Nate Hoffelder

A couple months ago I reported on the tale of an academic publisher suing a librarian and a university over a critical blog post by the librarian.

To make a long story short, Edwin Mellen Press was using a bogus defamation lawsuit in an attempt to silence a critic who had described that publisher’s books as poor quality and not worth the cost.

That case was a pretty clear example of legal bullying, so when I read today that a lawyer for Edwin Mellen Press had made more legal threats against yet another blog I was not surprised. Appalled and angry, yes, but not surprised.

I’ve just read a new blog post over at The Scholarly Kitchen. That academic publishing blog has covered the Edwin Mellen Press legal shenanigans in the past, but today’s post by Kent Anderson did not cover new details in the story. Instead it was a short explanation that TSK had received a couple threatening letters from an attorney and as a result had removed 2 blog posts:

Earlier this week, we received two letters from the attorney for Edwin Mellen Press. We have subsequently removed two posts by Rick Anderson discussing Edwin Mellen Press and all comments emanating from those posts.

You can read the letters over at The Scholarly Kitchen, but the tl;dr version is that Amanda Amendola, acting as Edwin Mellen Press’s lawyer, threatened one of the commenters with a libel suit. She also threatened The Scholarly Kitchen with a lawsuit if that blog should

"publish or provoke any statement about our company or authors that is in the slightest bit defamatory".

In case you missed it, this is a threat to sue over comments.

BTW, if you want to read the posts that were removed you can find them over at thew Wayback Machine (here, here). You can find the "libelous" comment on the first link.

Later in the letter Amendola goes on to claim that The Scholarly Kitchen has "a legal obligation to monitor these types of comments".

This is legal bullying, clear and simple. The goal of this letter was to scare the writers and publisher at The Scholarly Kitchen, and to that end this lawyer made an open threat which was backed up in part by a lie. Edwin Mellen Press wanted to silence one of their critics, and they succeeded.

Please note that I am not criticizing The Scholarly Kitchen for removing the blog posts; threatening letters from lawyers are scary and the safer path is to remove the posts. I support The Scholarly Kitchen in their decision.

But this letter is still legal bullying and Amendola still lied. In particular, she was lying when she claimed that The Scholarly Kitchen had a legal obligation over the comments left on that blog.

That is nonsense. Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code covers secondary liability for internet service providers, and it has repeatedly been interpreted in ruling after ruling that this section protects a blog from any legal liability for the comments left by readers. You could make whatever nasty comment you wanted about this publisher or their lawyer and I have no legal liability what so ever.

On a related note, Edwin Mellen Press is still suing Dale Askey, the librarian mentioned in the first paragraph, though they have dropped the lawsuit against the university. In other words this vanity press is only attacking its critics with legal threats and not unrelated parties.

How nice of them.

Amazon announced today that they had bought another book-focused social network, Goodreads.

This 16 million member strong community is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2007 by Otis Chandler. It’s built on the idea of encouraging members to create bookshelves of titles they’ve read, would like to read, and so on. Readers can rate books, write reviews, and discuss the details of the titles they liked.

It’s not clear yet exactly why Amazon bought Goodreads, but the most obvious reason would be the Goodreads Recommendation Engine. Goodreads has been building this engine since well, since it launched, but they doubled down on their efforts in 2011 with the acquisition of Discovereads.com. That site was integrated into Goodreads and ever since then has been the basis for the Goodreads Recommendation Engine.

It is also possible that Amazon wants to gain access to the more than 23 million book reviews that have been posted by Goodreads members, as well as the book summaries they may have written. That would make a lot of sense for Amazon, and it is similar to one of the ways that Amazon has used Shelfari. Amazon has drawn on the book summaries that have been created by Shelfari members and used them for the X-Ray feature which Amazon launched with the Kindle Touch in the Fall of 2011.

