks like ereader adoption might be about to take off in Germany. A new report is out this week that suggests one in twenty Germans own an ereader.

According to a survey conducted for the Allensbacher Markt- und Werbeträgeranalyse 2013 report (AWA 2013), 5.2% of Germans over the age of 14 now own an ereader. The survey also showed that another 3.5 were considering buying an ereader, and that 6% of respondents indicated that they had bought an ebook in the previous year.

These questions were asked as part of a general survey into consumer buying habits, and it also showed that 7.4% of respondents had bought an audiobook in the past 12 months. Yes, audiobooks are more popular in Germany than ebooks, a trend which is the inverse of  the US market. Nearly 3 out of 5 respondents had purchased a book in the past 12 months, and about about 1 in 6 read books every day. Another 21% read books several times a week.

This 5% adoption rate places Germany far behind the US, where (at last count) 26% of US consumers owned an ereader. But it also puts ereader adoption in Germany far ahead of France, where according to the latest data GfK estimates that approximately 500,000 ereaders are currently in use.

Alles eBook

image by jepoirrier

It’s a sad day in the blogosphere. The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog that used to be known for the merit and quality of their posts, joined in the Amazon bashing earlier today.

There’s a new blog post on TSK today that claims, using poorly researched, poorly reasoned, and factually incorrect arguments that the Apple Ebook Ruling is a Loss for Publishers, Authors, and Readers.

I have gotten several requests on Twitter to debunk this post, which I am more than happy to do.

Let’s start in the third paragraph:

Amazon (who is at the crux of this story) sells ebooks under the wholesale model. This means that they can set prices as they wish, usually at $9.99. They can sell the title for $9.99 even if their agreement with the publisher stipulates that they must pay the publisher a royalty of more than $9.99.

Yeah, that’s simply not true nor has it ever been true. Repeating an urban legend doesn’t make it any less false.

Meaning, Amazon chooses to lose money on many of the books it sells, a fact documented in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) suit (see page 17 of the ruling).

What the blogger fails to mention is that the ruling mentioned also notes that Amazon also consistently made a profit on ebooks. See my post on loss leaders for quote and a link.

Here is the catch. Some books are niche titles, such as those published by university presses or other independents. They don’t sell enough copies to recoup their costs at $9.99.

Except that Amazon has never sold niche titles at $10. Also, even if Amazon had sold them that cheaply under the wholesale model the publishers would have recouped their cost while Amazon lost money.

Other books, such as those by bestselling authors sold by larger publishers, can command high prices that are needed to offset the losses such publishers incur on other titles. This is why different books have historically had different prices and why niche titles and blockbusters (at least when the first come out) often cost more.

Which is why Amazon sells a few ebooks for $10 and others for more than $10. Don’t believe me? Go check; I’ll wait.

But because Amazon chooses to sell an ebook at $9.99 (or whatever price they like), the ebook can’t be sold anywhere else for more.

Yeah, that’s simply not true. See my takedown of the Salon piece from last week for a detailed explanation.

Who is going to buy the ebook for $19.99 via the publisher’s site or Barnes & Noble or anywhere else when they can get it via Amazon for $9.99?

Answer: People who don’t have a Kindle or people who already buy most of their ebooks elsewhere by intelligently taking advantage of sales (Amazon doesn’t always have the lowest price).

Amazon is selling the book below cost to forestall competition in ebook distribution.

If that were Amazon’s goal then it was an utter failure. See my post on loss leaders for an explanation.

Jobs therefore knew this game well and knew he had no hope of competing against Amazon in ebook distribution as things stood without touching off a price war and losing money on every sale (which he could have afforded to do but that just isn’t how Jobs rolled). Jobs needed to change the playing field.

Nope. Apple didn’t have to have an ebookstore.

The thing about Apple is that they don’t care if they sell much content via iBooks and iTunes. When it comes to mobile, Apple makes most of their money selling iThings, not the content consumed on them. I’m surprised how many people forget that.

Five of the so-called “Big Six” trade publishers (Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) agreed to Apple’s terms (Random House was the only large publisher who did not participate at the time of the iPad’s launch). The publishers then went back to Amazon and used the deal with Apple, and the hype around the new iPad, to pressure Amazon into accepting an agency model on the same terms as Apple, ceding more pricing control to publishers (and the free market).

