Nate Hoffelder

Random House made a splash this week when the SFWA revealed that RH’s new digital-only imprints (Hydra, Alibi, Flirt) exploited authors with terrible contract terms.

The contract enabled Random House to grab all rights (including subsidiary rights), pay authors nothing in advance, and even bill authors for what would be considered usual business costs (design, editing, and the like).

If there’s one thing we learned from the Random House Hydra contract it’s that you need to read a contract before you sign it. And that goes for contracts with self-pub services. Random House is not alone in offering terrible terms to authors. It seems that even self-pub services can write an horrible contract a contract as exploitative as one from Random House.

Update: After I published this post, a reader pointed out even more horrible details from the contract. The redactions reflect contributions from that reader. Thanks, William!

The Passive Voice blog has tipped me to a new self-pub site out of the UK. Autharium is not a name I have heard before, and now that I have read the terms of service for authors I’m not sure it’s going to be around for long. This site demands an incredibly broad license to do whatever they want with a work.

Autharium will sell and distribute an author’s ebook, but before they do that the author must first grant them an exclusive worldwide license:

1.1 By submitting your Work to Autharium and accepting these Terms & Conditions, you grant to Autharium the exclusive right and licence to produce, publish, promote, market and sell your Work in any Digital Form (as defined in paragraph 1.4 below) in all languages throughout the world for the entire legal term of copyright (and any and all extensions, renewals and revivals of the term of copyright).

But wait, there’s more. Not only does Autharium demand an exclusive, their definition of digital form is so broad that it arguably includes subsidiary rights like audiobook, movies, and really any digital content:

1.4 “Digital Form” means any and all electronic and/or digital forms and media whether now known or later invented or developed including (by way of examples only): (i) any e-book (i.e. using any means of manufacture, distribution or transmission whether now known or later developed including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online and satellite based transmission intended to make your Work available for reading) (“eBook”); and (ii) any electronic version (other than an eBook) for performance and display (whether sequentially or not) in any manner (together with accompanying sounds, images, interactive and/or search features if any) by any electronic means, method or device (“Electronic Version”).

Autharium can legally sell the audiobook rights out from under the author, and the same goes for the movie rights. Hell, that site could sell the movie rights to their entire catalog for 10 pounds and a job offer, and it would be completely legal.

Fortunately the contract doesn’t get much worse than that (so far as I can tell). Section 14 says that you can terminate the agreement in writing. And that is an important point, because simply telling Autharium to remove the title from sale doesn’t actually cancel the contract.

But there are a couple other issues. For example, there’s a mention that Autharium might expect the author to pay Autharium for the privilege of being distributed:

In the event that Autharium has confirmed to you that it wishes to publish your Work as an eBook or an Electronic Version, Autharium shall, unless otherwise mutually agreed or unless prevented by circumstances beyond its control, produce and publish your Work as an eBook or an Electronic Version within 60 days of you having paid to Autharium any fees or other charges specified by Autharium for publication of your work.

And then there’s the fact that (as commenter William Ockham points out) Autharium gets to decide whether they want to accept a title (2.3), and until they decide to reject it they can sit on it for as long as they want (16.7):

2.3 Autharium is entitled to decide what it accepts and what it rejects in its absolute discretion. Please be aware that, notwithstanding paragraph 2.2 above and paragraph 4.4 below, Autharium may decide at any time not to publish your Work.

and

16.7  A failure to exercise or delay in exercising any right, remedy or power provided under these Terms & Conditions or by law does not constitute a waiver of the right, remedy or power or a waiver of any other right, remedy or power. No single or partial exercise of any right, remedy or power prevents any further exercise of it or the exercise of any other right, remedy or power.

All in all, this contract is not the absolutely worst I have read but it is as well as an excellent example of why authors (and everyone else for that matter) need to read contracts before signing the contract. You have to read the whole thing, too, otherwise you might make the mistake as Passive Voice (edit: or I!).

That blog covered this story before me, but they missed something (I missed a number of details as well). They looked at Section 13, which says that removing a title from sale doesn’t cancel the contract, but they missed Section 14, which covers the author’s termination rights.

