Nate Hoffelder

Earlier this week I reported that the POD and ebook distributor service Lulu had dropped DRM from their ebookstore, and it seems they’re not the only ones. Some time next week Centraal Boekhuis, the leading distributor of books and ebooks in the Netherlands, will start distributing more ebook titles unencumbered by Adobe DRM.

They’re not giving up on DRM entirely, but they have indicated that another 8,426 ebooks will be available protected only by digital watermarks. Counting the DRM-free titles (both Epub and PDF) this means that nearly three-quarters of the 20,000 ebook distributed by CB will either have no DRM or have so little DRM that the average user likely won’t notice.

CB is describing these 74% of ebooks as being DRM-free, but that’s not quite the case. First, there’s no guarantee that these ebooks will be DRM-free when sold through the major ebookstores (Kindle, Nook, iBooks), but of course we knew that. Also, the 16% of titles carried by CB as truly DRM-free are more likely to stay that was when sold via the major ebookstores.

The more important detail here is that there is a difference between having no security and having some security. Digital watermarks still provide a measure of control. While they don’t get in the way of a paying customer, they can still be used to identify who originally bought a piece of content. That can be useful data should an ebook, mp3, or other content show up on a pirate site.

I’ve mentioned digital watermarks before, so rather than repeat myself may I suggest that you read this, this, or this.

This deal mainly affects the smaller ebookstores which work directly with CB to stock Dutch titles (because digital watermarks need to be applied at the time of download).

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PlasticLogic may have overstated the involvement they had with the PaperTab flexible tablet, but they did have a couple interesting gadgets of their own to show off.

In addition to the lighted PL screen we’ve seen before and a watch, there was also a dual screen ereader concept. It’s tied to a cable and can’t do more than play a slideshow of page images, but thanks to PlasticLogic’s screen tech it is also quite thin.

The 2 screen panels are each one of PlasticLogic’s 10.7″ screens, and they are connected via a double hinge in the spine. The pages could be changed together or separately.

Update: PlasticLogic posted a demo video on Youtube:

I had shot a video showing this ereader in action but unfortunately my camera seems to have eaten it.  I’m kicking myself right now because it was a very cool sight to see.

I’ve always been a fan of really large screen ereaders, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen one on the market. I’ve always wanted to see an epaper alternative to displaying large-scale documents like blueprints, diagrams, or posters.

Sure, there are things like Microsoft’s Surface Table, but staring into a bright light like that is not good on the eyes – not on that scale.

I almost didn’t go CES this year because I didn’t think would be any new or really cool gadgets to write about, but now that PlasticLogic Intel has proven me wrong I’m glad I’m here.

A new partnership has been announced between PlasticLogic, Intel, and Queen University’s Human Media Lab. This Ontario based university has just revealed the PaperTab, a new flexible tablet based around PlasticLogic’s  epaper screen.

This tablet is running on a second generation Intel Core i5, and it uses the same 10.7″ plastic display which had previously been developed for PlasticLogic past failed devices like the Que and the PL 100, which was developed for the Russian education market. This tablet also has a touchscreen, and as you can see in the video it uses a rather fascinating way to transfer files from one screen to the next which looks to be similar to the tap-and share technology used in Samsung’s smartphones.

Other tricks shown off in the video include flexing the tablet to turn the page, something we’ve seen before in the Snaplet, a smart watch style device which the HML unveiled last year. That device was probably never planned as a commercial release, but clearly that project has influenced the PaperTab.

Before someone points out that a tethered device hardly qualifies as a tablet, let me say that I agree.  That doesn’t mean it’s not cool, though it does suggest that this won’t ever be a less-than-ridiculously device.

The several screens used in the demo video cost some hundreds of dollars, and that puts it out of the running. I’m someone who is in the habit of working on 3 or more screens at once, a work process which is enabled by cheap Android tablets.  While they might not be able to integrate as well as the PaperTab, my Android tablets function better as standalone devices.

In any case, this device is said to be at CES this week. I’ll seek it out.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the best business newspapers out there, but when they try to cover a tech topic they tend to articles verging on the nonsensical.  You might recall the WSJ columnist who in August gave up on his Kindle because he forgot to charge it before a cross-country flight; today I have an article which argues that ebooks are a failed product niche simply because the adoption rate has slowed.

This article was written by Nicholas Carr, and it is based in part on the recent survey results released by Pew Research Center last week. He points to the detail that more readers have read a paper book than read an ebook and uses that as a basis to pretty much proclaim that everyone who is a proponent of ebooks is wrong.

Mr. Carr is quite fond of straw man arguments, and in fact he starts his article with one:

Ever since Amazon introduced its popular Kindle e-reader five years ago, pundits have assumed that the future of book publishing is digital. Opinions about the speed of the shift from page to screen have varied. But the consensus has been that digitization, having had its way with music and photographs and maps, would in due course have its way with books as well. By 2015, one media maven predicted a few years back, traditional books would be gone.

I’m not sure I know anyone who would have claimed that paper books are going away – not in 2012, in any case. Sure, some people thought that in the early days of the Kindle (2008, 2009) but I doubt that anyone really believed in that aspect of ebook hype past late 2009 or so. I know I did not.

