Nate Hoffelder

When Amazon announced new restrictions yesterday on how their affiliate partners could promote ebooks, they said the new rules would only affect a fraction of a percent of affiliates.

Sadly, that is not true. The new rules are actually going to affect all Amazon affiliates, and  complying with the new rules is going to require the affiliates to do the impossible.

Amazon wants affiliates to control what customers do after they click a link and go to Amazon.

According to the new 80-20 rule (my name for it), Amazon affiliates will be penalized in any month that one, their affiliate ID shows up on more than 20 thousand free Kindle ebook purchases, and two, the total number of paid Kindle ebooks account for less than one in five purchases. If an Amazon affiliate can’t comply with the rule, they will lose their income for the month.

When that rule was revealed yesterday there was a lot of hand-wringing among the free ebook sites as well as among authors and everyone interested in promoting ebooks by giving them away for free.  There was a lot of discussion how this would kill most of the value in KDP Select (the optional free days is valued by indie authors as much as the KOLL payments). There was talk about how this would damage the ability of free ebook sites to promote ebooks while still covering the costs of running a website.

Update: Andrys Basten has pointed out that Amazon’s new rule might have 3 clauses, not 2. The first requirement for the 80-20 rule could be that the rule only affects sites that, in the opinion of Amazon, "are promoting primarily free Kindle eBooks". The rest of my post is now hinges on a drone at Amazon deciding on whether an affiliate fits under the first clause.  That does not exactly fill me with confidence. (Note: Other reports suggest that Amazon has said there are only 2 clauses.)

This is all true but we were thinking too small. You see, Amazon’s new rule counts all free ebook downloads, not just the ones linked to directly.

For example, let’s say you click on this link to Amazon and then get 5 free ebooks. Even though I didn’t promote one of those free ebooks, I am going to get dinged for all 5 downloads. They will count towards that 80-20 rule.

The problem here is two-fold. Not only could Amazon potentially penalize any affiliate, this rule also assumes that affiliates can control what Amazon customers do after they click the link.

The larger Amazon affiliates are but a single download frenzy away from going over the 20,000 limit. What’s more, this Sword of Damocles dangles over even the small and medium free ebook sites. Earlier today I heard from George Burke, the owner of eBookDaily, a 2-month-old free ebook site. According to George his site has now has 12 thousand active members. Under the new rule George is going to lose his Amazon affiliate fees in any month that the members average more than 2 downloads each.

I am only slightly kidding when I say that Amazon expects affiliates to practice mind control over everyone who clicks a link. Crazy, no? I’m still not sure how they expect that to work.

But the free ebook sites can always switch to promoting paid ebooks, right? That will get the average up and minimize the chance that they’ll violate the 80-20 rule, right?

I’m not so sure.

The problem with trying to encourage the average ebook buyer to pay for more ebooks is that the ratio of purchased ebooks to free ebooks is rather low. I have been told, and a second source confirms, that the average ebook buyer probably downloads 15 free ebooks for every one they buy.

Edit: My original source says that the ratio of free to paid acquisitions is even higher than 15:1 (that was old data).

Second Edit: Smashwords reported in April 2012 that they saw 100 free downloads for every paid ebook. Look at the slides here (slide #49).

That’s a 15:1 ratio, and in order to comply with the 80-20 rule the free ebook sites (and all other Amazon affiliates) will have to try to get Kindle customers to buy 4 ebooks for every free title purchase at least 1 paid title for every free one either by getting them to download fewer free ebooks or by getting the customers to buy 4 times as many ebooks as they buy now.

One possible solution is that they could switch to listing more paid ebooks. Many sites already list a lot of paid deals, so I’m not sure that will have much of an effect in changing people’s behavior. Affiliates could also stop listing free ebooks entirely, but there is no guarantee that it would have any effect on the downloaders.

In any case, the real problem here is that Amazon expects affiliates to control what happens after someone clicks a link.  I know it sounds crazy but that’s what Amazon wants.

If anyone can think of a solution, please share. Also, please feel free to point out the flaws in my reasoning.

If you ask me, I think Amazon should simply disallow affiliate links on ebooks.  It would be easier on the affiliates, but it might also be more damaging on Amazon’s bottom line.

Barnes & Noble made a similar move last March when they stopped paying affiliate commissions on Nook ebooks. I’m sure you can recall how badly they’ve been doing this past year in terms of Nook hardware and content sales.

Amazon probably won’t suffer quite so much of a slowdown in growth, but they are still creating an opportunity for one of their competitors to step in and start trying to take customers away.  Given that more people read on smartphones and tablets than on ereaders, this is a real possibility.

image by dqqd

We’ve long known that it’s possible to cheat your way to a better ranking in ebookstores by buying faked reviews, but did you know that you can pull off the same trick with a print best-seller list (even a list as prestigious as that of The Wall Street Journal)?

It’s going to set you back $60,000 to $100,000, but it can be done. What’s more, it’s an accepted practice that even publishers like Wiley have used from time to time.