But no matter how much Amazon gains from Goodreads, it comes at a loss of the site’s reputation. The news may only be a few hours old but there has already been pushback from users. The response from twitter leans heavily towards the negative, and some users are already deleting their accounts.

This is a shame, because until yesterday Goodreads had enjoyed a good reputation for being a neutral party. It wasn’t under the influence of any retailer of publisher, and it even broke ties with Amazon in early 2012 when Goodreads decided that Amazon’s rules for accessing Amazon’s book data API were too restrictive.

But as popular as the site may be, Goodreads is not without its issues. After a number of conflicts in the Summer of 2012 between authors and their reader-reviewers, Goodreads laid down a new review policy that sided with authors.

This focus on authors over readers could be one of the reasons that Amazon bought Goodreads, but that is unlikely.

Goodreads is far larger than at least one of the other 2 book community sites owned by Amazon. LibraryThing (Amazon has owned a 40% share since 2006) has a membership count around 1.6 million, but Shelfari (acquired by Amazon in 2008)  has not disclosed their membership numbers – not in any location I can find.

Edit: It occurs to me that Amazon also owns a 4th social network, though few may think of it that way. That network is focused on the Kindle.

I wonder if the lack of info on Shelfari membership might be a sign of Goodreads' future. Goodreads is known for sharing insights into their community in blog posts and conference presentations, but now that they are owned by Amazon they could be be as close-mouthed as their corporate parent.

I think we now know why the CEO of E-ink stepped down last week. According to Digitimes, Amazon has cut their orders for E-ink screens:

Amazon Kindle e-book reader panel shipments reached about 750,000 units in January 2013 followed by 420,000 units in February. The shipments are expected to drop even further to 20,000 units in March and April, which is expected to affect E Ink Holding’s (EIH) revenues for the two months, according to industry sources.

E-ink is quoted as saying that this was not unexpected; the first quarter is usually the quiet period in the calendar, with sales picking up later in the year. E-ink’s revenues were down 33% and 44% in January and February, respectively, and the following 2 months could even be worse.

I wonder how accurate the production rumor really is? When you consider the scale of Amazon’s worldwide operations, a supply of only 20 thousand components is effectively the same as not producing any Kindles at all. That 20,000 is barely enough to repair returned units, so unless Amazon is in the habit of sinking money into excess stock this rumor suggests that they’re going to stop making Kindles for at least part of 2013.

How long will Amazon stop? That’s another question, and that depends on whether they have actually stopped producing Kindles. I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon is planning to start producing Kindles with Liquavista screens.

That would make sense, would it not? Amazon is reportedly buying Liquavista, and that implies Amazon wants to use Liquavista’s low-power screen in the Kindle. Starting production in, say, May would guarantee a sufficient quantity of color Kindles to ship in October – more than enough, in fact, to supply a worldwide launch. Amazon had supply issues last Fall when the Kindle Paperwhite launched, so I can see them wanting to avoid repeating the problem with a new color Kindle.

On the other hand, it is almost as likely that I have Liquavista on the brain and am reading too much into this small piece of production news. Let’s see what is leaked over the next few months.

Google Reader might not have the largest userbase of Google’s products but we are probably the most vocal, with over 143 thousand users signing a change.org petition requesting a stay of execution.

And now there are signs that Google may be listening. I just got an email from a reader a few minutes ago, and he pointed out a quiet change that Google has made without telling anyone.

Google has restored Reader to the menu bar found on most Google pages. I know this might not sound like much, but after it started disappearing last week (first from Gmail, then the Google Homepage and elsewhere) everyone took it as a sign that Google was taking early steps to discourage users from lingering.

Google Reader always was accessible (though the Google Reader Android app has been removed from sale), so really the removal was little more than a minor nuisance that frustrated users who were already pissed at Google.

Google has been taking flack over the imminent demise of Google Reader, and the move today could be a sign that Goole might be reconsidering. But I think I will hold the celebration for a little while. At the very least I will wait for the Android app to be restored. Now that would be a positive sign.

