Nate Hoffelder

Google Reader is back in the news again today with announcement that yet another news reader app was escaping certain death in the Readerpocalypse. TwentyFive Squares, developers of the Press app, posted on their blog yesterday about a new update to their app.

Press is a $3 Android-only news reader app that was originally designed to work with Google Reader, but with the new update it can now sync with a number of other news reader services.

Yesterday’s update adds support for Feed Wrangler and FeedBin. These 2 services are paid RSS feed readers, not free like the 9 alternatives that I have listed here, so they had not crossed my radar before. Other improvements in this update include:

• New, streamlined phone interface (check Settings for default behavior)
• UI refinements
• Several bug fixes and performance enhancements

The last major update to Press added widgets, support for Readability, and support for a couple new gestures (swiping between articles, long press articles in the list to reveal quick actions).

Press is still under development, of course, and the developers are promising support for Feedly and Fever.

You might recall that Feedly had announced earlier this week that they were building an app ecosystem; Press was one of the apps mentioned (along with Reeder, Nextgen Reader, Newsify, and gReader).

Google Play

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Do you like to read authors that write with a subtle mastery of the English language? Then you’re probably going to hate this new idea.

The Fraunhofer Institute, a German research firm with the motto "we forge the future", is now working on a new type of digital watermark DRM. They want to move beyond the existing techniques of adding digital watermarks to the metadata and extraneous text of an ebook and instead embed identifying details inside the body of the ebook.

In short, this new DRM (SiDiM, or "Sichere Dokumente durch individuelle Markierung") would make changes to the story as written by the author with the intention of changing each customer’s copy in a unique way. The goal would be to find identifiers so that a copy could be traced back to the original buyer.

On a technical level it is an interesting idea, and one that isn’t exactly new. This kind of security has been used on a small scale (for example) when firms wanted to track who was leaking documents. I do not know that it has ever been used on a large commercial scale before, however.

I read about this over at lesen.net, and was lucky to find that they had linked to a example sheet from Fraunhofer. The example sheet was in German, of course, but the possible changes were presented in A/B pairs and that made it easy to see the differences. Possible changes could include inserting extraneous returns, reordering items in a list, and altering the negation element used in the story (inconsistent to not consistent, etc).

I don’t know about you but I think this is a terrible idea. SiDiM is nothing less than security at the expense of art, and I do believe that the solution is worse than the problem.

Never mind that this would completely screw up the art of literary analysis; it could also drastically and randomly change the reading experience.

I don’t claim to be a terribly gifted writer but I do know that a change as subtle as reordering a list can change the intended emphasis of that list or the cadence of a sentence; it can lead a reader to think the author is implying something different. Splitting up a paragraph so the first or last sentence stands alone can emphasize that sentence in a way the author did not intend.

And as for negation, I have the strong suspicion that whoever came up with this idea doesn’t have a subtle enough grasp of the language to know that words like inconsistent, unarmed, and invisible have subtly different meanings from not consistent, not armed, and not visible, respectively.

Fortunately this DRM is still in the developmental stages. There is a consortium that is working on the design, implementation and validation, of the SiDiM architecture. Curiously enough, one member of the consortium is a law firm specializing in IP. It’s not clear what that firm contributes; perhaps the developers had ethical objections to testing on rats.

I don’t have any info on when this DRM might see widespread use, but if the early response is any indication I doubt that we will need to worry. This story might not have gotten a lot of coverage in English but it has been heavily debated on German digital publishing blogs.

Few book lovers liked the idea, with many raising the same objections I have raised in this post. I hope that will be enough to prevent very many publishers and ebookstores from adopting SiDiM.

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image by bensmawfield

The market research firm GfK has a new report out this morning with a new estimate of the German ebook market, and depending on how you look at it the report is either good news or bad news.

Gfk now believes that ebook sales accounted for 2.4% of the German book market in 2012. That is a significant increase over the estimated 1% market share in 2011, but it still falls far short of the growth seen in other markets.

This number may appear to be disappointingly small (ebooks were 21.67% of US market in 2012), but let me put it into perspective

Consider for a moment the growth of the US ebook market in the early Kindle years. According to the AAP, ebook sales made up 1.18% of the US book market in 2008 and 3.17% in 2009.

That 2009 figure is particularly important because it represents the US market when it was only 2 years into the Kindle era; that is where Germany is right now.

