Nate Hoffelder

If you’ve been following the publishing news of late then you’ve probably heard plenty about how great and wonderful Epub3 ebook format is. It slices, it dices, and it even makes Stephen Fries.

But if you’re like me then you could be lacking any real info on the how, the where, and the who of making Epub3 ebooks and distributing them. That’s why I took time today to go around to various booths at BEA 2013 and ask which of the conversion and distribution services are currently handling EPub3.

Update: Bill McCoy has reminded me that there is an existing spreadsheet that shows which ebook platform supports which Epub3 feature. It’s maintained by the BISG and can be found here.

I may have missed a name or two, so feel free to mention them in the comments.

Vook

This 4 year old company has long since pivoted away from publishing enhanced ebooks and is now a production and distribution service. Vook currently distributes ebooks to all the major ebookstores, but their Epub3 distribution is limited to iBooks, Samsung Reader Hub, and Sony Reader Store. Vook also supports the Kindle Store, though it is not clear just how many features are supported.

Aquafadas

Like Vook, Aquafadas is an ebook production and distribution service. I don’t think I was able to get a complete list of where they can distribute Epub3 but I was told that the list includes iBooks and the Kindle Store (more on this later).

AerBook

This service boasts of making an Epub3 picture book for KF8 and iBooks. It also lets you make Epub and other formats but does not support distribution.

Flipick

This is a relatively new distributor that launched back in January, They can take an InDesign file and convert it to a fixed layout Epub3 which can be sold in iBooks, the Kindle Store, and (coming soon) the Sony Reader Store.

Circular Flo

I don’t have as much info on this company as on the others, but I do know that it offers an InDesign to fixed layout Epub3 conversion service. They boast that their output will work in iBooks, and the Kindle Store.

Inkling

This textbook distributor supports Epub3 in their own platform and offers their own ebook creation tool, Inkling Habitat. It’s not completely clear whether your Epub3 ebook will be sold as Epub3 or as Inkling’s own Epub3-ish format. I’m not sure it matters, though.

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Footnotes:

1. If you’re wondering why the Kindle Store is mentioned in a post about Epub3, it’s because that’s how several of the services talked about KF8 and Epub3.  The formats are not exactly interchangeable but apparently the conversion services feel that if you produce one you might as well produce the other.

2. The complete list of ebookstores that I can confirm as selling Epub3 include:

• O’Reilly
• Samsung
• Sony
• iBooks
• Gumroad (a marketplace, not an ebookstore, but you can sell your own EPub3 here)
• Kindle Store (Amazon supports conversion from Epub3 to KF8 – check out KindleGen support docs for more info)

3. Naturally this info is only as complete as my current knowledge, so I would deeply appreciate any help in expanding this list.

There’s a new article up on the PW website tonight, but I’m not sure it’s worth reading. Bill McCoy, the Executive Director of the IDPF, penned a post in which he tries to debunk 7 myths of digital publishing.

Unfortunately for Bill he managed to prove that one of his so-called myths isn’t a myth; it’s a reality.

In writing about Epub3 McCoy tries to argue that the Epub3 ebook format is ready, but the points he raises completely demolish his argument. Check it out:

Myth #4: EPub 3 Isn’t Ready

EPub 3 was rolled out as a standards specification in late 2011, promising support for rich interactive content and tighter integration of e-book standards with the full Web platform. Eighteen months later, while many reading systems support ePub 3, several prominent reading systems still support only the older ePub 2 standard. And even the vendors that do already support ePub 3 don’t support 100% of its features. How can publishers use a standard if it’s not uniformly supported across the industry?

There are two parts to resolving this dilemma. First, publishers can deploy ePub 3 content today that has enhancements that work on ePub 3 reading systems, but the content is also fully usable on ePub 2 reading systems or ePub 3 reading systems that lack some features. Every O’Reilly Media title published in 2013 is ePub 3, and in a Web post, the O’Reilly team explains how to structure content that is future-proofed as well as backwards-compatible. Secondly, realizing the need to “raise the bar” of full ePub 3 support ASAP, more than two dozen vendors and publishers have banded together to collaborate on an open-source ePub 3 implementation, forming last March the new Readium Foundation.