The WSJ reported this week that a marketing company by the name of ResultSource has expanded their services to include rigging the best seller lists. They’ve developed a way to buy their way on to lists:

It isn’t uncommon for a business book to land on best-seller lists only to quickly drop off. But even a brief appearance adds permanent luster to an author’s reputation, greasing the skids for speaking and consulting engagements.

…

But the short moment of glory doesn’t always occur by luck alone. In the cases mentioned above, the authors hired a marketing firm that purchased books ahead of publication date, creating a spike in sales that landed titles on the lists. The marketing firm, San Diego-based ResultSource, charges thousands of dollars for its services in addition to the cost of the books, according to authors interviewed.

It’s not exactly a new phenomenon. Five minutes with Google found 6 different stories on gaming the best-seller lists (one, two, three, four, five, six), and I’m sure there are more examples out there.

If anything the only real news this week is that ResultSource can offer as a paid service what used to be very difficult to pull off on your own. They’ve taken the one-off scam of yesteryear and developed it into a system where they basically sell a spot on the best seller lists.

So how does it work?

ResultSource arranges to pre-buy 2,000 to 5,000 copies of a title in the weeks before it is launched. All those sales are recorded in Nielsen Bookscan in the first week that the title is available, so if the title in question is in one of the smaller niche markets (business books, for example) those several thousand sales can be enough to vault a book on to the best-seller lists.

And when it comes to business books, being able to claim the status of  best-selling author can be worth enough that the initial investment can actually pay off:

It isn’t uncommon for a business book to land on best-seller lists only to quickly drop off. But even a brief appearance adds permanent luster to an author’s reputation, greasing the skids for speaking and consulting engagements.

Mr. Kaplan (one author interviewed for the piece) says the best-seller status of Leapfrogging has "become part of my position as a speaker and consultant."

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that this scam has become an accepted practice by at least some publishers. A rep for Wiley even admitted to recommending ResultSource to a small number of business authors. "We view it as a marketing tool that targets sales and the timing of those sales," she said.

This scam works best on the best seller lists that use Bookscan data as one of their sources. The best-seller list maintained by The WSJ, for example, has probably been compromised numerous times by ResultSource, but other lists like that of The New York Times are more likely to be immune. The NYTimes creates its best seller list via a secret process, and that should make it more robust. Current industry common knowledge suggests that it’s based at least in part on book sales at select bookstores across the country. But no one knows exactly which bookstores, so the NYTimes list is safe, right?

Well, no. That list has been quite publicly gamed on at least one occasion in 1995.

So are there any lists you can trust? I doubt it. Amazon has been shown to fiddle with their best seller list, rendering their list (and the one from Digital Book World) suspect. And even Bookscann cannot be relied upon to report sales; ask anyone and they’ll tell you it has also long since stopped being an accurate reflection of the book market.

Are there any lists you can trust?

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 image by Martin Cathrae

Amazon has recently announced a change in the rules for their affiliate program. When those new rules take effect in March 2013 they’re going to make it harder for websites like eReaderIQ to cover their costs with affiliate commissions while still helping readers find free Kindle ebooks.

Ever since Amazon opened the Kindle Store they have been using free ebooks as loss-leaders. The free ebooks were used to draw in as many customers as possible in the hopes that they would stick around and buy more ebooks. And thanks to Amazon’s passion for encouraging affiliate marketing, a whole host of sites have sprung up to find and introduce you to those free ebooks.

Unfortunately that is probably going to change soon.

Starting on 1 March, Amazon is going to start checking to see if an affiliate is encouraging people to download "too many"  free ebooks, and if anyone who crosses over the threshold will lose the affiliate fees for that month.

The new threshold has 2 components. According to Amazon, they will block a payment to an affiliate for any month where:

1. At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks
2. 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links

Amazon says that fewer than a tenth of a percent of affiliates, and they could well be correct. But no matter how many sites are affected, what’s really going on here is that Amazon is closing a lucrative loophole in the affiliate program.

Loophole? What loophole?

Let me explain. There are a number of websites that direct you to free Kindle ebooks not because they want you to download the free ebook but because they hope that you’ll buy something else while on an Amazon website.

All of these sites are not using Amazon’s affiliate system for its intended purpose (advertising a product sold on Amazon), but to instead promote a free product in the hopes that they can pick up an affiliate fee or sales commission on a product they didn’t promote.

Amazon naturally thinks that the sites I describe above are gaming the system, and they’re not going to let the bigger sites get away with it anymore. Starting in March a website that promotes Kindle ebooks is going to have promote more paid Kindle ebooks or it won’t make any money in a given month.

Luckily this will only affect the larger sites, and possibly not even all of them.

Amazon

Thanks, Jeremy!

When Bookish launched a couple weeks back I didn’t think much of the site. The press release claimed that Bookish would be a great community that would help readers find their next book, only there was no community and the discovery engine was less than amazing.

I suspected at the time that Bookish would turn out to be little more than a marketing tool for the 3 publishers who financed the site, and today I learned that my suspicions were correct.