While Amazon did launch an international Kindle in 2009, Amazon, Kobo, and other ebooksellers only really started investing in the German ebook market in 2011. Kobo launched in Germany in July 2011, and Amazon launched a local Kindle Store there in April 2011.

Germany is really only 2 years into the Kindle era, so it should come as no surprise that the ebook market share is still as small as it is.

And given the recent investments in this ebook market, it is bound to grow. Most of the major ebooksellers (Apple, Google, Amazon) and Kobo have opened ebookstores in Germany in the past couple years,  and earlier this year a local coalition, Tolino,  formed and launched a new shared ebookstore platform and ereader.

But in spite of my hopes for growth, the German ebook market is still facing a serious supply issue. The selection of available titles is still limited, with GfK reporting that only 54 percent of all new titles and 29% of publisher’s backlist available as ebooks. Less than half of the ebooks that a consumer might want to buy are available digitally, and that is likely dampening the ebook adoption rate.

image by Robert Couse-Baker

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Speculating about Apple’s next gadget is a popular past time in the blogosphere, and today Reuters entered the fray. They posted a story earlier this morning saying that they have numerous "sources" that indicate that Apple might have 4.7″ and 5.7″ iPhones in the works:

Apple Inc is exploring launching iPhones with bigger screens, as well as cheaper models in a range of colours, over the next year, said four people with knowledge of the matter, as it takes a cue from rival Samsung Electronics.

The moves, which are still under discussion, underscore how the California-based firm that once ruled the smartphone market is increasingly under threat from its aggressive South Korean competitor. Samsung has overtaken Apple in market share through the popularity of its bigger-screen Galaxy "phablets" and by flooding the market with a range of products at different prices.

It’s a good thing this rumor includes an unspecified release date of next year; it if had included a mention of this coming Fall I would have labeled the rumor bunk.

So far as I know, no components for new hardware have leaked, and that’s a solid argument against a new model being released this year. It’s now June, and if we were going to see a radically new iPhone this year then we would already be seeing leaked parts and schematics.

But even though this rumor speculates about a product to be released next year, I still would not read too much into it. From the way that Reuters phrased the rumor I think the plans for the new hardware are far more tentative than some might think.

The keywords are phrases like "Apple is exploring" and "still under discussion". The fact that the word discussion was used instead of the word development should be taken as a sign that this new hardware doesn’t exist yet.

There is a fairly good chance that the new larger iPhones referenced in this rumor are at best an idea which has been discussed in meetings. A bunch of people have discussed the possibility that Apple might release a larger iPhone, but so far as we know the idea is "still under discussion".

And that really doesn’t mean anything at all. Companies discuss things all the time, including ideas that are never carried out. New hardware is cool, yes, and I too want to see a larger iPhone. But I am not going to let my personal bias influence me – not in this case, anyway.

What do you do if you’re a screen maker with a 10.7″ screen no one wants to use in an ereader or tablet? If you’re PlasticLogic you convince signage manufacturer to cobble together a new product based on your screens.

PlasticLogic has just announced that Dresden Elektronik, a specialist in traffic management systems, is developing a new sign that is built around a pair of Plastic Logic screens. It’s called deZign, and it will be shown off this week at the Digital Signage Expo 2013 in Berlin, Germany.

DeZign is going to be used to display timetables and other info at transit stops. When it hits the market it will offered as an alternative enable transit companies to change the content of a timetable at the push of a button, instead of having to manually replace paper timetables at stations and stops.

The deZign will use less energy than a digital sign based on LCD screens, and the epaper screens will be readily visible in nearly as many lighting conditions as the existing digital signs.

So why use 2 screens instead of a single larger screen (as one reader suggested)? It’s cheaper to use a pair of screens because the development costs are already sunk. A larger screen would have to be developed from scratch, with all the expenses that entails. The deZign might not look as good but it has the benefit of being quicker to market, too.

This new signage has a lot in common with a sign produced by one of Plastic Logic’s other partners. Serelec, one of Dresden Elektronik’s competitor’s in France, debuted the ZED sign in January. That sign also used a pair of Plastic Logic screens to display timetables, maps, and other transit info.

A little over a month ago Barnes & Noble quietly removed any mention of their Nook for PC and Nook for Mac apps, and today they confirmed to me that the apps are no longer being supported.

When my competition reported several days ago that B&N had quietly removed any mention of the Nook for PC, Mac apps from the B&N website, I was one of many that were puzzled by this inexplicable move. This story has already gotten some coverage in the blogosphere, but I held off in the hopes that this was an error of some kind. Unfortunately that is not the case.