First, a minority of the ebook platforms that support Epub also support Epub3. It is misleading to use the word "many" to describe a minority.

And seriously, if you have to concede that it’s not fully deployed and that even the best support is incomplete, then you have basically proven that Epub3 is not ready. It’s not a myth; it’s a fact. And no amount of marketing hype will change that fact.

Update: It seems that even the IDPF has come to the conclusion that Epub3 isn’t ready. That’s why they announced in July 2013 that they’re going with an Epub3 Lite ebook format.

Just to be clear, I see Epub3 being held up not by the technical details of the format but by the lack of support among reading platforms. Apple supports most of Epub3, and Sony and Samsung support bits and pieces. So far as I know that’s it.

And that’s why I say Epub3 is not ready.

IMO, Epub3 won’t be ready for another 6 months to a year. Widespread adoption is waiting on the Readium SDK. This is going to be used as the core for reading apps and ereaders, and it is not expected to be ready until the end of 2013. Integrating the Readium SDK into apps and ereaders will take even longer (6 months to a year).

I know because I asked one of the developers only a couple weeks ago. I was double checking my facts for the post about why there are reasons not to adopt Epub3 just yet, and I was also told some other details that might interest you.

The reason Epub3 is waiting on Readium SDK is that the development costs are unbelievable (or so I was told). There’s a good reason why so many companies have joined the Readium Foundation:

I’d guess if you include dev, QE, design, product mgt, etc to create an EPUB3 renderer that is any good, and integrate it in to existing apps on all major platforms, you are looking at 10 yrs or something of man hours.

Yes, 10 years of labor.

Just to put that into perspective, let me remind you that we live in an age where a single developer can start a new service or company as a night job, where even successful startups can run with only a handful of employees.

With that in mind developing Epub3 from a technical spec into a usable ecosystem (app plus ebookstore plus distributor plus ereader) must be a huge undertaking.

Frankly, I am surprised that there has been any adoption of Epub3 at all.  Can you imagine how much Apple must have spent on developing the iBooks format, their own variant of Epub3? And then they followed up with Epub3 support. Of course Apple only had to support iBooks and Epub3 on IOS, and that made it a lot easier for them. But the expense involved still boggles my mind.

Folks, y’all are welcome to drink McCoy’s Kool-Aid, but I refuse. I plan to continue to ignore the marketing hype and look at the reality of the situation.

Epub3 is not ready yet. To say otherwise is to simply deny the facts in front of you.

P.S. Is it just me or is there something wrong when the only person speaking the truth is the outsider? That strikes me as a fundamental and frightening flaw in the system – any system.

image by RoxTues

The Author Solutions front company (link) self-pub service Lulu is going to be showing off a new service later this week at the uPublishU conference on Saturday.

It’s called Helix, and it’s designed to give authors an objective analysis of how their book matches up against similar titles.

Helix, which has been in beta since March 2013, gives authors the opportunity to compare their manuscripts against a database of over 100,000 books compiled by The Book Genome Project (aka BookLamp). This is basically an analytics report for authors, and it deconstructs a book down to its DNA (hence the name).

A Helix Review can tell an author how the themes present in the book compare to similar titles in the genre. For example, it will offer insight into how an author’s writing style or language density compares to leading titles in the genre, or how the length of a book compares to the more successful titles in a genre.

This is sort of an objective "place in the world" review of an author’s manuscript, only without the subjective bias of a human reviewer. A human reviewer would be biased by what they read last and their personal preferences, two issues that Helix will not share.

Of course, no review should be taken as the final word on the correct way to write a book, and a Helix Review can’t answer the most pressing question on an author’s mind: Is my book any good? But Lulu and BookLamp believe that Helix will give authors a chance to see their work in a new way.

A Helix Review costs $49, and there is also a Lite option which costs $29 and offers a more basic analysis. It’s currently only available through Lulu, but The Book Genome Project plans to make it available soon through other self-pub services.

Helix Review FAQ

Helix Review (Lulu)

I think Amazon might be on a revivalist kick lately. They’ve just brought back the Kindle DX, that 9.7″ ereader that was launched in 2010 and discontinued in October 2012.

There’s been no announcement from Amazon, but earlier this week Amazon quietly started selling the Kindle DX again on amazon.com. The current list price is $299.