The section on termination rights changes the entire tone of the contract. As terrible as the contract is, an author can escape. The same cannot be said for Random House contracts, or  ones written by other big publishing houses.

Update: A reader has pointed out the the termination clause isn’t as broad as I thought. An author can terminate if and only if Authorium is in material breach of the contract for a period of at least a month. That means this contract is nearly as bad as The Passive Voice blog indicated.

See, I told you that it needs to be read carefully. Even I wasn’t careful enough.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

The POD and self-pub service Lulu announced earlier this week that they were launching a new suite of marketing and publishing services. Authors can now choose one of several overpriced bundles of services (starting at $999) or authors can overpay for individual service. For more information, visit the Lulu website.

Here’s what Lulu VP Kathy Hensgen had to say about the deal: “We listened to our community, and they wanted enhanced options in services. As author needs evolve, Lulu continues to innovate with a deeper range of multi-media solutions for its customers as well as an even keener focus on personal attention”.

But there’s one important detail that Lulu isn’t sharing, and that is who is actually providing these services. I’m still waiting for Lulu to get back to me, but sources say that Lulu has signed a deal with Author Solutions. All the new services are actually provided by ASI, not Lulu, though Lulu is getting a commission on the revenue generated via their website.

Update: The news has been confirmed by Lulu.

Folks, the packages offered by Lulu are virtually identical to the ones offered by Simon & Schuster’s vanity press, S&S Archway. They are just as much of a bad deal, though I am unfortunately the only one to come out and say that about Lulu.

To put it simply, any service that you find via Author Solutions or one of their partners (like Lulu, S&S, Harlequin, or Penguin India) is overpriced of for no other reason than Author Solutions' profit margin has to come from somewhere, and that goes double when there is a partner involved.

And even if the services weren’t overpriced, there is a cloud hanging over the head of Author Solutions. They are being investigated by at least one law firm that could be looking to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of authors. ASI is infamous for deceptive practices, failing to pay royalties, and other misdeeds. Do you really want to join their pool of victims?

P.S. I have contacted Lulu and asked for confirmation. If they respond (there is a first time for everything) I will post an update.

When txtr announced the beagle last October they promised that this smartphone accessory/ ereader would be available at the super-low price of 10 euros.

Much media hay was made about that fact, but now that the beagle is about to hit the market it turns out that txtr’s price for the beagle was a little optimistic.

I have just received an email from txtr that confirms the beagle will indeed be sold in the US in the near future:

We are making a limited number of beagles available in North America. We are making progress with operators as planned.  However, due to pressure from readers, the decision was taken to offer it to a small group of readers who want to buy it now. The price in the US will be $69, including a $10 voucher.

No, you didn’t read it wrong. This device really will cost as much as the $69 Kindle. What’s more, with a little work you can find a B&N Nook Touch for less than the retail price of the txtr beagle.

Uncontrollable laughter aside, the super-low price was never the real price of the beagle; it was the subsidized price. Users were going to be able to get it for 10 euros because txtr’s customers (not the end user but the telecoms) were supposed to subsidize the price. I suppose that the beagle would have been used to entice smartphone users into renewing their contracts.

But now it seems that the telecoms aren’t as interested in the beagle as txtr expected (I don’t believe the middle 2 sentences), so instead this smartphone accessory is going to see at least a limited amount of retail distribution.

I have to say that I am not surprised at the lack of interest; when this device launched I lamented the fact that it was deliberately hobbled by design. It is far less capable than your average ereader, and in fact it would be better thought of as a digital picture frame.

The beagle has a 5″ E-ink screen, but instead of storing and displaying ebooks the beagle can only hold 5 folders full of page images, with one folder set aside for each title. The beagle can’t process ebooks on its own, so it needs the txtr Android app to convert an ebook to page images and transfer the page images to the beagle over Bluetooth.

Guess what? That app requires Android 4.0, so anyone who doesn’t have a relatively up to date smartphone or tablet will be out of luck.

With that restriction in mind, I’m not sure why very many people would want the beagle, and apparently many of the commenters on the beagle’s first review (in The Guardian) agree with me. They especially didn’t like the fact it was tied to a smartphone contract.