Peter Winkler, writing for The Huffington Post, noticed that all of the books promoted on Bookish were published by either Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster:

The top stories at Bookish when I first visited it on Feb. 5 were Elizabeth Gilbert’s take on Philip Roth’s advice to a novelist to quit writing, an interview with novelists Michael Connelly and Michael Koryta, the editors of The Onion reviewing Fifty Shades of Grey and The Art of War, and an exclusive excerpt from Harlan Coben’s latest novel, Six Years. There were additional interviews with Po Bronson, Rhonda Byrne, author of The Magic, her second sequel to The Secret, and children’s book author Lucy Hawking.An ad on the right side of Bookish’s main page, for Jojo Moyes' novel, Me Before You, displaying Penguin Books' iconic logo, set my Spidey sense tingling.

"Hmm," I asked myself, "I wonder how many of these authors are published by the publishers behind Bookish?" A little sleuthing on my part quickly provided the answer: all of them.

I 'm not sure that comes as a surprise; I had assumed that the claims of editorial independence were bunk.  I mean, why else would 3 publishers fund a site through 2 years of development if they weren’t going to use it to promote themselves?

But wait, there’s more. Not only does the editorial content focus on book by these 3 publishers, so does a lot of the rest of the content on the site.

Peter reports that all of the exclusive author content is provided by authors signed to the 3 publishers. There is also adverts on most of the pages, all for books published by Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster.

And even the discovery engine left a lot to be desired. In spite of the fact that this site ws originally announced in 2010, Peter found the results to be anemic at best. It wasn’t able to find his book when he typed in the title, but then again he wasn’t published by Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster. And it turns out that Bookish’s much-vaunted discovery engine can only recommend from a rather limited selection of titles – around 250k at the moment. That’s not even as large as the combined back list of Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster.

Anyone want to take bets on how long before Bookish is shut down as a failure?

My money is on Bookish not lasting 6 months (barring a major reorganization), but I could be wrong. But at the very least I am sure that most will agree that Bookish will die in a shorter amount of time than the site took to develop.

Ever since the news broke earlier in February that Amazon had a patent to sell used digital content there’s been a heated discussion on what this means for the ebook market and authors as well as whether it is right/wrong/ unethical/immoral to sell used digital content in this way.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the debate I have also been encountering a fair amount of misinformation. A number of people (including at least one blogger) don’t understand exactly what it means to sell a used ebook. One blogger writing over at TeleRead believes that it is illegal to resell an ebook:

Amazon has patented a means to sell used e-books within the Kindle system. A book will be branded within the system when it is bought, and when the buyer puts it up for resale at the Kindle store, it will be removed from his account and transferred to the buyer’s account. Amazon will receive a small fee for each sale. A limited number of sales of each book may or may not be included in the system.

According to copyright law, specifically the first sale doctrine, this is illegal because digital goods aren’t physical things so they can’t be resold. (See my article, “The First Sale Doctrine and eBooks,” for more details.)

She’s wrong (though her post on first sale doctrine isn’t completely off base). It’s a little complicated to explain why, so I’m going to have to take things all the way back to the beginning and work from there.

Let’s start with the author.

Someone writes a book and they decide to sell it in the Kindle Store. They upload it to KDP, negotiate and agree to Amazon’s contract, and the ebook is listed in the Kindle Store.

And then Amazon sells the ebook.

Well, no, they don’t.

I know that we are all used to saying that we buy ebooks but the legal relationship of exchanging your money for a Kindle ebook is not a purchase. What happens is that you agree to a contract. Amazon takes your money and grants you the right to use the ebook under certain conditions.

Those conditions are defined by amazon in the TOS. The terms of use for the Kindle Store are rather lengthy, and you can find them here. If you are not familiar with what’s in that contract then I suggest you go read it.

The transaction is a license, not a purchase. The exact difference between a license and a purchase is still a thorny legal issue, and it is not clear what rights you have outside of the terms of use, but there is a difference.

I suspect that people who say that the act of selling used ebooks is illegal due to copyright law don’t seem to have realized that Amazon does not sell ebooks. That means that copyright law does not necessarily forbid the reselling of Kindle ebooks.

—
Sidenote: The blogger mentioned above believes that you lease an ebook instead of buy it. You could phrase it that way if you like (a lease is indeed a type of contract) but she is still wrong in saying that selling a leased ebook is automatically illegal. She missed the fact that under certain conditions you can legally buy and sell a lease. It happens all the time.
—

Here’s the thing.  When or if Amazon resells ebooks, my guess is that what they will actually be doing is transferring a license from one customer to another while also cutting off access to the ebook for the seller and enabling access to the ebook for the buyer.

When it comes to reselling Kindle ebooks, the contract between the author/publisher and Amazon is probably going to matter just as much as copyright law,  and that is because Amazon arguably cannot resell a Kindle ebook if the author/publisher does not give them permission.

Earlier in the post I specifically call out the negotiation step because when an ebook is uploaded, the author/publisher is presented with a number of options like price, market availability, and whether the ebook should be added to KDP Select.  The author/publisher is able to decline or accept these conditions.