Amazon launched the Kindle DX in May 2009 as their bid to enter the academic market. The KDX was the first Kindle model to directly support PDFs, and Amazon hoped that the KDX’s larger 9.7″ screen would work as an adequate replacement for paper textbooks. Amazon even convinced a number of major US universities to launch digital textbook pilot programs based on the Kindle DX.

This was of course before the launch of the iPad. That was during the middle years of the ereader bubble, a time when it wasn’t a crazy idea to believe that an E-ink ereader with poor PDF support and no touchscreen could be useful for textbooks. But now we know, largely thanks to those pilots, that the Kindle DX is too slow and too feature limited to work well with textbooks. It’s not nearly as fast as your average textbook app on Android or iOS, and it also has fewer features.

And if the lackluster performance wasn’t enough to kill most school’s interest in the Kindle DX, the lawsuits filed by visually impaired students did. In 2009 several students filed suit in partnership with the NFB to block the Kindle pilots because the students were blind and thus couldn’t use the Kindle DX. Those suits weren’t settled until mid-2010, but naturally that put the kibosh on large-scale adoption by schools and libraries.

This ereader was updated in 2010 with a faster screen and more features (and Amazon even rolled out a firmware update in early 2011) but this ereader has largely been neglected since then. It might be new on the shelf today but it is still a circa 2010 ereader. I feel a similarly priced tablet would be a better buy.

This week’s revival of the Kindle DX isn’t the first ereader that Amazon has brought back, and like the Kindle Touch this offering might only be temporary. So if you want one you should act fast.

On the other hand something tells me that this ereader might be available for longer than the month or so that the revived Kindle Touch. Amazon has not only brought back the KDX, they also updated their menus to promote it again. The Kindle Touch, which was briefly available for about a month earlier this year, was sold but not promoted.

Amazon.com

Earlier this week Amazon launched a new platform to publish fanfic. It’s called Kindle Worlds, and while at first glance it appears to be aimed at creating a market for fanfic SF author Tobias Buckell thinks Amazon could have a different motive:

Interesting, everyone is responding to this as a way to monetize fan fiction, but that’s slightly off. It’s really a way for Amazon to disintermediate media tie in novels, where packagers and publishers approach authors to write in an established media universe.

Amazon is using some elements of fan fiction to do an end run around the existing publishing structure of it.

As such, I think it’s probably more worrying to tie in writers and publishers than fan fiction writers and other writers. Another disruption.

I think he could be correct. When I wrote about Kindle Worlds I described it as Amazon’s attempt to disrupt publishing, and that is usually a safe guess for anything new that Amazon does in relation to books.

But I didn’t quite correctly identify how Amazon would disrupt publishing. The detail I missed and that Buckell caught was how Amazon might use Kindle Worlds. This is entirely different from the stated purpose of producing fanfic.

Amazon is setting up Kindle Worlds so it will render the in-house publishing depts (like Alloy Entertainment, its first partner) redundant. Once Kindle Worlds gets up and running movie studios and tv production companies won’t need to deal with publishers anymore. They’ll be able to deal directly with Amazon to have tie-in novels written and released.

If you look at two of the largest sources of tie-in novel it starts to make a lot of sense.

Disney currently has a contract with Del Rey and Dark Horse to produce Star Wars novels, while CBS uses S&S to produce Star Trek novels. I think these media giants would definitely be interested in cutting out the publisher middleman and making more money, don’t you? (S&S and Star Trek are both owned by CBS, but that’s no guarantee that CBS wouldn’t outsource the Star Trek tie-in novels if they could make more money.)

And it’s not just the tie-in novels that could gain from this. Authors who have been thinking about inviting others to write in their universe might also end up signing with Kindle Worlds. Buckell goes on to add that:

As for myself, I’ve spoken on a couple podcasts about my desire to open the Xenowealth world after my fifth book. So far it looks like Amazon is trying to control this whole thing, it’s not quite as ‘open’ as I’d like. I’m struggling to see the mechanism where I could go on there and say ‘the Xenowealth is an open IP, here’s how to come in and start writing for it’ and split the royalties, play around.’ So I’m still not sure of how I’d build the Xenowealth opening up. I had been thinking about registering a website, with links to existing Xenowealth stuff, creating a wiki, and then investing some money in buying some stories from people who submitted (similar to what Eric Flint does for one of his own universes).