Thanks, Joe!

And Amazon wants to buy it.

Bloomberg is reporting this morning that Samsung is looking to sell Liquavista, their Netherlands-based screen tech research firm. According to Bloomberg’s unnamed source the rumored asking price is under $100 million. Amazon is also rumored to be interested in buying Liquavista.

I told you so.

Way back in January I reported that Amazon was interested in buying Liquavista, and a couple weeks later I reported on the rumor that Samsung was interested in selling.

Bloomberg is also reporting that "Samsung is considering a sale of the business after the acquisition didn’t meet its expectations", or so their source said. That fits in closely with my supposition that Samsung wanted to sell Liquavista because Liquavista’s low-power, sunlight visible screen tech would never be an equal replacement for the high quality LCD screens now on the market. That was in the comments section of one post, which you can find here (scroll down).

Samsung is now using screens with 300 dpi and offering incredibly rich colors on their mobile devices. As cool as Liquavista’s screen tech might be, the most recent demo video showed that the screen tech was nowhere near able to offer a screen which looked as good as even the newer mid-range LCD screens. And since it is far too expensive to compete with the cheap LCD screens, there is not much of a market for it.

Pretty much the only possible market left is ereader, and that is likely why Amazon wants Liquavista.

Thanks, pauli!

Google’s new note-taking service launched last night and it’s been catching a lot of flack from bloggers. If the early responses are any indication, Google Keep is going to fail not because of any of the service’s shortcomings but because no one trusts Google.

When I reviewed Google Keep last night I pointed out that Google Keep’s biggest flaw had nothing to do with its features; the problem was the company behind the service. And from the posts I’ve read so fat it would seem I’m not the only one who thinks that.

That doesn’t invalidate my opinion of Google Keep, but it does remind me that we can’t trust Google not to rip the rug out from under us. If anything the demise of Google Reader reminds us that it is much safer to use a third-party app that isn’t dependent on Google’s servers.

There were already a couple editorials online last night who are just as annoyed with Google as I am. Om Malik, writing over at GigaOm, put it thus:

It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.

I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt hits the nail on the head:

I use a variety of Google products, and normally, this might interest me, but I’m seriously having doubts about bothering, following the abrupt shutdown of Google Reader. Is it worth entrusting data to a service that might be killed abruptly? It seems fairly bizarre to violate users' trust so much, and then days later ask for it right back.

It all comes down to trust, in the end. When you think about it, our chief objection to Google Keep is that no one trusts Google anymore. If they’re willing to kill a tool like Google Reader at the drop of a hat then how do we know they won’t repeat that betrayal?

Popularity? That wouldn’t stop Google; it certainly has not stopped them in the past.

I have been told that Google Reader had more active users than Google+ the week before it was killed. I can’t name my source but I trust them enough to repeat the claim. Also, in spite of what Google reps claimed when GR was killed, I’m told that GR usage had not declined.   Growth had stagnated when Google shredded GR’s sharing options in order to integrate Google+, but Google Reader was still more popular than Google+.

Just to put things in perspective, Google+ reportedly had 343 million users in January (assuming the external estimate is correct). Gmail, another immensely popular Google service, had 450 million users in June 2012.

If Google is going to simply ignore the interests of a group of more than 350 million users just because the service doesn’t fit some vague corporate ideal then how do we know that they won’t do it again?

Amazon has already responded to the rumor that Techcrunch invented a few hours ago. In an email to Business Insider, an Amazon spokesthing is quoted as saying:

"It’s not happening–we are already at the lowest price points possible for that hardware."

They’re probably correct that the current Kindle Fire hardware is as cheap as it can be. As FJTorres pointed out in the comments of that post:

The current FireHD has several premium features (the tuned audio system and speakers, for example) that could be deleted to produce a cheaper tablet.

..