It seemed to make little sense for B&N to remove the apps without providing a true replacement. But as unlikely as it might sound, that is exactly what has happened.

Earlier today I received an email from B&N which confirms that both apps have been retired:

We are no longer supporting NOOK for PC for Windows 2000/XP/Vista. To enjoy the NOOK content on your PC please use the NOOK for Windows 8 App or NOOK for Web. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook-for-web/379003594/

B&N sent me the same statement concerning the Nook for Mac app, but I don’t see a need to repeat it here.

TBH it should really come as no surprise. B&N stopped updating the PC app in November 2011 and the Mac app in March 2012 (according to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org).

That is over a year ago, meaning that the Mac app was already deadlined due to a lack of support for OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. Also, there were no signs that either app supported all the content currently sold in the Nook Store. This now includes fixed layout ebooks (graphic novels, cookbooks, and other rich content), interactive children’s books, and more. Basically the apps had already been abandoned long before they were removed from the B&N website.

But even with the knowledge that B&N had given up on the apps long ago, IMO this move is still a poor choice. Readers might be able to use Nook for Web but they won’t be able to access all of their content. I just checked my Nook account and the majority of the ebooks I got from B&N are not compatible with Nook for Web. Of the first 120 titles listed in my account, a mere 32 could be read online.

Thrty-Two

I am lucky that I have alternate Nook apps and a Nook HD-, otherwise I would have lost access to something like 75% of the Nook ebooks I own (assuming I were dependent on the Windows app). Or at least it could cost me access to my purchased ebooks, and that brings me to B&N’s other example of mismanagement.

You see, B&N goofed a second time in that they forgot to recommend their other reading app for OSX and Windows. It’s called NookStudy, and it was launched in Summer 2010. NookStudy is more of a textbook app that a general purpose reading app, but it still reads all my Nook content and it is still available for OSX and Windows. At the very least it deserved a mention.

Update: A reader has told me that B&N has retired the support forums for NookStudy. That could be a sign that B&N is planning to get rid of that program as well. (Thanks, Tim!)

All in all, the manner in which B&N retired the Nook for PC and Nook for Mac app suggests that B&N doesn’t care much about ebooks any more. They’re not investing in the apps, they didn’t make any effort to make sure the content is compatible with the replacement, and they didn’t think to offer their other reading app for Windows and OSX.

At this point I am really hoping that the Microsoft buyout rumor is true, because B&N is cutting their losses. It looks to me like they are giving up, so I really really really hope that a white knight appears to rescue the Nook platform before B&N shuts it down completely.

Editor’s Note: The comments have been disabled on this post due to an overwhelm,ing abundance of spam. Sorry.

Here’s a story that is a couple weeks old but seems to have gone unreported.

If you’ve been following digital publishing news then you’ve probably heard about the Publishing Hackathon. This was a contest that was held at the same time as BEA 2013. A total of 30 contestants submitted project ideas which, following the true spirit of a hackathon, were developed over the course of a weekend.

I only got a chance to look at that contest and the entries today, and I am surprised that there seems to be no commentary on the fact that one entry truly is a hack.

Eric Hellman showed off an idea that, assuming someone wanted to use it maliciously, could be used as the first step in hacking your tablet, smartphone, or ereader. That is not how Eric used the idea, and that’s not at all how he described it, but it is still one possible use.

What Eric showed off was a new way to generate an "about the author" page inside Epub3 ebooks. Rather than create a static page when the ebook is published/updated, this project created the page from scratch by pulling content from external websites and displaying that content inside the ebook. This idea only worked in the Readium Epub3 reading app, and it pulled content from the Open Library and other safe places.

On a technical level this is very cool, but it should also be raising red flags.

Eric’s idea involves code being executed inside an ebook which goes to an external website, gets content, and displays it inside your ebook.

Do you see the problem?

This might sound a little paranoid, but how do you know that the external website is safe and that the content it downloaded into your ebook is not doing something nefarious behind the scenes?

You don’t know, and that’s a problem. For all we know the code inside a given ebook could lead to a site that will try to hack your ereader, tablet, or smartphone.

Update: A reader has pointed out that this security concern is mentioned in the Epub3 spec (here). Good; let’s hope developers take it seriously.