I also expect that when Amazon decides to start selling used ebooks, authors and publishers will be presented with the the decision of whether they wish to allow Amazon to resell their ebooks.

I am basing that assumption on the text of the patent (and Amazon’s past behavior). The patent includes a provision where the copyright holder can decide to prohibit the reselling of an ebook in much the same way that an author/publisher can decide not allow their ebooks to be loaned by one Kindle user to another.

In fact, this patent appears to cover both the reselling of ebooks and when users loan ebooks to each other. That detail leads me to conclude that Amazon will ask for permission to resell ebooks.

Or at least that is what I think. I could be wrong but I expect that I will end up being closer to the truth than the folks who say that reselling ebooks is illegal.

P.S. If a lawyer shows up and wants to present a counter argument, please do. I like learning why I might be wrong, and the legal issues surrounding this situation are far from settled.

image by J. Tegnerud, uitdragerij

The online bibliophile community Goodreads has just released some of the results of its most recent member survey and they’re raising a few eyebrows.

This survey was based on 1,500 Goodreads members. The results were presented last week at O’Reilly TOC, and based on the first half of the slides I think Otis Chandler was at TOC to meet with publishers and pitch Goodreads' user base as a survey group. (I’m not complaining; I just thought some publishers would be interested.)

Goodreads found that 37% of the members who owned smartphones read on them, with about 13% not reading ebooks on any other device. In comparison, 86% of tablet owners read on their device, with nearly a third reporting that the tablet was their only reading device.

There’s no obvious explanation for the sharp difference in usage, but the survey does show that smartphone owners are far more likely to use them on the go, with lunch breaks and commuting as the most common reading scenario. Tablet owners, on the other hand, are more likely to read at home than anywhere else.

Good reads also mentioned that during this past holiday season tablets outnumbered ereaders under the Christmas tree. Three and a half times as many tablets were bought for each ereader purchased, confirming once again that the ebook market has moved beyond ereader hardware.

And when it comes to finding their next read, it seems that the vast majority of Goodreads members do what I do. When they finish a book, 83% seek out other books written by the author, while nearly as many look for similar books (75%). But when it comes to picking a book to read, nothing compares to word of mouth. A trusted friend was the single leading reason that members bought and read books, with reviews, samples, and buzz not even coming close.

Later in the survey the respondents revealed that price isn’t necessarily the dominant factor in where they buy ebooks, with only 44% reporting that they usually shopped around before buying. And less than half of that 44% always shop around.

And when readers do shop around, it will likely come as no surprise to learn who has the most loyal customers. It’s not Apple; 65% of the people who read in iBooks also use read Kindle ebooks (and over a quarter read Nook ebooks). And Barnes & Noble also has to share their customers with Amazon (37%).

But Amazon doesn’t have the same issue. Readers of Kindle ebooks are much more loyal than any other segment of the market, with only 18% also reading in iBooks and 15% reading Nook ebooks. This more than anything is an example of why Amazon has dominated the ebook market; they have a loyalty that cannot be matched.

BTW, Kobo placed a distant 4th in the "also read" category, coming in behind Google Play. No matter how impressive one might find their jump in revenue last year they’re still not making a lot of gains in the US market.

I have long argued that copyright law has grown far out of proportion and no longer serves the needs of the creators, so I was pleased to read this week about a recently filed lawsuit that could prune back some of the overgrowth.

The noted Sherlockian scholar, Baker Street Irregular and prominent attorney Leslie Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library and The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship, to name a few, has filed a civil lawsuit against the Conan Doyle Estate to determine that the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are in fact in the public domain.

Mr Klinger is suing (according to the press release) because of the pressure that the Conan Doyle estate applied against Mr Klinger’s latest anthology of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories.

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes was supposed to be published by Pegasus Books and included Holmes stories by numerous well-known mystery/sci-fi/fantasy authors.  The anthology is on hold because the Conan Doyle estate contacted the publisher, asked for a fee, and threatened to block distribution of the anthology if the fee was not paid.

The Conan Doyle estate’s justification for their legal shakedown is at best questionable and is based on a not-entirely settled point of copyright law. Allow me to explain.

As you probably know, the vast majority of the Holmes stories are old enough that they are no longer in copyright in the US. (The author died in 1930, so his entire body work is public domain everywhere but the US.) In the US you can legally download nearly any of the Holmes stories from sites like Project Gutenberg. If you wanted to, you could then format the stories as ebooks or bind them into a paper book and sell the stories. This is completely legal.

But according to the Conan Doyle estate, one thing you cannot do is write a new story that features Sherlock Holmes. There is exactly one remaining Conan Doyle book, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, that still contains copyrighted Sherlock Holmes stories – 10 stories, in fact. Because some of the original stories are still in copyright in the US, the estate believes that they can control who writes new stories. They are using that control to collect fees from publishers, studios, and anyone with deep pockets.