The bold section contradicts itself by confusing basic concepts of economics. Let me explain using terms from Economics 101:

When publishers order sellers to set prices we have a command market, not a market where sellers are free to set their own prices.

This, says Judge Cote (page 9), constituted a “conspiracy” to raise prices.

The conspiracy comes in when Apple and the 5 publishers were discussing each other’s negotiations (see the email records). That makes this less 5 publishers in negotiation with Apple and more a collaboration between 6 parties.

To put it simply, a bunch of competitors were jointly discussing how they might all set the same market prices. How is that not an anti-trust violation? It sure as hell looks like one.

Due to browbeating by the Department of Justice and fear of a protracted suit and punitive fines, all five publishers settled out of court and agreed to reinstate the wholesale model with Amazon for at least two years. …

What this means is that anyone wishing to enter the ebook distribution space will face an ebook pricing war against an entrenched competitor that is willing to sell at a loss, propped up by a seemingly limitless supply of cash from investors who do not seem to care about margins so long as market share is growing.

It’s been some 10 months since the first agency ebooks went wholesale. When is that ebook pricing war supposed to start, exactly?

It didn’t start that day, that’s for sure. Ask anyone and they will tell you it hasn’t started yet. In fact, Penguin ebooks went off agency today, and Amazon isn’t offering many huge discounts.

Guess what? Amazon doesn’t even have the lowest prices. Jeff Bezos must be some kind of genius if he’s going to win an ebook pricing war with higher prices.

Update: I’ve just done my own spot check and Amazon almost always had the lowest price. Only a few of the discounts are more than 10% to 15%, though, and many titles are priced above $10.

The result is likely to be an ebook market (at least in trade publishing – professional and scholarly publishing is a different matter) with little innovation – why would anyone bother? Not only must a new entrant invest in new technology, negotiate complex, multi-national rights agreements with publishers, and market their new product to consumers, they must then slog it out in a price war.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the possibility of innovation from anyone other than traditional retail channels.

Never mind alternative business models like rentals; this argument fails to factor in the ebookstores that have been launching in the past year or so that are based on novel book discovery concepts. If that’s not innovation then I don’t know what that word means.

In case anyone thinks that this is overstating the bleakness of the situation, I direct you to the recent departure of Barnes & Noble’s CEO, William Lynch, a former Palm executive who was brought into the company to grow their reader business, in what Reuters called “an acknowledgement that its digital division Nook has failed to compete successfully in the e-reader and tablet markets“. Furthermore, after reporting that Nook sales dropped 34%  last quarter, the company announced it was pulling the plug on its hardware division.

The problem with pretending that B&N’s troubles are all the fault of Amazon is that the Nook was a troubled platform a year ago – you know, when agency pricing was supposed to protect everyone from evil Amazon.

Do you think there’s a chance B&N might be to blame for B&N’s troubles?

This view of Amazon’s strategy is shared by publishers as evidenced by the recent Penguin/Random House merger, completed just last week, which reduces the Big Six to the Big Five. The primary motivation for the merger is reportedly to establish a publishing house with enough size to have leverage with Amazon. More mergers may be yet to follow. And while such consolidation may indeed improve the publishing industry’s leverage with Amazon, there are consequences for readers as Boris Kachka observes in an op-ed in the New York Times. These may include lower bids on author manuscripts, few options for authors, more homogenized titles (you think there are too many vampire novels now), and a even greater focus on genres and blockbusters.

Bigger conglomerates mean more overhead thus reducing what can be spent to actually acquire new manuscripts, and it’s all Amazon’s fault.

Yep. Amazon held a gun to the heads of Penguin and Random House and forced them to merge.

—

The piece goes on to repeat itself in the conclusion, but I see no reason to refute it again. There’s absolutely nothing of merit here.

So Apple finally lost the price fixing lawsuit today, an event that surprised almost no one. What with Apple’s 5 co-conspirators having already settled, a settlement already in place in Europe, and the solid case presented by the DOJ, there was little chance that Apple was going to win.

But there is one question that seems to still be circulating today. A lot of people, including one in my comment section, wonder why Amazon was not on trial today. After all, Amazon’s pricing policy is clear evidence (in some minds, at least) of their nefarious plans to destroy their competition.