If Amazon created a mechanism for my simplifying that (by saying we split the royalties), I’d be very interested.

It might be too early to say, but I think Amazon has already created that mechanism. I would bet that Amazon isn’t the one exercising editorial control over the fanfic published via Kindle Worlds; I think it’s much more likely that the original copyright holder gets to pick which stories get published. The latter party is much more interested in getting the stories right and making sure they fit into canon, while Amazon just wants to make a buck.

But even if that’s not how Kindle Worlds is set up right now, changing the permissions structure shouldn’t be that hard.

That is far more disruptive than expected, wasn’t it?

E-ink is best known for their ereader screens, but lately they have been making a strong push into other markets. For example, they are now providing screens for a number of DIY and development kits from Freescale, AdaFruit, SEEED, SparkFun, and more.

I happened across a few of the kits in the E-ink booth at SID Display Week, and that inspired me to go look for more. The following post includes a mix of kits with segmented displays and graphic displays. Some of these kits are project-based while others are development kits.

BTW, if you know of a kit not mentioned here, please mention it in a comment.

Update (26 April 2015): a couple new models have come on to the market since I wrote this post.

Waveshare

This recent (April 2015) addition has a 4.3″ screen and a 6-wire serial port. It’s designed to work with Arduino and other boards.

It costs about $55.

Atmel

Atmel has partnered with Pervasive Display to produce a kit with 1.44″, 2″, and 2.7″ E-ink screens and a controller board.

The EPD Xplained Pro kit costs $72.

Embedded Artists

First up is an ePaper Kit from Embedded Artists. This kit takes a 2.7″ (264×176) E-ink screen from Pervasive Displays and mounts it on a board that leaves all the pins readily accessible. This kit can work with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and more.

It’s listed for 29 euros.

AdaFruit

This DIY instigator sells a trio of kits that use the rePaper project board. Each kit comes with a single screen and a cable that is intended to make it easier to connect this kit to an Arduino or other project boards.

The first kit has a 2″ (200×96) E-ink screen and currently listed at $35 for a single kit.

AdaFruit is also selling a second kit with a 2.7″ (264×176) E-ink screen. This one costs $40.

And if you want a smaller size, you can get a kit with a 1.44″ (128×96) E-ink screen for $33.

Sparkfun

Here is a minimally functional but rather expensive option from Sparkfun. This $25 display, when combined with a $15 breakout board and a CPU board, will offer you the ability to show 2 shows of 10 characters.

That’s not much to work with, but it could be useful for certain limited function projects. And as you can see from this demo video shot in 2011, the display is about 3″ across so it should be quite readable.

SEEED

That Sparkfun unit can’t do much, but luckily this next one can. Earlier this year SEEED released a screen unit which is designed to plug into an Arduino board.

They call it a display shield, and it gets the name because it takes up all the ports on the Arduino board. It costs $50 and is built around a 2.1″ E-ink screen with a resolution of 172 by 72.

E-ink

E-ink has been making their own kits for a while now, and you can now buy a basic one via DigiKey.

The one at right costs $70, and it comes with 2 segmented displays. This is a development kit, not a DIY kit, so it is intended to introduce a hardware developer to E-ink’s screen tech. This kit includes a control board and plugs into the USB port of a laptop for easier programming; it doesn’t require any other hardware.

Renesas Electronics

Here’s a kit that I just happened across today. It combines a segmented E-ink display with a control board.

It costs $49, and is available now from Renesas, Fact sheets and other info can be had from DigiKey.

Freescale

If all the kits I have shown you so far are simply too small for your project, then you might want to go look up Freescale. They have been making E-ink demo kits for a few years now.

I can’t find purchasing info on their website, but I did happen across their latest kit in the E-ink booth at SID Display Week. It had a 6″ E-ink screen and used one of Freescale’s latest CPUs. That is probably more power than needed for most projects but then again I am not a hardware engineer.

And just to be clear, the Freescale kits are intended more for prospective Freescale customers who are interesting in building their own hardware. These aren’t really DIY kits, but I include them here to show one rather extreme option.