This is not the first time that I heard about the Conan Doyle estate collecting license fees. Star Trek: The Next Generation paid off the estate back in the 1990s. That tv series made 2 episodes that references Sherlock Holmes, and they paid an unnamed fee each time.

What’s more, even the editors currently suing the Conan Doyle estate have paid the fee before when publishing a collection of newly written Sherlock Holmes stories. They’re just not willing to submit to the extortion this time (I think it may have been the alleged threats that tipped the scale, or possibly the size of the fee demanded by the estate):

"The Conan Doyle Estate contacted our publisher," says Klinger, "and implied that if the Estate wasn’t paid a license fee, they’d convince the major distributors not to sell the book. Our publisher was, understandably, concerned, and told us that the book couldn’t come out unless this was resolved. "

Unfortunately for the estate, their interpretation of copyright law is arguably not supported by a plain text reading of current law. US copyright law protects a work as a whole, not the elements in a work.

Or at least that is one interpretation, and it is the legal argument that these editors are presenting in their lawsuit. I tend to agree with the editors because if you take the counter position to its logical conclusion then it is revealed as false.

If the elements of a story can be copyrighted and not the work as a whole, then all the Sherlock Holmes stories that have entered the public domain include a copyrighted element. If the Holmes character is still under copyright then arguably you cannot do _anything_ to _any_ of the Holmes stories. They all mention a copyrighted element and thus cannot be used.

Does that make any sense? I don’t think so, and I am sharing that conclusion in order to offer a simple explanation for why the character is not under copyright.

In any case, it doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters here is what the judge decides.This case was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and if appealed will go to the Seventh Circuit Court.

Let’s see what happens.

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image by shining.darkness

Amazon updated the Kindle iOS app today and something tells me they’re no longer seeing the Kindle as the center point of their ebook plans.

In addition to a fix in the brightness control and a new end of book pop up menu with suggested actions, the iOS got a subtle byt meaningful addition to the highlight option. You can now highlight text in 4 colors, not just the single color offered before. As you can see in the screen shot at right, your color options now include pink, blue, yellow, and orange.

I know this doesn’t look like much, but the important detail isn’t what it looks like on the iPad (or the fact the Kindle Fire doesn’t have this option yet).

No, the important detail here is that you can’t see those 4 different highlights on the Kindle’s E-ink screen. Amazon has given the iOS app a feature that the Kindle will never have (unless there is a color Kindle coming).

I think this adds to a point I made last week. I wrote a post about hardware no longer being the determining factor for ebook sales, and one detail I used to support my argument was that Amazon was giving the Kindle apps all the same features as the Kindle hardware. Today Amazon proved my point by adding a feature that the Kindle can’t have.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a sign that Amazon has a color Kindle on their product roadmap. It would explain their rumored interest in Liquavista, and even if it’s not true one can always dream.

And in other news, Amazon also added a new end of book reminder similar to what is currently included on the Kindle Fire. When you get to the last page of a Kindle ebook, the iOS app will now suggest that you write a review, rate the ebook, or share with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. The app will also suggest other ebooks you might be interested in reading.

You can find the app in iTunes.

I have long held the position that LCD screens aren’t as evil as everyone claims, and that the belief that E-ink is better for you eyes is a myth. Now there is new evidence that reading on an LCD screen device like the iPad or Kindle Fire might actually take less mental effort.

A team of researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, have recently published a paper which shows that in spite of claims to the contrary, it was easier for a test group to read on an LCD screen. What’s more, the test group also showed approximately the same retention of the reading material, no amter whether they read on LCD, an ereader, or on paper.

Dr. Matthias Schlesewsky and his colleagues tested a group of 57 Gen X and senior citizens for this study. The comprehension and retention of the reading material was judged by asking the test subjects questions, but in order to measure how much effort the test subjects put into their reading this study had to go high tech.

The test subjects were strapped into a rig that tracked their eye movements and measured their brain waves using an EEG (electroencephalogram) machine. Past research has indicated that reading can be associated with certain patterns of brain activity, and in this study the researchers noted when they occurred and at what intensity.

The results were mixed, and I’m not sure I would place the same emphasis on them as the research team did.

First, the EEG measurements showed that the Gen X test subjects used about the same amount of mental energy while reading on all 3 materials, with the tablet requiring slightly less energy than the ereader and paper book. The eye tracking figures showed the younger group also spent about the same amount of time reading on each type of material, with the tablet taking slightly less time.

But with the senior citizens, the results clearly showed that the test subjects spent far less energy and time reading on a tablet than was spent reading on the ereader or paper book. Curiously enough, the ereader took more energy and time than reading the paper book or the tablet.

Interesting, no? The researchers have posited that the backlight on the tablet might contribute to it being easier to read. I think it merits further study, myself; I’d like to see the study repeated with a slightly different set of conditions.

One other interesting result from this study came from the comprehension questions asked after the reading sessions. Both test groups showed a slightly higher error rate when reading on the ereader or the tablet. It’s small enough that the researchers described it as insignificant, but I disagree.