Today I thought I would take some time and point out the difference between what Amazon’s actual pricing policies and what many assume to be those policies.

First, a couple definitions.

Loss Leader

• A loss leader, or simply a leader, is a product sold at a low price, at or below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services. Using a loss leader, often a very popular good or service, is a type of sales promotion—a marketing strategy that focuses on pricing strategy.

Predatory Pricing

• The practice of selling a product at low prices in order to drive competitors out, discipline them, weaken them for possible mergers, and/or to prevent firms from entering the market. It is an expensive strategy. In the United States there is no legal (statutory) definition of predatory pricing, but pricing below marginal cost (the Areeda-Turner test) has been used by the Supreme Court in 1993 as a criterion for pricing that is predatory.

The thing is, many people are pointing at Amazon offering loss leaders and proclaiming that Amazon is engaging in predatory pricing. I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard or read that Amazon is trying to drive their competition out of the ebook market, with the subsequent goal of raising ebook prices.

There are several problems with that claim, the first of which is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the allegation. In fact, if this really were Amazon’s goal then for the past 5 plus years they failed utterly to accomplish it.

Rather than see competitors abandon the ebook market, we have seen many, many companies get into ebooks since Amazon launched the Kindle Store in November 2007. Amazon has largely pursued the same ebook pricing policy since they opened the Kindle Store (with the exclusion of agency ebooks), but in spite of Amazon’s predations they now have more competitors than before, including:

• B&N
• Kobo
• Google
• Samsung
• Apple
• Baker & Taylor

Update: A reader reminded me that Samsung, Sony, Apple, and Google are not in the ebook market to make money from ebooks but to support their other businesses. I have said that before, but I’m bringing it up again because these are competitors that Amazon won’t be able to drive out of the ebook market. Here is why.

Another issue with the claim that Amazon is engaging in predatory pricing is that Amazon is continuing to pass up an opportunity to sell Epub ebooks. Surely if Amazon wanted to drive out the competition then they would pursue the potential customers that own non-Kindle ereaders, right?

Funny how that hasn’t happened in the 3 years since Amazon stopped trying to turn a profit on hardware, isn’t it?

But never mind the evidence of your own eyes; let’s instead look at what the Dept of Justice concluded after investigating Amazon, Apple, and the price fixing conspiracy.

As you might recall, last September Judge Cote issued a ruling that signed off on the proposed settlement between 3 of the conspiring publishers and the DOJ. In that ruling (PDF) Judge Cote dismissed the many claims made by publishers and others that Amazon was engaging in predatory pricing:

Second, the Complaint asserts that Amazon’s e-books business was “consistently profitable.” Moreover, to hold a competitor liable for predatory pricing under the Sherman Act, one must prove more than simply pricing “below an appropriate measure of . . . costs.” There must also be a “dangerous probability” that the alleged predator will “recoup its investment in below-cost prices” in the future. None of the comments demonstrate that either condition for predatory pricing by Amazon existed or will likely exist. Indeed, while the comments complain that Amazon’s $9.99 price for newly-released and bestselling e-books was “predatory,” none of them attempts to show that Amazon’s e-book prices as a whole were below its marginal costs.

The tl;dr version is that Amazon has always made at least some money on ebooks, and that means there’s no proof that Amazon’s pricing policies meet the definition of predatory.

And that, my dear, is the short answer for why Amazon isn’t on trial.

image by edenpictures

Another news reader service showed up in my inbox a few days ago and there is much to like.

Silver Reader didn’t quite make it out the door before the Readerpocalypse, but it’s still worth a look.

This service is the work of a team of eastern European developers, and they are pitching it as being faster than the late, great Google Reader. I’ve been using it this morning and I have to agree. It is fast, and aside from a few hiccoughs Silver Reader was more than able to handle my excessively large number of RSS feeds.

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Click here for more Google Reader alternatives.
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This service eschews the common white back ground in favor of slightly more colorful theme:

Even though the background isn’t white, the text is still readable, IMO, though I think lightening the background might help improve readability.