Second Update: Baldur Bjarnason has raised this issue a couple times before(EPUB javascript security, Javascript in ebooks). Those posts are well worth a read.

Before you decide that I am completely off my rocker, let me point out that I am not the first person to identify this issue. Apple, for example, supports JavaScript in Epub3 but does not support letting JavaScript inside an ebook call for external websites (according to Eric).

And I also know that Apple wasn’t the first to consider the possibility that an ebook might access external websites. Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting (now with Safari Books Online) was blogging about the idea as early as June 2010. Her demo involved a location-aware ebook, so it was not any threat to users, but it stands as proof of what is possible.

Are you scared yet? Good.

I’m deeply concerned that Readium has such an obvious security hole, but I also know that there is a relatively simple way to fix this issue. App developers are going to need to either block external connections or at the very least they will need to make it optional and include popup warning messages.

This reminds me of an old trope about ebooks which is becoming more true as time goes by.

eBooks have often been described as web content wrapped into a file, and while that analogy doesn’t quite work with the simpler ebook formats when it comes to Epub3 it is almost literally true.

Given the HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript support in the Epub3 spec. an Epub3 ebook is effectively a website inside a file. While this can be quite useful, it also means that we need to start treating Epub3 ebooks with the same caution that we apply to our web browsing activities.

Readers are going to need to be careful where they download ebooks, and more importantly reading app developers are going to need to start thinking about how their apps can behave like the security firewalls found on most computers.

Reading apps are going to have the first responsibility of controlling malicious ebooks. If nothing else they will get the blame should something bad happen, and that is why I think the developers should start planning for the worst.

image by walknboston

Amazon might be getting all the press but they’re not the only ebookseller in China. The online retailer Dangdang has been operating an ebookstore in China since late 2011, and next month they plan to ship their second ereader.

The rather unremarkable new Duocon is going to come equipped with an HD E-ink screen, Wifi, 8GB of storage, and will cost 699 yuan (about $114 USD).

Like its predecessor (as well as many other ereaders), the second-gen Duocon has a touchscreen, and it improves on that earlier model with a faster CPU, higher resolution screen, and a frontlight.  This ereader is running an unknown OS on a 1.2GHz CPU with 256MB of RAM, and it also has a speaker and headphone jack. Screen resolution matches the new standard of 1024×758, and like the current Kindle ereaders this ereader is missing a card slot.

eBook format support includes Epub, PDF, Mobi, and PRC. This ereader can also play MP3, Wav, and OGG audio files as well as display common office formats like DOC, PPT, txt, html, and XLS.

The Duocon is supported by an on-device ebookstore, which is stocked with around 100,000 titles.  That’s more than double the number of titles Dangdang carried when the ebookstore launched in December 2012, and it is also more than twice as many titles in the Chinese Kindle Store.

Dangdang is pricing this ereader at 699 yuan, which a decent discount from the Kindle Paperwhite’s retail price of 849 yuan. The Duocon will ship on 15 July.

Wired has a new article this morning on Google Reader, and it might be worth a read. They scored an exclusive interview with Richard Gingras, Google’s Senior Director of News & Social Products.

This article is Google’s attempt at spinning the shut down of Google Reader (now only 24 days away), but in trying to come up with an explanation why the Readerpocalypse was a good idea, Google has actually revealed just how little they understand about how we read, and how we find content to read.

But there’s another reason Google decided to put its RSS reader to death. According to Mountain View, most of us simply consume news differently now than when Reader was launched.

“As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process,” says Richard Gingras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google. “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.”

That may well be true, but it doesn’t account for the sources we use to get that news. I read news all throughout the day, and I still use a news reader to do so.

But apparently Richard thinks I am doing it all wrong. According to Google we should be getting our news from Google Now and Google Plus:

Google Now‘s approach is to leverage artificial intelligence techniques to learn your tastes and habits so it can deliver headline news you’ll want to read, when you want to read it. Since it’s on mobile, it can take advantage of device sensors to consider data like your location, the time of day, and whether you’re stationary or on the road. Over time, it will learn, for example, that you like to get the top headlines during your 8 AM commute, and that you prefer stories about politics and food. If this worked perfectly, it’d be an extraordinarily efficient way to get the news. But to start, it still has to learn your preferences, and — far worse — it’s not available on many Android devices yet (oh Android fragmentation, you rear your ugly head again).