As you can see in the graph at right, going from paper to digital introduced a slightly higher error rate. Given the general hype surrounding digital textbooks at the moment, this bears further study.

Right now the textbook publishers and their pr flacks are talking about the many wonders of digital textbooks (I still see federal govt interest in digital textbooks as a disguised jobs program) but there’s never really been much substance to prove that digital textbooks were better.

Here we have a study that suggests digital textbooks are not better for students. It’s a pity that this probably won’t slow down the mad dash towards the next hot trend, but as we all know the US government rarely lets evidence get in the way of politics.

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Here’s a story from north of the border.

Edwin Mellen Press, a publisher that is widely regarded as being little more than a vanity press, is now suing a McMasters University librarian (as well as the university) over a 2010 blog post.

I’ve been reading about it today and I have to say that this is one of the stranger lawsuits I have ever heard of.

The blog post originally appeared on the personal blog of Dale Askey, a professional librarian. He wrote it in 2010 (but at some point since then deleted the post from his blog). In spite of this he is still being sued, but that’s not the weird part. Mr. Askey wrote that blog post while a librarian at Kansas State University, and it was only afterwards that he happened to change jobs and start working at McMasters University in Ontario Canada.

I’m shaking my head right now because what we have here is a Canadian university being sued by a UK publisher over an article the university did not publish which was written by someone they did not employ and which is no longer posted to the internet.

Is this what it feels like to have a stroke?

For the sake of thoroughness (and to better understand this case) I found the original blog post. You can find it at the end of this PDF of Edwin Mellen’s filing (page 10).

It looks to be fairly tame stuff (I know I have said worse about US publishers) and well in line with both any reasonable 1st amendment protection as well as standards of professional behavior. With that in mind I have to wonder what exactly Edwin Mellen expects to get out of this.

They tried and failed to get the university to repudiate the librarian and the blog post, but MU is supporting Dale Askey. And so Edwin Mellen is suing the university and the librarian, claiming that this blog post cost them millions of dollars.  The lawsuit would be laughed out of court if it were filed in the US, but given that it was filed in Canada it will take some time and money to defeat Edwin Mellen’s bullying.

It’s almost as if Edwin Mellen looked at the lawsuits the RIAA filed against their customers and thought it brilliant. Clearly they think turning one negative blog post into a 3-ring media circus, with themselves as the guest of honor, was the correct response.

Whatever. I gave up trying to figure out their thought processes about 3 hours ago.

source, source, source

image by Loozrboy

When Pearson bough the self-pub scam experts Author Solutions last July, I hoped that it would be a sign that Author Solutions would clean up their act and rise to a higher ethical level. Sadly, it is now clear that Pearson had planned all along to get down in the muck.

Penguin India has just launched a self-pub scam service called Partridge, and it is a sad sign of how low this once honorable publishing company has decided to sink. Like the similar Archway service that Simon & Schuster launched in the US, Partridge is actually run by Author Solutions.

Prices start at ?12,450 (about $234 USD), considerably cheaper than Archway’s packages which start at $2,000. That’s not a discount; Partridge is offering a much shorter list of services included in each package.

I’m not sure if that was a cost-cutting measure or simply general sloppyness, but I have noticed that the Partridge website is considerably less polished and professional than I would expect. It looks like it was slapped together and then put online with minimal planning, editing, or much thought in general. For example, if you try to find out what ebook formats they distribute and where, you will be told this:

Every Partridge India book is available in digital or electronic format. They are compatible with different e-reading devices and can be downloaded from various online bookstores, such as Google and Amazon Search Programmes.

The rest of the website is about as detailed as that excerpt. Given the millions of English speaking tech people in India, I have to wonder at the quality of the website. Did Penguin India outsource the entire project to China?

Now that would be ironic (from an American viewpoint, at least), but at a minimum I would be concerned that the work performed by Partridge will be on par with the quality of their website.

In any case, I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Any self-published author is better off making their own way. Whatever services are being offered by Author Solutions can almost certainly be found cheaper elsewhere. You just have to look.

Remember the Pyrus Mini, that ereader with the 4.3″ epaper screen which E-ink insists ripped off their proprietary screen tech?

Guangzhou OED Technologies, the Chinese company that made the screen on the Pyrus Mini, has apparently branched out into other screen sizes. E-ink has not raised a stink about this because they were probably hoping that no one would notice, but I’ve just learned that a new 6″ ereader from the Dutch company Icarus appears to be using the knockoff screen.

What’s more, a brief glance through other product listings have revealed a number of different ereaders that appear to have some type of epaper screen that wasn’t made by E-ink (or any other screen company I know of).

I first came upon this story via a new product announcement on the Dutch ereader blog eReaders.nl. The covered a new ereader from Icarus. The Icarus Essence is a no-frills 6″ ereader that lacks Wifi or a touchscreen. It has 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and broad format support including Epub, PDF, Mobi, and more.

Just about the only detail that is worth noting is that the product listing says it has an epaper screen, while all the other Icarus ereaders have E-ink screens. That might be a small detail but it is a telling one, trust me.