As you can see from this video from 2010, Freescale has even boasted about the possibility of a $99 Android device built around an E-ink screen (the kit shows up after the 4 minute mark):

Qualcomm is getting a lot of attention this week thanks to their new 5.1 inch Mirasol screen, but most of the press coverage has left out one key detail.

The screen doesn’t actually work.

I spent a few minutes this morning in the Qualcomm booth, eager to play with their new prototype, but unfortunately it is more of a prop than a prototype. The display is completely non functional, and it would perhaps be better to describe it as a custom print job than a display. Qualcomm used manufacturing tech similar to what is used to make a Mirasol screen and printed the prototype that everyone is talking about.

If the stats are to be believed then this could one day be a super high resolution smartphone screen with a resolution of 2560×1440, or about 564 ppi. But at the moment it is simply a printed screen that has a lower resolution than my $150 inkjet printer.

The Qualcomm reps tried to sell me the same "it’s under development" line that they convinced everyone else to believe, but I don’t buy it.  The thing is, if nonfunctional props count as demos then Star Trek had the first tablets, cell phones, and so on. Show me a demo that works and I will call it a demo. Until then it’s a movie prop, no more and no less.

And given the difficulty that Qualcomm has faced with this screen tech, I don’t expect this screen to ever hit the market. I expect it to suffer the same fate as the 4.3″ smartphone demo units that Qualcomm showed off last year.

Hard-core fans have been writing stories about their favorite characters for nearly as long as books have been published, and now Amazon is going to help them get paid for their work.

Amazon has just announced Kindle Worlds, a new licensing initiative that will enable stories written by fans to be published in the Kindle Store. The stories will be authorized fanfic, and Amazon has already signed up a partner.

Update: I have a new take on Kindle Worlds now that Amazon has convinced 2 of their authors to sign up.

Warner Brothers' Alloy Entertainment is the guest of honor at today’s feast. Alloy is the book publishing division that coordinates with WB tv show production depts, and they have agreed to license Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries. The press release also mentions that more license deals might be in the works.

Did I mention that the fanfic authors are going to get paid?

Amazon will of course have to pay Alloy Entertainment, but the author of the fanfic will also be getting 35% or 20% of the net sales revenue. Stories over 10,000 words will be paid at the higher rate, while short-short stories will be paid at the lower rate.

In exchange for the royalty, the authors will agree to sign over their rights to Amazon Publishing. Yes, this isn’t a KDP program but an expansion of Amazon’s more traditional publishing effort. As such, Amazon Publishing will be picking which stories to publish and setting prices.

The program will officially launch in June with 50 titles. You can find out more on the Kindle Worlds webpage.

So is anyone surprised that Amazon was the first to come up with this idea? I’m not.

First of all, Baen Books is already using a crowd-sourced fanfic model to generate new content for the Grantville Gazette, the anthology series set in an alternate history universe. Baen has been publishing GG since 2003 (according to Wikipedia), and Baen has just released the 47th volume in the series.

But that was a small scale example; so far as I know Amazon is the first to commercialize fanfic on a large scale, and that doesn’t surprise me. Fanfic has been a well-established literary form for decades (modern fanfic dates back to Star Trek or Sherlock Holmes stories, take your pick), but my guess for why it hasn’t been widely commercialized is fear.

It’s not that publishers or creators didn’t want to make money (even off of fanfic). No, the problem was that their lawyers had convinced them of the terrible possibilities of what might happen to the original copyright. Ask a lawyer specializing in IP and they can spin a worst case scenario that might occur if a fanfic were even acknowledged (much less authorized).

I’ve heard a dozen different authors express more or less that same fear over the years, and I would expect that Alloy Entertainment’s lawyers raised the same objection.

Amazon was probably the only one who could break through the fear. They’re big, rich, and have a convincing track record for making money in markets that largely didn’t exist before Amazon entered them (Kindle Singles, ebooks, etc). And Amazon may have also paid a hefty license fee in advance just to sweeten the deal.

Kindle Worlds is  probably going to make Amazon a lot of money in the long run. But more importantly, it’s also going to legitimize a new segment of publishing that has been quietly ignored for decades. And that is the larger story today.