As you can see in the screen shots above and below, Silver Reader offers a standard layout of feeds and folders on the left and posts on the right. It currently offers just a couple viewing modes (list view and full blog posts), and of course in the list view you can open and read one post at a time.

The content from an article is displayed in line with the list of posts, and not as a separate pop up window:

This service is still new, but it launched with the necessary sort options: sort by oldest/newest. It can also hide already read posts, but unfortunately it cannot do the same for folders and feeds in the left panel.

You can log in with Facebook, Google, or you can create a local account. I logged in with my Google Account, but was unable to import my Google Reader data. I ended up having to import the list of feeds manually. On a related note, Silver Reader can also export the feeds you follow as an industry standard OPML file, thus resolving one concern shared by many ex-GR users.

Silver Reader is a freemium service, and while there will always be a free service the developers have said that they plan to offer a subscription service with more features. Other future plans include fixing bugs, improving the responsiveness of the web browser version of Silver Reader so it runs better on mobile devices, and adding features.  The developers have been quite busy with working on Silver Reader, and I can see from their blog that they rolled out an update today.

This service is currently limited to only working in the web browser, but plans for native Android, iOS, and Windows apps are in the works.

Silver Reader

Silver Reader blog

Goodreads released a new infographic yesterday that answers the age old question that hounds authors everywhere: Why didn’t readers finish my book?

Everyone who has ever read more than one book has abandoned a book before finishing it, for one reason or another. And in this day and age, many readers go to Goodreads to explain why they gave up on a book.

Goodreads has combed through the reviews, posts, and comments left by readers and pulled out some useful details, including the top 5 most abandoned books, the top 5 most abandoned classics, and other details including the leading reasons why a book was abandoned and how far readers got before giving up.

I was surprised to learn that I had abandoned 2 of titles on the Top 5 Abandoned Classics List; the only which I have tried and finished was Atlas Shrugged. (Funny, I thought that was an easy read.)

Goodreads

When I showed you last week that you could download a copy of everything you’d ever seen in Google Reader, I didn’t think there could be anything better than having a huge volume of old data to sift through.

Yesterday I found out I was wrong.

Mihai Parparita, the developer who originally gave us the tools to download a personal Google Reader archive, is back again with an even better trick. He downloaded and modified a copy of the Google Reader website (the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) so it can be used to browse your archive of Google Reader data.

As you can see from this screenshot, it looks just like the real thing:

Mihai explained more in his blog post:

A side effect is that I now have a self-contained Reader installation that I’ll be able to refer to years from now, when my son asks me how I spent my mid-20s. It also satisfies my own nostalgia kicks, like knowing what my first read item was. In theory I could also use this approach to build a proxy that exposes Reader’s API backed by (say) NewsBlur’s, and thus keep using the Reader UI to read current feeds. Beyond the technical issues (e.g. impedance mismatches, since NewsBlur doesn’t store read or starred state as tags, or has per item tags in general) that seems like an overly backwards-facing option. NewsBlur has its own distinguishing features (e.g. training and "focus" mode)², and forcing it into a semi-functional Reader UI would result in something that is worse than either product.

Zombie Reader can be downloaded from Mihai’s website, readerisdead.com.

Just to be clear, it cannot be used to browse any current news reader service, and that is probably a good thing. As much as I liked the Google Reader service, I have to admit that the website design needed work. It was not the best tool for reading content, and the overall design needed a little polish. I can only recall Google making a single change to the Google Reader design, and that was when they uglified it so it would look more like Google+.

Persistent.info

If you were thinking about getting one of txtr’s beleaguered 5″ beagle ereader, now might be your chance.

The German ereader maker txtr is sending out emails this morning, touting a summer sale. For a limited time you can buy a txtr beagle for only 20 euros. That is two-thirds off the regular retail, finally making this ereader the cheapest on the market.

Txtr is also throwing in an alternate back plate as well as a couple free ebooks, but the deal is only available in Germany from txtr.

This device was launched in October 2012, but has only seen marginal market success. Txtr had originally planned to sell it via telecoms, where it would be bundled into new service contracts and sold to consumers with a subsidized price tag of 10 euros. Unfortunately for txtr it seems that no telecom has been interested in buying the beagle and then selling it as a subsidized device.