Also announced last week (but not yet available) is the Icarus8, a larger ereader with Wifi, audio ability, and an 8″ (1024×768) epaper screen. I’m still looking for confirmation but I don’t think that is an E-ink screen either.

But wait, there’s more. It turns out that Trekstor, sellers of the Pyrus Mini, are also selling the 6″ Trekstor Pyrus and it too has a knockoff screen. TeXet, a Russian gadget company, has a number of ereaders with E-ink screens as well as at least one ereader with a 4.3″ (screen like the one found on the Pyrus Mini).

Isn’t this interesting?

There are now 4 ereaders on the market in various parts of the world that clearly do not use E-ink’s screen.  It makes you wonder how many have escaped notice, doesn’t it?

It also raises the question of whether these screens really do violate E-ink’s patents. Surely 3 companies in 3 countries wouldn’t all put themselves at risk of a lawsuit without first going throw the technical specs with a fine tooth comb and making sure that the screens were legal.

Now I’m beginning to understand one of the conversations I had at CES 2013. I never wrote about it, but I met with the device maker who originally developed these ereaders before licensing them to teXet, Icarus, and Trekstor. The CEO of the OEM doesn’t want me to name his company, but he swore up and down that the knockoff screen was not a knockoff. He insisted that it didn’t infringe on E-ink’s patents.

I’m seriously beginning to wonder if he is correct; but for now all I can say is that there are details to this situation that I don’t have yet.

That might change in the not too distant future. When I was at Flextech last week I made sure to bring my Pyrus Mini with me. I left that ereader in the eager hands of the Flexible Display Center, and I handed it over with the understanding that they would dissect the screen and send me a report.

It’s going to take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months before I get an answer, but I do plan to get to the bottom of this.

When Intel unveiled their rugged educational tablet last April I predicted that it would be overpriced and underpowered. I’ve just been sent a link to the first product listing for this tablet and I am correct on both counts.

The cheap and powerful $200 educational tablet has morphed into a $700 tablet with a weak battery, outdated CPU, and running an unimpressive OS.

It’s easy to tell that the StudyBook is quite a few steps behind the technology curve. It’s running Windows 7 Home, which is not at all a tablet friendly version of Windows. It has a single-core 1.5GHz Atom Z670 CPU, a 7″ screen with a resolution of 1024×600, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a pair of cameras (VGA and 2MP).

This tablet weighs in at a husky 526 grams, much heavier than the Nexus 7 (340g). The extra weight is likely due to the Studybook’s rugged case, but it is offset by an anemic 2.8Ah battery which is promised to offer 6 hours of runtime. Frankly, I don’t believe it.

I have not found any details on the software that ships with this tablet, but Dynamism does describe this tablet as being "a valuable option for enterprises and mobile workers who need to rely on a durable, ultraportable, Windows tablet". Based on the lack of detail on the software I would not assume that this tablet ships with much in the way educational software.

All in all, there is absolutely no detail about this tablet that would make it worth buying. It is not only ridiculously overpriced when compared to any of the educational tablets on the market, it is even a poor deal when compared to the MS Surface Pro tablet. That gadget retails for $900 and is both significantly more powerful as well as designed from the bottom up as a tablet OS.

In terms of performance, the $200 Nexus 7 has the Studybook beat (just to name one device). It has a better and faster CPU, better screen resolution, better battery life, and it even runs an OS which was designed to work on a touchscreen.

If you are looking for an educational tablet, even in that small niche there are any number of better options. In the 10 months since Intel announced the Studybook. everyone and their cousin has released or at least announced a kid’s tablet.

OLPC is working on the XO tablet. Archos, Polaroid, and even a small tablet maker like Ematic have released kid’s tablets. Lexibook has released numerous models, including 7″ and 10″ tablets as well as a tablet convertible. But if I had to pick the best model I would go for the Fuhu Nabi 2. It has a price and specs similar to the NExus 7 only with software customized for kids.

I don’t know if Intel realized quite how much the market was going to change in the past 10 months, but they should have.  The Studybook design was outdated only a couple months after it was announced, thanks to the Nexus 7 being released in June 2012. It met the $200 price point that the Studybook never reached and it had a multi-core Tegra 3 CPU.

I have to wonder why Intel didn’t beef up the Studybook as new and better tablets were released. In all honesty I don’t think they could have done so; they’re not nimble enough.

Dynamism

When the German court legalized the used software market last fall I predicted that Amazon would soon be interested in setting up a way for their customers to sell used ebooks in much the same way that we can now sell used books, CDs, DVDs, etc.

Today I learned that I could not have been closer to the truth.

Amazon has just been awarded a patent for an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects".  The patent looks fairly broad to me, and covers more than just ebooks. The abstract mentions "e-books, audio, video, computer applications" and that tells me that Amazon s not thinking small.