While Google Now caters to your breaking news needs, Google+ steps in for more leisurely interest reading. Google has been trying to push Google+ as a social media news source (instead of Google Reader) since 2011. At Google I/O last month, Google+ gained some functions that make it smarter about surfacing articles and images readers might be interested in checking out. Say someone posts an article on Google+ that you like. Tap (or click) it to flip it over and see an automatically generated list of related hashtags that you can click to get more related content. In this way you can explore varied sources you otherwise wouldn’t know about, or get deeper knowledge on a subject you’re interested in.

I choose to be amused by this rather than pissed.

I have to be amused by this, because otherwise I would be bothered by the suggestion that I use Google Now. It does not support web browsers (only mobile apps), making it a giant F*** You from Google.  Apparently I am not supposed to be using a web browser any more, not for reading, not for work, not for anything.

And even if I could use Google Now, there’s no way that it can match my ability to sort through the feeds and find the articles worth sharing. My reading interests are based on decades of reading, and that cannot be emulated in days, weeks, or even after years of using a service like Google Now.

And as for Google+, don’t get me started. Seriously, if a social network could provide my news sources don’t you think I would have switched over by now?

So far as I can tell Google has not yet figured out that social networks get news links from news junkies, most of whom use a news reader of one kind or another. Basically the very people who feed links into Google+ are the ones that are being harmed by the shutdown of Google Reader.

But you don’t have to take my word for it; instead consider the millions of people that have fled to GR alternatives like Feedly, or the numerous services that have come out of the woodwork since Google Reader was EOLed.

And here’s one that will knock your socks off. If no one uses news reader apps any more then Why the Hell is Digg scrambling to launch a replacement to Google Reader?

Seriously, Digg is throwing resources at a product that Google claims no one will want to use. Given all that I have seen going on for the past 4 months I think that claim simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

I am going to have to agree with the general sentiment on Twitter. Google is doing their best to spin a bad decision, but sadly the excuses quoted above are the best they can come up with.

Sony is building something of a reputation for unusual ebook marketing tactics, and this week they added a new trick to their repertoire. They’ve adapted the infographics that were first debuted in April and turned them into a 'family tree" that shows you a book’s literary lineage.

Sony has released several infographics, with one focused on general fiction and mystery genre and another that combines romance and and Sci-Fi. That latter infographic is particularly entertaining.

The Sci-Fi family tree is a rather curious one, and it includes inbreeding, infidelity, and other Jerry Springeresque connections. For example, someone at Sony Reader Store listed the fantasy novel Game of Thrones as being the child of Total Recall and A Wrinkle in Time. Who do you think was being cheated on, I wonder? And then in the next generation The Hunger Games has an incestuous relationship with its cousin Game of Thrones to produce The Fault in Our Stars.

I do not mean to cast aspersions on a person’s family history, but whoever designed this family tree has serious issues. I was under the impression that family trees were supposed to fork, not merge. (No hillbilly jokes, please.)

Over the past year Sony has been making a serious investment in their ebookstore. They have released a new reading app that supports Epub3, added expert reviews, and started working on new ways to market ebooks to readers. It’s pretty clear that their primary goal is less to make money on ebooks and more to cash in on the content sold on their hardware, but they are still a presence in the market.

Computex 2013 kicked off this week in Taiwan and Charbax is there to go hands-on with the latest gadgetry.

For some time now I have been talking about Onyx’s 6″ Android tablets with E-ink screens and their E-ink smartphones, but today I have something new to show you.

Yesterday Charbax caught up with Onyx and got the first look at their prototype 8″ color E-ink ereader. Yes, Onyx is going to match Pocketbook and release a new ereader that uses the Triton 2 with a frontlight.

As you can see in the image at right, this is a very early prototype that is, I kid you not, held together by black tape. This thing doesn’t even have a case yet; even the speakers are bolted to the development board.

Charbax also got to play around with several of the unreleased E-ink Android tablets. That’s not exactly new, but he did uncover at least one detail that makes this video worth watching. Early in the video, he shows that the tablet has an awfully fast page turn.

Later in the video he plays a game of Angry Birds on an E-ink tablet. This screen was refreshing fast enough that I am pretty sure it was fast enough for video (30 frame per second). That is simply amazing, especially considering that this time last year you could only do video with a hacked ereader.

The Onyx rep also confirmed the screen resolution on the new E-ink smartphone. That device has a screen resolution of 800×480. That is a detail that E-ink wasn’t ready to reveal yet when I spoke with them at SID Display Week in Vancouver. Oops.