I could see them hitting $119 and $179 with ads. $99? I doubt it. Not in HD, this calendar year. For that they’d have to stick with the WSVGA screen of the original Fire.

One problem with deleting the premium components from the Kindle Fire HD is that if you take too much away you’ll end up with just a Kindle Fire.  As I wrote in the previous post, why not save the trouble and just cut the price on that tablet?

 Amazon is never one to pass up an opportunity to try to get you to read on a Kindle.  They launched the Kindle in 2007 with a free conversion-by-email service, and since then they have added easy-peasy apps, web browser plugins, and even a printer driver  that let you send content with but a single click.

And today they are extending their efforts beyond users to include websites. Amazon has just announced a new "Send to Kindle Button" that can be installed on a website.  Here’s more from Amazon:

Have you ever encountered news, blogs, articles and other content on the web that you want to read but don’t have time to do so immediately? The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.

You can see this button in action at BoingBoing, where they have added it to their Sharebar (the image at right).

From what I can tell it works much like the buttons that Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket have released. Clicking the button will send the body of whatever blog post you are reading to Amazon where it will be converted to a Kindle ebook and sent to your Kindle.

You can find the Send to Kindle Button here.  There is also a WordPress plugin which can be downloaded here.

JManga broke some hearts this week when they announced that they were ceasing operations.

This digital manga distributor announced earlier this week that they would no longer sell manga as of 26 March and planned to shut down completely in May.

Any customers with store credit would get a refund in Amazon.com gift cards, and any purchased content will be lost when JManga turns off the lights in May (no downloads allowed).

Once again, the legitimate customer is harmed while the pirate gets away scot-free.

JManga launched with much fanfare in 2011. This company was backed by the 36 publishers of the Japanese Digital Comics Association, and it was created as a laudable response to the then rampant fan-based scanlation (piracy and English-language translation) of Japanese comics.  By offering a legitimate option these publishers hoped to provide the content that was obviously desired by fans.

Sadly, JManga wasn’t up to the task. The site suffered from troubles with getting and keeping content, pricing issues (fans balked at the early high prices), and technical problems including only releasing an Android app in late 2012 (over a year after JManga launched) and never actually releasing an iOS app.

And now JManga is shutting down and taking all existing purchased content with it.

What we have here is a yet another example of the fact that DRM does nothing but punish the paying customer. It doesn’t actually stop piracy; in this case piracy was already rampant thanks to readily available scanners and a large and enthusiastic fan base.

All that was accomplished with JManga was that the legitimate customer was punished for being honest and paying for the content they received. The pirates, on the other hand, weren’t bothered at all.

I wish more publishers could learn from this mistake, because the hostility that has been shown toward JManga customers is appalling.

Yes, hostile is the correct word. In fact I would go so far as to say that any publisher who chooses to use DRM (leaving out the ones that have it forced on them from above) is expressing contempt for their customers.

DRM is the digital equivalent of a shop owner who glares at every customer that enters the store, secure in the knowledge that everyone is a thief. Never mind that the customer has money in their pocket; every customer is a thief.

That is exactly how JManga (as well as every publisher who distributed manga on that site) behaved toward their customers. Ditto for all other publishers and distributors who insist on DRM.

With that in mind, the real shocker is that anyone buys digital content at all.

(And yet I still buy DRMed ebooks. Go figure.)

source, source

Following Google’s announcement that they were going to kill off Google Reader on 1 July, Digg announced today that they are working on a replacement.

No, you didn’t read that wrong, and yes, I was as surprised as you.

Details are still scarce on the features, release date, but this is something they had planned to do this year. After yesterday’s shocking revelation from Google Digg made their feed reader their first priority.

Digg hasn’t been in the news much lately. This social news site fell from prominence as a result of the poorly conceived Digg 4.0 redesign. It was quickly abandoned by many users who flocked to Twitter, Facebook,and Reddit to share news, and the last time Digg crossed my radar was last July when the site was bought by BetaWorks for an undisclosed sums.