The patent was originally filed in 2009, and it describes not just the sale and or loan process but also the possibility that Amazon or the copyright holder might set a limit on the number of times a piece of content might be transferred:

an object move threshold ("OMT") may be set. The OMT may limit the number of transfers of a used digital object to other personalized data stores when the used digital object has been moved more than a threshold number of times, thereby helping to maintain the scarcity of the digital object in the marketplace. For example, a popular used digital object such as a song may have an OMT of three, only allowing three permissible moves of the song to other personalized data stores. After the OMT is reached, the used digital object is no longer permissibly moveable to another personalized data store.

That last detail has already been implemented as part of Amazon’s current lending feature where a title can only be lent once and only if the copyright holder enables it. But the way it is described here suggests that Amazon is also thinking about limiting the number of times a title could be sold.

The patent also mentions that the restrictions could vary based on user data. For example Prime Members could possibly be allowed to sell or resell a piece of content more times than a regular Amazon customer. Or a college student signed up with Amazon Student might have special options for reselling his Kindle textbook.

In any case, Amazon is clearly thinking about the next stage of the ebook market (and doing it years ahead of everyone else). While a lot of publishers are basing their future plans on certain assumptions like ebooks cannot be resold (that’s why digital textbooks are hot right now), Amazon is planning for the day when ebooks will be sold as used goods.

And even if Amazon doesn’t decide to get into the used digital content market they can still use this patent as a carrot for publishers. It can be used to block Amazon’s competition from setting up a service to sell used ebooks, something that I’m sure some publishers would desperately be interested in.

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image by karen horton

I’ve mentioned the Android reading app Moon+ Reader  once or twice (it’s bundled into the hacked firmware for the Sony Reader T1 and T2). It’s a very popular app with excellent file management features, ebook formatting options, and support for downloading ebooks from website.

It’s one of  the more popular reading apps available for Android, second only to Aldiko in terms of downloads – or at least it was before the app was removed from Google Play.

It looks like the Russian ebook distributor LitRes.ru has been watching the Samsung-Apple patent fight and taken a lesson to heart: If you can’t find a legitimate way to compete, invent a rules violation and get some authority to throw the book at your competition. That’s what has happened to Moon+ Reader this weekend. According to the developer’s blog, this reading app has been removed from Google Play because of a piracy complaint.

LitRes has just discovered that Moon+ Reader, an app that has been available for a couple years now, lets you download ebooks from websites. And *gasp* that includes pirate sites.

Like any number of other ebook apps (including Stanza,Mantano, and Aldiko), Moon+ Reader supports OPDS. This is an RSS-like protocol that enables websites to offer ebook downloads inside compatible reading apps. While at first glance it looks like a download protocol, it would be better to describe it as a catalog protocol because it also includes important metadata like title, author, file format type, and description.

Far from being a tool of pirates, OPDS is used by many legitimate ebookstores and download sites. Project Gutenberg, Baen Books, Internet Archive, and Feedbooks all use OPDS to offer ebook downloads, and the app developer Bluefire uses it to connect their reading apps for iOS and Android with partner ebookstores. There’s even a trick where you can set up your own library of legally purchased ebooks in your Dropbox account and create an OPDS catalog for it.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking that this could be an honest mistake. Well, no. From what I can tell, this is not the first time that LatRes tried this particular trick.

The developers of a Russian text-to-speech ebook app Chitatel reported late last month that their app had been removed from iTunes for much the same reason (it’s back now). According to their announcement, LitRes accused them of piracy because it was possible for users to use the Chitatel app to download pirated content. Newsflash for Litres: You can also download pirated content with a web browser.

LitRes has a number of apps in Google Play, including both an audiobook app as well as an ebook app. Aside from the non-Russian reading app, none of the apps have all that many downloads. But one thing they do have are a lot of 1-star reviews. When this news broke on Reddit, one redditor proposed a campaign of retaliatory 1-star reviews. I’d say it’s having an effect.

As for Moon+ Reader, the developer has filed a counter notice with Google.  The app is bound to be returned to Google Play, though it might take up to a month for Google to get around to it.

Until then you can download the free version of the app from the developer’s website. The paid version of the app requires a $5 registration fee which can be paid via Paypal.

Update: LitRes has responded to the story. Assuming that Google Translate did its job, they claim that both apps mentioned above "include in their applications pre-installed links to pirated library as the main source for books". I call BS on this statement; the main sources of Moon+ Reader are sites like PG, Smashwords, Feedbooks, etc – none of which are pirate sites.

And while it is possible that Moon+ Reader could have offered a link to a pirate library via a user submitted OPDS catalog, that catalog (as well as the link to it) is not in the app so removing the app from Google Play will not remove the pirated content.

I think it far more likely that LitRes filed a piracy complaint in order to harm the competition, not fight piracy. Had that been their goal they would have communicated with the developers first.

Second update: One reader is reporting that his version of the app has an extra download site in the list that isn’t showing up in the 3 versions of the app I downloaded. He reports that TUeBL is listed alongside Smashwords, PG, and the rest. That is (according to some) a pirate site, though the operators dispute this. But does it have ebooks which LitRes cam file valid DMCA notices? I don’t know.

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