It’s not clear yet when the beagle will ship, but I can tell you that this ereader did pass through the FCC about a month ago; that cleared the way for the beagle to be legally sold in the US.

Of course, now that it’s not subsidized and we can see that the true price is far higher than txtr initially claimed, I have to say that I’m not sure that txtr will sell all that many beagles. Clearly the Kindle is a better value.

You can find the beagle listed for pre-order here.

When 5 German ebooksellers got together last Friday and announced that they were joining forces against Amazon, I was far more pessimistic than most. I thought that this coalition wouldn’t be a real competitor to Amazon until the members were better at selling ebooks than Amazon.

I still haven’t seen any sign of salesmanship but today I did learn that Tolino does not appear to have the technical chops to go head-to-head with Amazon. Lesen.net reported this morning that the newly updated Tolino reading apps were flawed, buggy, and generally annoying existing users.

First, a little background. Tolino is a coalition made up of 5 German companies (Thalia, WeltBild, Hugendubel, Deutsche Telekom, and Bertelsmann), each of which had an existing ebookstore. According to their estimates at last week’s press conference, the 5 ebookstores had a combined 35% share of the German ebook market, with (my estimate) more than a million users between them.

And it is with those existing users that things went terribly, terribly, wrong. Reports are coming in from the customers of a  couple different ebookstores (Weltbilt, Hugendubel). Both of the Android apps for these ebookstores as well as the iOS app for Weltbilt suddenly stopped working last week after they were updated to work with the new Tolino platform.

Many users have reported in the past week that they can no longer access their previously purchased ebooks. Some are complaining that they can’t even stay logged in after they exit the app.

It’s so bad that the 1-star reviews have knocked one of the apps down below 2 stars:

Now, problems like this are not unique to Tolino. Even Amazon has released updated apps which cause problems, and in fact Amazon did just that a few weeks ago when a registration bug in the new Kindle IOS app cost users all the samples and ebooks currently on the device.

But Amazon also managed to address the problem within a few hours and fix it in less than a day. The current problem with Tolino is much more serious and has been going on for a week now, with no fix in sight.

That is simply not acceptable, not by any standard.  And until Tolino gets their act together they simply are not a serious competitor to Amazon – I don’t care what anyone says.

It’s been some time since I last had the chance to talk about a new product with a Pixel Qi screen, so I was very pleased when an email from Chris Swanner of Sol Computer arrived this afternoon. Feast your eyes on this beauty:

Sol Computer is now carrying a 10″ USB-powered monitor that features a Pixel Qi screen. It’s in stock and shipping right now, and a 7″ model will be available shortly.

I will likely nver get my hands on one, but based on the product listing and the video I must say that the production value is a little low; there’s no case shown. In fact all the images I have seen show what looks like a simple mount that was sticky glued to the back of the screen panel. But who cares; it works outside:

The retail price is not listed, but I checked and one of these babies will set you back $800.

No, that’s not a mistake. It really is that expensive, especially when compared to USB LCD monitors. You can pick up one of those on Amazon for under $100.  Heck you can even get a ViewSonic 22″ Android tablet/SmartDisplay for half the price of the 10″ Pixel Qi monitor above.

So why would anyone get this? Simple: because it works in direct sunlight.

Sure, there are a lot of tablets that work out side but few work well and even fewer work well in direct sunlight or brightly lit conditions. Pixel Qi is about your only option for long-term outside computing.

Sol Computer currently offers a number of different options, including tablets, a rugged netbook,  and the 10″ USB monitor. The netbook runs Windows, and the tablets are offered in Windows and Android. Price range from "you don’t want to know" to "you really don’t want to know".

Remember last December when there was all the doom and gloom about the decline in ereader shipments? Many blogs reported it as a sign of the end of the ereader market, but given the latest survey data from Pew Research Center that’s probably not the case.

According to the PRC over a quarter of Americans adults owned an ereader in January 2013. It seems that reports of the death of the ereader were greatly exaggerated.