I’m not really surprised; the beagle is so limited in functions and ability that the telecoms and the potential end users probably found it as unappealing as I did.

The beagle has a 5″ E-ink screen, 4GB of storage, and Bluetooth (but not Wifi or USB). This so-called ereader is better termed as a smartphone accessory because it cannot load ebooks without one. The beagle requires a relatively new Android device (smartphone or tablet) which is capable of running txtr’s reading app. Why Android? Because (according to their website) txtr has not released updated any of their other apps to include support for the beagle.

Still, the beagle is on sale in Germany for only 20 euros. That puts it far below the current prices for the Trekstor Pyrus Mini, which costs 49 euros. The beagle sale price is also far less than the price of the Kobo Mini, which is selling for 59 euros at the moment.

Update: A German ebook blogger has pointed out that both of these ereaders are on sale in Germany:

TrekStor Pyrus Mini (aka eBook Reader 4Ink) is on sale at Thalia for 35 Euros, Kobo Mini on sale at Saturn for 29 Euros.

I think we now know why the beagle went on sale, don’t you? Clearly its more capable competition are putting pressure on it by offering better prices.

txtr

Thanks, Chalid!

The Internet Archive is one of the largest repositories of free information online, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized just how large their operations really were.

Robert Miller, the Global Director for eBooks at the Internet Archive, sent out an email yesterday to IA sponsors, partners, and content contributors with all sorts of  new stats on the IA.

This email (I have embedded excerpts at the end of the post) reveals that the IA now sees 15 million ebook downloads each month. That’s far higher than the 4.3 million downloads reported by Project Gutenberg.

IA is also now hosting 4.4 million ebooks, along with millions of other works. In comparison, the IA collection is much larger than Project Gutenberg’s 42 thousand title catalog, but also much smaller than the 30 million titles that Google Books is said to have scanned. (That last figure is unsubstantiated and includes ebooks which cannot be freely downloaded, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.)

That 4.4 million collection represents books scanned by the IA and partners, of which about 2 million were scanned by the IA. Starting with just a single location in 2004, the IA has expanded to include scanning operations in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. They now scan books at 33 locations, and they plan to expand into South Africa inside of 6 months.

Dear Archive Sponsors, Content Contributors and Partners,

We are at the mid-year point in 2013. I wanted to share  with you some “news you can use” about several milestones we will soon be reaching, a few changes in our pricing structure and plans for the remainder of the year. Please feel free to distribute this email to the appropriate people on your teams or the libraries you represent.

First, thank you for your continued support of the Internet Archive. We, together, have collectively built the largest, free, public digital lending library in the world. Yippee to all of us!

Milestone –
In about 3 weeks, we will reach the 2 millionth eBook that we have scanned! This is a testament to the commitment and support from all of you.

We are also closing in our 1,000 partner!!

Thank you again! (and please don’t stop scanning!)

Use/Downloads  –
For the past 6 months we have a consistent 15 million digital loans/ per month  of all the eBooks we have on line. That is 350 books every minute being checked out! This number continues to grow each month.

Public domain and modern books –
Overall, we now have 4.4 million eBooks online (Archive.org), the difference of 4.4 and 2.0 million is  from uploads of items digitized elsewhere. We also have 500,000 modern eBooks for the print disabled and 250,000 modern eBooks (OpenLibrary.org). Our next goal is to reach 10 million public domain and modern eBooks on line. We are looking for partners that wish to fund more modern books to grow our contemporary global library. By working together, I am confident we will reach this goal in the near future.

…

Plans going forward –
1. Where are we scanning? We continue to expand our scanning footprint and are now on 4 continents ( North/South America, Europe and Asia.) and 33 locations. We hope to be in South Africa in the next 6 months, which will give us a 5th continent. Help us get to Australia and New Zealand! Antarctica….?

No Shelf Required

eBooks might be seeing immense popularity in US and UK but they’re not having the same luck in France. There’s a new report out this week that shows that ebooks are still a negligible part of the french book market.

According to the latest report from the Syndical national de l’édition (SNE), ebook market share rose from 1% in 2011 to 3% this year. That is a rather small percentage when compared to the US (21.67% for 2012), or even the UK (10% ish for 2012), but still higher than the most recent estimates for Germany (2.4% for 2012).