I have high hopes for Digg’s new reader. These folks are already fans of Google Reader (what blogger isn’t) and they’ve been running a news site for some years.  And even though Digg did muck up their last major redesign (and the current Digg website is far to prettified and information-poor), my fingers are crossed that they will get this one right.

There is a huge opportunity here for someone to step into Google Reader’s shoes. That service is an essential tool for anyone who follows a lot of RSS feeds. In fact, the vast majority of of the followers of this blog (76%) depend on Google Reader or a service that plugs into Google Reader. Extrapolate tat statistic to all news junkies that use RSS and suddenly there are tens of millions of users up for grabs.

Digg is also planning to release an API so all the 3rd part apps that now work with Google Readercan switch over. That’s going to make the next 6 months to a year rather interesting, because Feedly is also working on their own Google Reader replacement.

I can’t wait to see who picks up the market share abandoned by Google Reader.

Digg

  Update: This post how features 9 possible Google Reader alternatives.

When Google announced yesterday that they were cutting me off from Google Reader, I (and many others) suddenly had to scramble to find a new dealer for my news addiction.

I’m still in the middle of picking a replacement, but so far I have been a little disappointed at some of the suggestions put forward by other blogs. Some of these fools threw together a list of apps like Pulse, Flipboard, Google Currents, and the like, none of which meets the needs of the average Google Reader user.

Those apps are all intended for entertainment reading, not for use by hard-core news junkies like myself. The hard-core user needs a way to pack as much info on screen at once. We are not out to be entertained; we want to get as much info as possible.

I follow 1900 feeds, and while that is a little extreme I bet that anyone who follows more than 100 RSS feeds has the same needs I do. Rather than suggest useless apps, I am going to list the ones that I plan to test:

Feedly

NewsBlur

Tiny Tiny RSS

The Old Reader

BlogLines

Opera (this web browser has a feed reader built in)

FeedsAnywhere

Update: And here are a couple late additions:

Bazqux

CommaFeed

—

Feedly looked like an early contender,and the developers behind this app had even been working on a setup called Normandy that operated completely independently of Google Reader. But I’ve tried it and I don’t like the UI. First and foremost the UI designer thinks gray text on a gray background is a good idea, but I also don’t like Feedly because it defaults to the same prettified and information-poor layouts found in apps like Flipboard, Google Currents, etc.

Feedly is rapidly growing to be the leading replacement for Google Reader. This service has responded quickly to the influx of GR users and added features, viewing modes, and defaults that might fill the needs of a hard-core news junky.

I have given up on using the rss feed reader option in Opera. It is frankly an ugly and minimally functional cobbled together afterthought that doesn’t offer nearly the features viewing modes, or functions I need. Plus I think it gave me a migraine – twice.

CommaFeed is a relatively newcomer to the market. As of late May 2013, this service is still ramping up from its first few thousand users while adding features as fast as it can.

Bazqux is an established but relatively unknown news reader. It is nearly as feature rich as Google Reader was and can support a thousand or more feeds. This is a paid service and it does not currently have any mobile apps.

FeedsAnywhere is a very mobile friendly, free, durable news reader that works well on small screens. It too can support a high number of RSS feeds.

I have not tried all of the rest.  Have you? What do you think?

Google is in the middle of their annual Spring-cleaning and unfortunately for me Google Reader is going out on the curb:

So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

I was hoping this wouldn’t happen. The last time Google updated Google Reader they stripped away its native social networking features and integrated the RSS feed reader into Google+, and before that Google uglified the layout to make it look more like Google+.  I thought that was a sign that Google Reader would be around for the long haul, but I guess that was overly optimistic.

Google is claiming that the shut down comes after  several years of declining use. That could well be true but Google is still going to leave a lot of users in the lurch.