This data comes not from the survey on American libraries or the report on US reading habits. Instead a helpful soul with the Pew Research Center pointed me at the reports and survey data that Pew has been gathering in their study of America’s mobile shopping habits.

The January survey data shows that 31% of Americans now own a tablet of some kind, be it iPad, Android, or iPad. That’s up slightly from the 25% who reported the same in November 2012. That is an excellent growth rate, even though it is far less spectacular than what was reported this time last year (from 10% before Christmas to 19% after Christmas).

But  never mind tablets; the important news today is ereader adoption. According to the most recent survey conducted in January, a full 26% of American adults now own an ereader. That’s up from the 19% who owned them back in November.

Let’s look at those numbers. According to the survey data ereader ownership got a 9 point bump last Christmas and a 7 point bump this Christmas. That’s not exactly what I would call a sharp decline, and it is not anywhere close to resembling iSuppli’s prediction that ereader shipments would drop by a third in 2012.

In fact, if we factor in the estimated sales in markets other than the US, for example the 1 million ereaders sold in Germany in 2012, I would not be willing to argue that ereader shipments dropped at all in 2012.

Furthermore, I think I now see why E-ink predicted in early January that ereader shipments would increase in 2013. They had probably already gotten early data on ereader sales over Christmas, and that data probably showed exactly what I just told you.

It seems that reports of the death of the ereader were greatly exaggerated. The hard-core readers and book buyers are still adopting ebook readers.  The numbers might not be going up as fast as before but they’re still going up.

I told you so.

via Pew Research Center

 image by gadl

When Random House launched 3 new digital-only imprints (Hydra, Alibi, and Flirt) last fall there was little information which could shed light on how they would be run. But if there is any truth to a letter the SFWA sent out to their members today then I think RH has a vanity press on their hands.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is now warning their members that any title published by one of the imprint, Hydra, would no longer be counted by the SFWA as a legitimately published work (more on this after the letter):

Dear SFWA Member:

SFWA has determined that works published by Random House’s electronic imprint Hydra can not be use as credentials for SFWA membership, and that Hydra is not an approved market. Hydra fails to pay authors an advance against royalties, as SFWA requires, and has contract terms that are onerous and unconscionable.

Hydra contracts also require authors to pay – through deductions from royalties due the authors – for the normal costs of doing business that should be borne by the publisher.

Hydra contracts are also for the life-of-copyright and include both primary and subsidiary rights. Such provisions are unacceptable.

At this time, Random House’s other imprints continue to be qualified markets.

Note: There’s no information on the website for these 4 imprints that confirms the terms that Random House offers to authors, but there is a post  on the Writer Beware Blog that lists basically the same terms and provides more details that reveal the contract is even worse than it first appears:

• It’s a life-of-copyright contract that includes both primary and subsidiary rights.
• There’s no advance. Net proceeds (defined as net income plus subrights income less the deductions detailed below) are split 50/50 between author and publisher.
• Deductions for ebook edition: "one-time out of pocket title set up costs" (editing, cover art, design, etc.), plus a "sales, marketing, and publicity fee" of 10% of net sales revenue.
• Deductions for print edition, if there is one: "actual direct out-of-pocket paper, printing and binding costs," plus 6% of gross sales revenue to cover freight and warehousing costs.

Update: John Scalzi got his hands on a contract from RH Alibi, and it is just as bad as the RH Hydra contract mentioned above.

So why is this a big deal? Well, you could look at the contract terms and be appalled, but the letter itself is an act of censure.

It has no real legal effect, but the market effect could be profound. The SFWA has stated, as a professional trade group, that the Random House Hydra imprint does not meet their standards of conduct for business ethics and that authors should not do business with RH Hydra.

Any title published by RH Hydra won’t count towards the the 3 short stories, 1 novel, or 1 screenplay that a writer must sell before becoming a member of the SFWA.

To put it simply, RH Hydra is now on the SFWA’s shit list. And that is a big deal.

This doesn’t happen very often, and the last time I know that a major publisher was censured was back in 2009. The RWA (Romance Writers of America) put Harlequin on their negotia non grata list after the publisher launched Harlequin Horizons.