The report also noted that the latest estimates from the market research GfK suggest that 15 mullion smartphones will be in use in France by the end of 2013, along with 5 million tablets and half a million ereaders.

Yes, only 500,000 ereaders. While this might end up being one of the factors that hold back the ebook market in France, there is also a chance that France could be one of the markets that completely bypasses the ereader ownership stage that the US passed through. I have been suggesting this possibility since February of this year but TBH there’s been no evidence yet that this has happened anywhere.

And I’m not sure France has enough devices to spark a rise in ebook sales. Nevermind the 500,000 ereaders; the 5 million tablets and 15 million smartphones represents a small percentage of metropolitan France’s adult population, which is currently estimated to be roughly 48 million. In comparison the latest figures from the Pew Research Center indicate that 56% of American adults own a smartphone, 34% own a tablet, and 26% own an ereader.

But in spite of the limited market success of ebooks and the limited number of potential reading devices, the report is highly optimistic about the future possibilities. My source indicates that the report cites a number of positive trends, including a growing interest in France ereaders and ebooks.

L’Express

image by Luigi Rosa

The Kindle is widely regarded as being responsible for igniting the ebook era, but the idea had been around for at least 30 years before the Kindle launched in November 2007. There were a number of marginally successful ereaders and ebook platforms before the Kindle, including the Sony Data Discman, Rocket eBook, and there was even a joint B&N-Microsoft effort during the late 90s tech bubble.

And then there were the ebooks produced by Voyager Company in the early 1990s and distributed on floppy disks (and later, CDs).

These were early enhanced ebooks called (appropriately enough) Expanded Books (Wikipedia). A wide variety of titles were released as Expanded Books, including A Hard Day’s Night, Art Spiegelman Maus, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and A Wrinkle in Time.

Here’s one title:

In addition to the text of the book, an Expanded Book also had audio, animation, links from various parts of the text to supplemental content. All of this content was bundled with the disk, obviously; this was the pre-internet era.

I’ve come across Expanded Books before, so rather than repeating myself let me quote some of the technical details and other info I reported on way back when:

Expanded Books was perhaps the very first attempt to develop enhanced ebooks. This was before my time, but I’m told the project did produce a number of titles including The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Annotated Alice, Jurassic Park and The Tao of Pooh / The Te of Piglet, the last of which is still available on Amazon as a 3.5? floppy disk.

The ebooks were built to run in Hypercard and included such amazing features as embedded audio and images, multiple font sizes, bookmarks, typed notes, search,  and what at the time was considered clever menu design. Voyager produced around 60 titles as well as a tool kit for authors and publishers to produce their own ebooks. According to the 1996 edition of The Art of Electronic Publishing, Voyager sold the ebooks for $20 each, with some multi-volume sets  priced at $25.

This ebook format never amounted to much because the idea was too new, too expensive, and because it only ran on Macs (not a common OS back then, or for that matter now). Expanded Books were dependent on Apple’s proprietary Hypercard programming language (here’s Ars Technica with more info on Hypercard).

But never mind why Expanded Books failed; today I wanted to share with you a demo video of one of the titles release. Here is an annotated and expanded version of Stephen Gould’s On Evolution:

This ebook was released in 1995, so it’s not quite 20 years ago, but I think you get the point.

The work  Voyager was doing 20 years ago was not a whole lot different from a current ebook app, is it? Sure, the video is lower resolution and the interface is dated, but the content added to the original text isn’t terribly different from enhance ebooks today.

The above video is just one of a couple dozen promo videos that Bob Stein uploaded to Vimeo. He was one of the co-founders of Voyager and clearly he is also a packrat, for which I will be eternally grateful.

More Reading:

• Expanded Books (Wikipedia)
• 25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web (Ars Technica)
• Early ebooks and why they failed (Alfa Bravo)
• 'Getting The Book Invented Properly' by Douglas Adams (video) (The Digital Reader)
• Video: What Electronic-Book Interfaces Looked Like 20 Years Ago (Andrew Hearst)
• Nora Barnacle and the Birth of the Ebook (TidBITS)
• Voyager Expanded Books (Electronic Publishing, 1996 edition)
• An oral history of the future of the book (Snarkmarket)

found via MobileRead