Amazon has just expanded the publishing industry beyond legacy publishers, self-published authors, and indie publishing. Now fanfic authors can go legit, and that is going to have an interesting effect on the rest of publishing.

Remember when self-pub was synonymous with vanity press and was a sign of an author’s failure? That’s no longer true, and 5 years from now writing fanfic will probably be considered just as legitimate.

And that is what Amazon did today.

E-ink has managed to be the most exciting and biggest letdown at SID Display Week this year.

They’ve just unveiled a new screen tech that promises to offer the sharp color that the Triton 2 color E-ink lacks in no less than 3 colors, but unfortunately it is also limited to exactly 3 colors.

The Spectra 3 Color Display is the second new shelf label tech that E-ink is showing off this year. It’s based in part on Sipix screen tech that E-ink bought last year, a detail which the following chart made clear and which was confirmed by E-ink’s reps.

This is E-ink’s first practical example of a screen that uses more than simply black and white: it adds red to the mix. The screens I saw really were as red as the image at right, but sadly that is the only shade of red that this screen can show.

The downside to the Spectra screen tech (and the reason it’s only being offered as a shelf label) is that this screen can only show black, white, or red.

But what this screen tech cannot do is show pink, gray, or any shade in between. Spectra is no more and no less than a 3 color display, in much the same way that a Pearl E-ink screen is a 16 color display (16 shades of black, white, and gray).

Update: I’ve just come across an animated GIF that shows the red, black, and white ink capsules in action:

While I’m sure that E-ink would like to develop a variation on this screen tech that could be used for ereaders, they were not willing to even guess when that might happen. But they did say that it will be available as a shelf label later this year with screen sizes measuring from 2″ to 6″.

So when you see this video, don’t get too excited over the fact that this 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024×758:

When it comes to business models, Stephen King is no stranger to experimentation.

Back in 2000, long before the Kindle brought the digital book market to life, Stephen King published one of his novels as an online serial. In 2009 he published one of his stories as a Kindle exclusive, and earlier this year he released an essay as a Kindle Single.

So when I read this morning that King was only going to allow a print edition of his latest novel, the only detail that surprised me was his explanation.

The next Stephen King novel, Joyland, is about to hit store shelves. The book is a murder mystery set in a Southern theme park in the 1970s, and according to the press coverage this book will only be available in paper (apparently at the request of the author).

"I have no plans for a digital version," King told the WSJ. "Maybe at some point, but in the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one."

This is an interesting idea, isn’t it? It seems that King wants to support real bookstores, so he has decided to refuse to support digital stores. That’s why he’s not going to allow even the paper copy of the novel to be sold online.

No, wait, Joyland is available for pre-order on Amazon.com and elsewhere. (And as pidgeon92 reminded me, even the Audible audiobook is up for pre-order.) It’s just the ebook edition that cannot be bought. Apparently Amazon selling the paper book at a steep discount isn’t a threat to physical bookstores.

If it sound strange to you that King is blocking the ebook while still allowing Amazon to sell the paper book, you’re not alone. When I reported on this story last year I was under the impression that King didn’t like the ebook edition because he wasn’t a fan of ebooks (for this book, at least). In fact, he made a statement to that effect in the press release.

I thought his reasons would be similar to that of Audrey Niffenegger, the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. She is opposed to ebooks on aesthetic grounds and because she is concerned about conservation:

I am not opposed to the existence of e-books; I know lots of people are wildly enthusiastic about them. But I have spent my life working with books as an art form and I am devoted to physical books. E-books in their current incarnations are still imperfect and they threaten the arts of book design and typography. As a book conservator I am also nervous about the digitization of books: will they be readable one hundred years from now? Or will thousands of books simply vanish as platforms and programs change?

Now it seems this is just a misguided attempt to help physical bookstores. Sadly, this is probably going to fail at its intended goal, but at least it will test whether piracy is useful as a promotional tool.

JK Rowling was the first to test the idea with the Harry Potter series. The ebook editions weren’t released until years after the series had ended, and there is little sign that she was negatively affected by piracy.

I don’t think piracy will affect sales of King’s new novel, but we’ll have to wait and see.

image by robinrkc

Update: Yahoo issued a press release Monday morning that confirmed the news They promise not to screw it up:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.