Harlequin has always been a trendsetter, and in launching Harlequin Horizons (since renamed DellArte Press) this publisher was one of the first major publishers to directly take advantage of self-published authors by launching a vanity press. Like S&S-Archway or Penguin India-Partridge, Harlequin Horizons was owned by a respectable publisher but was (and still is) actually run by Author Solutions.

Harlequin was censured back in 2009 simply because Harlequin signed a deal with Author Solutions. The censure appears to have been lifted when Harlequin Horizons was renamed and any mention of Harlequin was removed from the site.

Don’t you wish the SFWA had done the same for all of Random House? I do.

In any case, Random House Hydra is officially on the naughty list.

source

Ask anyone running the marketing dept of an ed-tech company and they’ll tell you that technology is going to fix every problem we currently face in public education. Never mind that past technology solutions caused more problems than they fixed, the new panacea will fix that too!

This same song-and-dance has been spouted by technologists ever since Edison claimed that films would make textbooks obsolete (I kid you not), and Today’s performance is being staged by Newscorp.

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

And I’m sure that Amplify will accomplish that goal.  In addition to the tablet, Amplify also sells a suite of educational tools that they believe teachers can use to improve student performance, monitor their successes, and turn everyone into an above-average student.

The software includes all the basic learning material that teachers need to dole out information on any given subject: Google Apps for Education, audio, video, games, online textbooks, multimedia lessons, reference books, a graphing calculator, and more.

The content is all reportedly aligned with the new Common Core educational standards that school districts across the US are currently working to adopt, and it even includes the highly popular Youtube-based lectures by Khan Academy , which coincidentally are now available in an iPad app.

Amplify has been testing the tablet in schools since October 2012, and they have refined both the hardware as well as the sales pitch.

The Amplify tablet is going to cost $299 and require a $99 a year subscription to access the content. There’s also going to be a 4G version, the Amplify Tablet Plus, which will cost $349 and require an additional $189 a year for the data plan.

In a way, this really comes as no surprise. Apple has led the way in getting tablets adopted in schools, with over 8 million iPads sold to schools since Apple launched the tablet in 2010. Apple’s other educational initiatives, including iBooks Author, have seen similar success with Apple reporting that iTunes U having hit 1 billion downloads earlier this week.

image by flickingerbrad

Here’s a fun little cartoon/infographic that compares some of the benefits of ereaders versus books with paper. It’s the work of Sylvia Liu, and she has graciously allowed me to repost it here.

Have you been cheated by Author Solutions or one of their many subsidiaries? There’s a New York law firm that wants to talk to you.

Update: And now that firm has filed their lawsuit.

I’ve just been given a link to a new notice posted on the website of Giskan, Solotaroff, Anderson, & Stewart, a Manhattan-based law firm that specializes in class action and commercial litigation. The law firm:

is currently investigating the practices of Author Solutions and all of its brands (AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford, Xlibris, Inkubook, and Wordclay). Authors using Author Solutions have complained of deceptive practices, including enticing authors to purchase promotional services that are not provided or are worthless, failing to pay royalties, and spamming authors and publishing blogs/sites with promotional material.

They are seeking authors who have had negative encounters with Author Solutions. (Gee, I don’t think they’ll have much trouble finding them.) There’s no evidence yet that the law firm intends to file suit, but given Author Solution’s infamous reputation in the self-pub community I should think that a class-action lawsuit is inevitable.

This, folks, is what I had been waiting for ever since Pearson made it clear that they weren’t going to reform Author Solutions. That fly-by-night firm and their various brands have a history of questionable business practices that goes back for at least a decade, with some of the brands having been in operation since the late 1990s. Pearson acquired Author Solutions in mid-2012 for $115 million and have since used it to launch new self-pub services in partnership with Penguin India (Partridge) and S&S (Archway).

That firm has always been a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen but now that it is owned by Pearson there are some very deep pockets to go after. In fact, I would bet that this is just the first of many lawsuits currently in the works. This is just one firm that posted a public notice; I would bet that the rest are quietly reaching out to disgruntled ex-ASI customers via complaint boards and forums.