Onyx is also working on a 9.7″ ereader, and I have heard elsewhere that they are planning to release a 13.3″ device that uses the new Mobius screen.

Editor’s note: No, this is not a delayed April Fool’s Day joke.

When I caught up with Kobo at BEA 2013 last week they made a big deal about how their ABA member partners were having a positive effect on their ebook sales. It seems Amazon has also noticed Kobo’s success, because the retail giant appears to be building a similar network of retail partners.

Update: Amazon officially launched the program in November 2013.

Reports have been coming in for the past week that Amazon is trying to recruit indie bookstores to sell the Kindle. The first to report this shocking news was Los Angeles-based Skylight Books.

This indie bookseller posted on their blog last week that they got a call from an Amazon rep:

so i got a phone call today from a representative of Amazon! apparently, he was given the task of reaching out to independent bookstores in order to ‘build’ a ‘relationship’ with the indies in order to ‘partner’ with us in a program to sell Kindles in our store…yea, really. so, in my most incredulous voice i asked him if he was serious and stated flatly that we wouldn’t be interested.

I haven’t been able to confirm the accuracy of this story, but other sources have indicated that this isn’t the only bookseller to be telemarketed by Amazon. One report even lead back to an email for the Amazon Kindle Wholesale Team. That in and of itself is not newsworthy (I knew of that team already), but it does provide convincing supporting evidence that this story is true.

Update: Shelf Awareness beat me to this story this morning, and they have a second bookseller who reports that he too was contacted by an Amazon rep.

But we now know for sure that Amazon has approached at least one other independent bookseller about selling Kindles. Roger Page, co-owner of Island Books, Mercer Island, Wash., was standing near his wife, Nancy, when she fielded a call like the one made to Skylight Books. "I believe they mentioned the word Kobo and said they could offer competitive prices," he said, adding that he suspected the caller was "somebody low down on the totem pole" and describing Nancy’s response as "very firm."

But never mind the unconfirmed story; there are other signs today that Amazon is much more interested in brick-and-mortar stores than they used to be. I have discovered new job listings on the Amazon website for field sales reps for the Kindle.

Amazon is currently looking to fill 10 different positions for a "Field Sales Representative – Kindle" (as well as a management position). The locations for the sales reps are spread across the US and are focused on major metro areas like Seattle, NYC, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Francisco.

So far as I can tell these listings are brand new; they certainly weren’t there when I was researching a related story in late April. The job is a part time position with duties including being a Kindle evangelist, leading training sessions, and so on. There’s not much in the job descriptions that is really all that unusual for a sales rep, but there is one line that caught my eye:

Participating in assisted selling activities on weekends at select retail locations

That seems a little intense when compared to Amazon’s past interest in retail sales, don’t you think?

So far as I know Amazon had previously focused their efforts on getting into retail chains like Staples, Target, Microcenter, and the like.  But that task doesn’t seem to fit with the impersonal sales of a major retailer.

Instead, I think that "assisted selling activities" would more closely describe pitching the Kindle at book fairs, author signings, and other more personal events. You know, the kind of events that a bookstore might run.

I’m not suggesting that Amazon will have much luck in convincing bookstores to sell Kindles, but I do think they are working towards that goal. And Amazon has convinced Waterstones to be their partner in the UK, so this clearly isn’t impossible.

And it would also be a good idea. Over the past year Amazon has lost a number of retail partners as major retail chains have decided to stop pimping for their competition. Both Target and Walmart stopped carrying Kindles in 2012, costing Amazon shelf space in thousands of retail stores.

Still, the bookseller at Skylight Books is probably a good example of the response Amazon will receive. This bookseller asked that Amazon fulfill a couple requirements before he would agree to be a partner:

I don’t see that happening, do you?

P.S. I am still trying to find out more about this story, and I am waiting to hear back from Amazon. If you know of an indie bookseller who has been contacted by Amazon, please let me know in the comments.

The tea leaf readers at PricewaterhouseCoopers are back aging this week with more predictions for the future of the ebook market.

According to their latest peyote-inspired predictions, the ebook sales in the US book market will eclipse paper book sales by 2017:

In its annual “Entertainment & Media Outlook,” set to be released Wednesday, PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) estimates that trade (consumer, not educational or academic) ebooks will drive $8.2 billion in sales by 2017 — surpassing projected print book sales, which it thinks will shrink by more than half during that period.