With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer seems to have decided that the best way to revive that firm’s flagging prospects is by buying up smaller startups. The latest company to feel Yahoo’s half-nelson affectionate embrace is the blogging service Tumblr. According to the WSJ, Yahoo’s board has approved the acquisition:

Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to acquire blogging startup Tumblr, people familiar with the matter said Sunday.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the company, one of the people said. Tumblr would continue to operate largely as an independent business, the people said.

Before you read too much into this, it’s worth noting that none of the coverage includes a confirmation from Tumblr, nor has Tumblr mentioned the deal on their staff blog. Also, this is all based on unnamed sources who talked to the WSJ, so there’s no real evidence that the offer to buy Tumblr has been approved or even formulated.

And even if this offer is real, I’m not so sure that Tumblr will take Yahoo up on it. The userbase is uniformly hostile to the idea,  and that means that selling out to Yahoo could cause the service to self-destruct.

But the deal could still happen. Tumblr is beginning to look worried about the lack of revenue, and this deal would resolve that issue – in the short term, at least. But based on how Yahoo has cared for Flickr and Delicious, I don’t have high hopes for Tumblr’s long term prospects. Both of those sites are like Tumblr in that they are driven by user-generated content, but both have been neglected by Yahoo (here, here). Many expect Tumblr to suffer the same fate.

A new news reader has just come across my desk, and based on the few minutes which I could get it to work I think this could be a serious alternative to Google Reader.

CommaFeed is a free news reader service that is strictly browser based at the moment. As you can see from the following screenshot, it offers a clean and minimalist alternative to the more colorful Feedly.

Or at least it is supposed to offer a cleaner alternative to Feedly; I can’t get it to work with any consistency.

One of the nicer features of CommaFeed is that it will let you integrate your Google Reader account, which I did. Unfortunately, the service wasn’t really intended to work with an account that follows over 2k RSS feeds, and I keep managing to break it. But this is probably a problem that is unique to me, so the service is probably worth a look.

Here’s what the developer had to say:

When Google announced Reader shutdown, I started to work on a clone. It is now available. It’s simple, bloat-free, and it’s open-source. Say hello to CommaFeed.

CommaFeed currently has around 1,000 users (so said the developer in a tweet this morning), so this service probably isn’t a serious threat to Feedly with its millions upon millions of users. But this could be still be a good alternative for someone.

You can try it on the website, and if it fits your needs there are Firefox and Chrome plugins. CommaFeed is also open-source, so running your own version is also a possibility.

Please let me know what you think.

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Amazon has long touted the online book community Shelfari as a site where members can assemble virtual bookshelves, contribute details, and generally be bookish. While this is all true, Amazon is also hiding a number of secrets on the site.

Earlier this week I learned that at least one of Shelfari’s members isn’t a person; it’s collection of computer programs and it has been quietly adding book details for some years now. But more importantly, that collection of computer programs is now adding details to ebooks because those ebooks are selling well in the Kindle Store.

Tell me, have you spent time on Shelfari? Members of that site probably already know this, but it was only this week that I learned that Shelfari will let you see the activity of active users. You can see the ebooks they have on their virtual bookshelves, comments, and you can even see the data that they have added to book descriptions.

Take this member, for example. The user X-Ray/Shelfari is credited with adding an incredible amount of information to various book descriptions, including:

• 900 thousand character names,
• 700 thousand location/settings,
• 491 thousand first sentences, and
• 4.8 million author and contributor entries.

And that’s just a tithe of what X-Ray has been doing.

Now, some might say that all this data was added by Shelfari employees, and that is true for some details, yes. The book summaries might have been written by a person, and I can certainly detect the presence of a real person signing off on some edits, but a lot of the edits were generated automatically. There’s the 2.7 million edits where duplicate book pages were combined, or the 3.3 million changes to the Dewey Decimal classifications of various books. While these edits might need the approval of a real person, it is a near certainty that they were suggested automatically.

And those aren’t the only book details that are added automatically.

I was tipped to this story by an author I know, Carmen Webster Buxton. She is a member of Shelfari, and a couple days ago she got an email notification that several dozen character details had been added to the listing of one of her books (scroll down). The details added to her book were all character names, without any other info or explanation, and they were all added in a single clump by the user X-Ray.