I am a hard-core user of Google Reader, and I currently follow over 1,900 RSS feeds. While that is a little on the high side, the one time I ran a poll I learned that most gReader users use the app to follow an average of more than 100 RSS feeds.

Frankly I don’t know whether I will be able to find a feed reader that is as good, and for me this could be a serious problem. Google Reader was a vital tool for finding news stories for this blog, and I don’t know where I will find a good replacement.

I have head good things about NetNewsWire, but that is strictly an OSX and iOS product. And I have found this page, this page, and this page of feed readers which I plan to try.

But at this point I am freaking out.  Can someone recommend a newsreader app that works across Windows, Android, and the web browser?

Any 2 of those 3 would be good.

The Australian bookstore chain Dymocks has just announced that they are shutting down their vanity press subsidiary. There is a notice on the D Publishing website that informs visitors that operations will cease on 25 March 2013, and authors currently participating in the program have received an email notifying them of the change.

Dymocks was rather opaque on their decision, though it looks to me like it just wasn’t profitable. “We learned a lot about that market and those customers but unfortunately the constraints of the platform and business model meant we couldn’t fulfil the vision,” Dymocks managing director Steve Cox told BRW. “It was a difficult decision but we’ve decided to focus on areas that are core to what we do. The investment required to left the site to the next level at this moment in time is not an investment that we think it’s right to make.”

Dymocks launched D Publishing in December 2011 in the hopes of cashing in on the growing number self-published authors, but unfortunately that group did not turn out to be sufficiently naive. Far too few were willing to make the mistake of overpaying for the privilege of being published in the Australian market.

And that is not a error on my part; D Publishing launched with a distribution network that included only Google Play Books as well as Dymocks' own ebookstore and bookstore (for paper books). There is no current mention of D Publishing distributing beyond beyond those 2 stores, so I think they never did expand their distribution network.

As I look over the D Publishing website I have to say that I am amazed that the service existed this long. Dymocks charged ridiculous prices (and required authors to hand over all rights) but offered very little in return.

Dymocks couldn’t even promise to get an ebook into the major ebookstores, and yet they demanded exclusive rights and charged authors $400 for the privilege. No wonder they failed.
source

The South by Southwest Con is going on right now, and Marvel is there to show exactly how big their bag of gimmicks really is. They’re showing off Project Gamma, their amazingly wonderful plan to add soundtracks to digital comics:

Project Gamma is, in the words of Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso, an "adaptive, non-repetitive score" that changes as a person swipes from panel to panel through a digital comic. Marvel is working with the production companies Momentum Worldwide and CORD, whose composers and producers have worked on "Harry Potter," "Drive," "The King’s Speech," and "Looper."

I am underwhelmed. This strikes me as just another gimmick that will turn out as interesting and useful as augmented reality. That was one of the gimmicks that Marvel unveiled at last year’s SxSW, and that’s a sign we could be seeing a trend.

I think Project Gamma is going to disturb the existing reading experience more than add to it. Does any dedicated reader really need an audio cue that in a certain scene we should pity a character, or that in a later scene is tense because there is a confrontation?

I think readers are smart enough to figure that out on their own. And if nothing else this is not a movie, for Pete’s sake.

Fortunately it looks like this won’t be coming soon, and when it does it will only see limited release:

Marvel has not announced a release date for Project Gamma, although Alonso said that he expects it to be available to the public before the end of 2013. Gamma’s price point, debut comic, and final name have yet to be determined, said Alonso.

I’m going to bet that nothing much will come of this.

Or perhaps it would be better to say that it will continue to amount to not much. After all, ebooks with soundtracks have been hailed as cutting edge since at least 2008, and in 2011 Booktrack launched their first ebook set to synchronized music. Aside from the initial splash none seem to have amounted to much, with Booktrack only showing a few dozen titles on their website.

But that’s just my general dislike for the idea. Tell me, how many ebooks do you have that have a soundtrack out of how many in your library? would you buy more if they were available?