In the next few months we are probably going to hear about other firms which are also working towards filing class action lawsuits against Pearson/ASI. I have to say that I am looking forward to it; the lawsuits will be entertaining and stand as a warning to any of the other major publishers that are thinking about following in Pearson’s footsteps.

image by Ana Paula Hirama

Do you work in a paperless office? No? Then I have something for you.

Here’s an interesting Kinect hack that appears to have been developed last Fall but only came across my desk today. It seems a Japanese engineer has come up with a new use for the Microsoft Kinect.

As you probably know, the Kinect is a motion tracking accessory for XBox, Windows, and whatnot. It’s being used here to track the location of the trash as it is thrown in the air as well as the trashcan.

I’m not sure who created this smart trashcan, but I did find a "making of" video. The narration and subtitles are in Japanese, so my details are a little sketchy. But from what I can tell based on the video, that is no ordinary trashcan. It’s been hacked – turned into a robot, basically. In addition to motors, wheels, and a battery, there’s also a wireless connection so the trashcan can be controlled from a computer.

The operation of the smart trashcan is pretty simple. There’s an app running on the PC which takes the data from the Kinect, crunches it, and sends commands to the smart trashcan. The trashcan is maneuvered so it ends up below the piece of trash before the trash hits the ground.

Simple, yet practical.

But as cool as this is, what I would like to see is the next iteration of the idea. Rather than catch the projectile before it hits the ground, why not shoot it down?

I’d like to see this idea be adapted to include a foam dart gun like the one at right. It’s a USB powered dart cannon which incorporates a webcam. I can’t find a place to buy it online, but the thought that it might be used to shoot down trash has a lot of appeal.

found via eBookPorn

So 3 German booksellers, Deutsche Telekom, and Bertelsmann walk in a press conference … and announce they are going to be selling a new ereader called the Tolino Shine.

The Shine is going to bring generic ereaders to a whole new level. Its bland "me-too" design is based around the same HD E-ink screen found on the KPW and Kobo Glo. Like pretty much every other new 6″ ereader on the market, the Shine also has a frontlight, Wifi, and a touchscreen (IR).

This ereader has 4GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, and claims up 7 weeks battery life. It is going to retail for 99 euros when it ships next week.

Edit: This ereader also has access to 25GB of online storage (provided by the Tolino platform).

All 5 Tolino partners (Thalia, WeltBild, Hugendubel, Deutche Telekom, and Bertelsmann) will carry the Shine in their 1,500 retail stores across Germany or on their website. eBooks will be provided via one of the 5 ebookstores maintained by the 5 partners. I am told that all of the ebookstores have been updated to switch them from their current platforms to a new one developed by Deutche Telekom. Some of the 5 partners have released reading apps, and in the near future those apps will also be updated to use the new ebookstore.

Readers will also be able to buy ebooks from the device itself as well as at Deutche Telekom’s 11,000 wifi hotspots across Germany. The new ebookstore boasts 300,000 German language titles.

So this is a Kindle killer? If you ask me, I think the Tolino partners forgot that in order to win you need to do something better than the dominant player or have some appealing feature that attracts users. I don’t see how the Shine meets those requirements.

Here’s a hands on video from lesen.net. Tell me if you think it looks like anything special:

And frankly, this is 2013. They’re not going to win the ebook market on hardware. And that goes double when you factor in the statistic that the global ereader market is shrinking, not growing.

Don’t believe me? Even what little stats I have on the German ebook market shows that I am probably correct. Last October BitKom reported that 11% of Germans read ebooks (9-ish million people). They predicted elsewhere that around a million ereaders would be sold in Germany last year (far fewer than the 12% of Germans who own a tablet). That leads to the obvious conclusion that most of those readers are not using a dedicated ebook reader. They read with an app running on a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

I would say it’s pretty clear that focusing on ereader hardware is a sub-optimal choice.

Let me know when Tolino has a plan to sell ebooks better than Amazon, because that is the point at which they might start winning. At this point all I can see is that they are making the same hardware mistake as everyone else.