Now, Shelfari has been automatically adding details like this since at least 2010, so at first glance today’s news isn’t much in the way of news. But have you considered why this ebook was X-Rayed?

Carmen thinks, and I have to say that I agree, that this particular book was X-Rayed by Shelfari (that’s what we’re calling it) because it was seeing a fair amount of activity in the Kindle Store. Karen tells me that The Sixth Discipline has been downloaded 14 thousand times in May alone, and we are pretty sure that is what triggered the X-Ray.

Amazon is now using the sales data from the Kindle Store to select which KDP titles are X-Rayed by Shelfari. The Kindle Store is also lending a copy of the ebook so it can be X-Rayed, and the resulting data is then fed back into the Kindle Store so it can be used in the X-Ray feature which Amazon launched in late 2011 (that is what happened with Carmen’s book). This is now a closed loop whose only outside influences are sales stats from the Kindle Store.

There is a synergy here that is both obvious and elegant once it is explained, but it’s also an idea that only Amazon thought to implement. And that, in case you were wondering, is why they are winning the ebook market.

If you are an author who is selling ebooks through KDP, it might be a good idea to check to see if your more successful titles have been X-Rayed by Shelfari. There’s a good chance this has been going on for a while now, and you might want to check to make sure it didn’t make a mistake.

Has anyone encountered this X-Rayed by Shelfari feature?

The venerable weekly political magazine The Nation has just released the first ebook in their new publishing imprint.

State of the Union, Nation Essays features the selected essays of the late Gore Vidal. This essayist wrote regularly for The Nation over a span of nearly 5 decades, and in the words of The Nation this collection "exemplifies his critical vision, from provocative pieces like Some Jews and the Gays to the famous Requiem for the American Empire.”

The ebook is available now for Kindle, iBooks, and in other ebookstores. It costs $10, and is likely a sign that The Nation is planning to adopt a distinctly different pricing policy from other media organizations that have ventured into ebooks.

According to the press release, the eBookNation imprint is going to include both newly published titles by current writers as well as collections of essays and articles from The Nation's Digital Archive, a vast catalog of nearly 150 year’s worth of the leading commentaries on progressive politics and culture.

The next title to be published will draw from the essays of the columnist and political commentator Molly Ivins.

eBookNation is also going to be used to promote previously published ebooks by The Nation’s current writers.The website currently mentions a dozen titles, including the recently released The Art of Controversy by Victor Navasky, NixonLand, and The Mind-Body Problem: Poems by Katha Pollitt.

eBookNation

If you have ever doubted whether agency pricing resulted in an increase in ebook prices, I have a chart that should interest you.

The US Dept of Justice filed new docs this week in their case against Apple and its 5 co-conspirators. The filing is titled Plaintiff’s Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, and this 103 page PDF lays out the arguments that the DOJ plans to make should this case go to trial.

The filing includes details on how the DOJ believes the conspiracy came about, and it includes emails that the various publishers sent to each other as well as other evidence.

Mixed in with the dry legal arguments were a number of charts which were created by Richard Gilbert. He’s the Emeritus Professor of Economics at Berkeley University, and his charts show how the average price of ebooks increased when the 5 publishers adopted agency pricing.

The above chart is drawn just from Amazon, but since the prices of the agency ebooks were the same across the market that is not so important. But it is still worth noting that the average ebook price for Random House and the non-majors probably does not reflect the pricing at other ebookstores; those 2 lines reflect wholesale pricing and not agency.

Still, the chart shows a steep increase, does it not? There is a table later in the filing that shows that ebook prices at B&N similarly increased as a result of agency.

According to the filing, here is how the data was generated:

To measure the change in price attributable to the shift to agency, Professor Gilbert

calculated the weighted average price of all Publisher Defendants’ titles in a one-week period shortly before, and another one-week period shortly after, the effective date of the Apple Agency Agreements. Measuring the difference between the two periods, he found that prices increased by 18.6% at Amazon and by 19.9% at Barnes & Noble in the weeks following the move to agency.

The data in the above charts comes as no surprise to anyone who was buying ebooks at the time, but it does also stand as a reminder just how customer-unfriendly the Agency eBook Model really was.

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