I found out about this prediction via paidContent (they got an early look at the data), and I can’t help but roll my eyes at the idea that anyone is taking it seriously.

The thing about this prediction is that PwC said almost the exact same thing last year. Here’s how paidContent put it:

New data from PwC’s media report projects that e-books will make up 50 percent of the U.S. trade book market by 2016.

This was confirmed in other reports, in case you were wondering.

I don’t know about you, but if PwC is going to repeat the same 4 year projection for a second year in a row then I am going to tend to think they’re full of it.Whatever model they are using to make those predictions is clearly inaccurate and cannot be trusted.

And that’s not even the only serious discrepancy about their data; their short term predictions were off by a ridiculous amount. Last June PwC said that their projection for the 2012 US consumer ebook market would hit $4.3 billion. Yesterday PwC said that same market only hit $3.3 billion in 2012.

Their short term projection missed by a billion dollars. That is a 29% difference between the prediction and the reality. While that might not be much of a difference to a govt accountant or an analyst out here in the real world it is ridiculously huge.

Seriously, how can anyone talk about these projections and keep a straight face?

E-ink got a lot of press the week before last with the announcement of a couple new shelf label systems, but they’re not the only ones taking this screen tech to places you would not expect.

While I was in Vancouver for SID Display Week I spent a few minutes with Peter Slikkerveer of Mpico. He was showing off the prototype for a new epaper label system that could potentially replace smart cards and luggage labels. These new labels are wireless, battery-less, and have a screen which can be updated remotely.

I met the Mpico rep at the Innovation Zone, an area set aside for single table demos. This company has developed a way to integrate a small E-ink screen with RFID chips.

An RFID tag is a tiny chip that is both read and written via a remote scanner. Have you ever simply waved your credit card at a scanner in order to make a payment, or gotten an E-ZPass for paying tolls on highways? That credit card, and the E-ZPass transponder, have RFID chips inside. If you’ve ever chipped your dog, then that dog also has an RFID chip inside.

As you probably know, an RFID chip is read by a remote sensor that transmits a signal to the chip and reads the signal that RFID chip sends back. Mpico has come up with a way to use the transmission from the remote sensor as a power source for an E-ink screen.

They had a number of different prototypes on display in Vancouver, including both long range and short range solutions. The short range would work best for smartcards, while the long range could be adapted to work on luggage labels and other places where we currently use disposable paper labels.

The smart card prototype (and requisite sensor) is at right. It doesn’t look like much at the moment, but that’s because this is a lab prototype, not a pre-production unit.  Naturally it’s a lot sturdier than the card which would be used by consumers.

It has a 1.5″ segmented E-ink screen which can display a date, and is really only intended to show off the idea. It would also be possible to instead give this smart card a different screen – perhaps one that could show the amount of credit left on an account.

The longer range solution is good to a distance of about 2 meters:

The black bar on the right edge of the table is the sensor, and the device on the left end of the table as well as the one in the middle next to the laptop are the labels.

Here’s a better view of one of the labels. As you can see, it shows a bar code, a 4 digit airport code, and a third line of text which can be adapted for a variety of uses (passenger name, for example).

Mpico is looking for a vendor partner that is interested in bringing this platform to market. Let’s hope they release it before Amazon debuts their own solution.

No, that isn’t just name-dropping; Amazon is working on a very similar technology.

Just over a couple months ago Amazon was awarded a patent for a wireless, battery-less ereader concept which received power and data from a remote base station. I didn’t think much of the patent at the time because I didn’t think a large E-ink screen could receive enough power to operate, but now that I have seen Mpico’s solution in action I am not so sure.

Amazon could indeed be working on a wireless, battery-less ereader for the academic market. If the screens are kept in the classroom and stored in a cart, that cart could also double as the transmitter and controller for the system. The screens could be passed out to students and then handed back in at the end of class.

Update: Mpico got back to me on the battery-less ereader idea, and they don’t think it’s possible either. The power requirements for say a 6″ screen are too high.

I still don’t think there’s much of a need for a battery-less ereader as an ereader, but that’s not the only thing Amazon could do with their tech. I would bet that Amazon’s solution could be adapted to serve the same purposes as Mpico’s labels. What’s more, Amazon has a direct interest in epaper labels. Can you imagine how useful this would be in Amazon’s warehouses? They could put a label on every single bin and update the label as the contents of the bin are changed.

Would anyone care to bet on which system is deployed first?