Tolino

Apple has never been one to give specific details about how much content they are selling, so when I read today that an analyst with Asymco had released a new estimate of iBooks sales I was thrilled. Horace Dediu has a post over on the Asymco blog which claims that apple could be earning an nearly 2 billion dollars from iBooks.

If you take Mr. Dediu’s numbers at face value then iBooks could be quite profitable, generating $1.8 billion in sales and about $1.3 billion in payments to publishers, aggregators, and distributors.

That looks like a lot of money, but unfortunately the figure is bogus. It only took me a couple minutes to debunk it, and it turns out that absolutely none of the figures used by Mr. Dediu stand up under scrutiny.

First, Mr. Dediu arrives at the $1.8 billion figure by making guesses about the number of ebooks sold each month, and he also made a WAG about the average selling price. But let’s skip that and focus on the bigger error that Mr Dediu made at the very beginning of his analysis. Let’s see if you can spot it:

In June of 2011 Apple announced that 130 million ebooks were sold through iTunes. In October of 2012 it announced that 400 million sold.

If you’ve followed Apple news then you know they don’t announce the number of ebooks sold; Apple has announced the total number of downloads (example). That is not the same thing.

Downloads includes all the free ebooks that don’t generate revenue.  And if the statistic I found while writing about Amazon’s changes to their rules about free ebooks promotions was any sign, free ebooks outnumber paid titles by at least 15:1 and possibly as much as 100 to one (according to Smashwords).

So the short of it is the billion dollar figure that Asymco is reporting today is complete bunk. And that’s a shame because this was potentially a very hot story.

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Amazon released a new update for their Kindle app for iPad and iPhone yesterday but they don’t want you to install it. In fact, no one thinks you should install the v3.6.1 update: not me, not Amazon customer service, and especially not the couple dozen early adopters who are having issues.

Update: Amazon has fixed the issue in the v3.6.2 update. I installed it and it works fine.

I think this is the only time I have can recall having seen a change notice which mentions solely:

Note: There is a known issue with this update. If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time.

Amazon is not being alarmist here; there are early reports that this update is screwing with device registration, causing users to lose downloaded samples, purchased ebooks, and app settings, all because the updated app forces them to re-register their iThing as a new device.

Andrys Basten was the first to notice the numerous complaints in the Kindle Support Forums. As of 9am there are 17 complaints on Amazon’s website as well as another 193 (mostly negative) reviews in iTunes. Nearly all of the reviews are reporting the same issue, with varying degrees of detail:

I updated via App store upgrades to 3.6.1 on an iPhone 5. This version of the application did not preserve the device registration, and I was forced to re-register the device. I had book samples, which I use for my queue of new books to purchase, on the device. These were lost.

and

Exact same issue with 3.6.1. The upgrade made me re-register the iPhone as a new device and I lost a number of SAMPLE books – which is how I evaluate prior to purchase. I also had to re-download numerous books from Cloud to Device. I can live with the latter, but the former has not only caused me to lose a potential shopping list, it has also cost Amazon (and authors) revenue as I have no way to recover the Samples and no written record of what they were.

iTunes

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The Association of American Publishers has released a new monthly revenues report for October 2012, and if these statistics are any indication someone other than B&N has been selling a lot of ebooks.

The general book market was up 8.7% from $5.4 billion to $5.9 billion in the first 10 months of 2012, with only a few market segments reporting a decline (adult mass market paperbacks, adult & religious hardcovers and YA paperback). Children’s books in particular saw decent growth (18.7% overall), but ebooks continue to be the bright spot in the monthly report.

eBooks continue to exceed the grown of the rest of the market, with combined sales across all segments increasing by 46% ($896 million to $1.3 billion). Much of the growth can be attributed children’s ebooks (up 160%), which is still seeing the record breaking 3 digit growth rate that the overall ebook market experienced in 2009 and 2011, but the adult ebook and religious ebook segments are still seeing excellent growth (35.9% and 22.9%, respectively).

According to AAP’s publicly available stats, eBooks now account for  22% of the US book market. This change was accomplished in only 5 years.

image by Bill Ward’s Brickpile