Mr Carr also seems to like mis-characterizing the rise in popularity of ebooks in the past few years:

The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology’s early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period. Further converts will be harder to come by.

The reality is that an explosive growth in a market as people rush in to adopt a new product is not an aberration; it is a basic truism of economics. The point at which the rate of adoption slows down is called saturation (Wikipedia).

Yes, folks, this WSJ writer did not bother to consult Wikipedia while trying to understand the economics of the ebook market.

Mr. Carr goes on to mistakenly identify a particular literati subculture as being the only ones who read so-called literature:

Readers of weightier fare, including literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, have been less inclined to go digital. They seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call "real books"—the kind you can set on a shelf.

The problem here is that I know any number of people who read heavy-duty, dense books on ereaders and smartphones. That, and arguably it’s a mistake to claim that a title identified as literary fiction is actually of higher quality than a popular novel like The Hunger Games (here’s why).

But once Mr Carr gets past the weak arguments and misunderstood economics, he begins to reach the conclusion that many people in digital publishing figured out years ago:

E-books, in other words, may turn out to be just another format—an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback. That would fit with the discovery that once people start buying digital books, they don’t necessarily stop buying printed ones. In fact, according to Pew, nearly 90% of e-book readers continue to read physical volumes. The two forms seem to serve different purposes.

Welcome to 2009, dude. Once you have adjusted to the changes, perhaps you could join us in 2013? We don’t have flying cars, but we do have Skynet.

And finally, Mr Carr closes out the article with a historical inaccuracy:

Having survived 500 years of technological upheaval, Gutenberg’s invention may withstand the digital onslaught as well. There’s something about a crisply printed, tightly bound book that we don’t seem eager to let go of.

Um, Gutenberg didn’t invent the book, or to be more exact he didn’t invent the codex (the technical term for a book with paper pages, spine, etc). The codex dates to at least the first century AD (Wikipedia, again). Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Even if books had died out, I seriously doubt that printing presses would no longer exist in any form; they are used for far too many purposes besides printing books.

All in all, this is a disappointing article, especially coming from what used to be an august publication like the Wall Street Journal. Hell, I’ve done better, and the total sum of my writing training consists of just the few writing classes required to get an engineering degree from a state university.

Surely Nicholas Carr can do better.

image by Lynn Gardner

For the past year or so I have been pointing out that B&N’s sky is falling, and today have come true. Barnes & Noble released details today on their sales this holiday season, and the details are so bad that I am reminded of Borders' news in early 2011 that they were insolvent. B&N is not quite that bad, but now I see why they needed that 90 million dollars which Pearson invested in Nook Media.

Today’s news covers the 9 week holiday season, the period in which American retailers expect to cover their losses from the rest of the year, to "put them in the black".

FYI: That is an reference to old-fashioned ledgers, where a profitable day was recorded in black ink, and a money-losing day is written in red ink. It’s also where Black Friday got its name.

Sales via B&N brick-and-mortar stores and the B&N website dropped 10.9% this holiday season, compared to the same period last year. Retail sales of Nook hardware in particular fell below B&N’s expectations, belying the initial good sales over Black Friday weekend. “Nook device sales got off to a good start over the Black Friday period, but then fell short of expectations for the balance of holiday,” CEO William Lynch said. “We are examining the root cause of the December shortfall in sales, and will adjust our strategies accordingly going forward.”

The Nook segment had revenues of $311 million for the nine-week holiday season, down 12.6% as compared to last year. This is attributed to both fewer units sold as well as lower selling prices, and the loss was only partially ameliorated by an increase in digital content sales, which were up 13.1%.

Even though quite a few of my readers disagreed with me, I’ve been worried about B&N’s Nook sales for quite some time. Ever since they ran a couple BOGO sales last Spring, and then followed them up with regular sales on refurbs, I’ve been convinced that the Nook hardware has been the albatross around the neck of B&N. And even as far back as the last holiday season there were signs that B&N was having difficulties moving hardware; sales of the Nook Touch were far below what B&N would have liked.

That’s why they decided to spin it off, and that’s why they’ve picked up piecemeal investments from MS and Pearson.

It’s a pity they have not sold it yet. When I last covered this bad news, one of my readers pointed out that there were any number of potential buyers, including Rakuten, Microsoft, Best Buy, or a retail conglomerate like BAS Group or Tesco.

Right now I’m really hoping one of them might be interested in rescuing the Nook.  In spite of the bad news today, there is still some real value in Nook Media. Oh, it’s not worth the couple billion valuation which B&N has placed on it, but as an ebook platform what it really needs is to go international and or be picked up by a company which has the deep pockets B&N lacks.

image by Monica Arellano-Ongpin

It’s a fact of life that legacy industries are often killed off by newer industries spawned by new inventions, so the generally worsening situation of the newspaper industry should come as no surprise as more news moves online.

What does surprise me is that some in the industry seemed determined to speed up the process and hasten the deaths of their companies. I’ve just read that the National Newspapers of Ireland has adopted a new licensing scheme where they expect websites to pay to link to one of their members.

I’m not kidding. They’ve been sending out notices, demanding payment:

The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts.

Note that this is not paying for an excerpt, which is not that unreasonable, or some punitive measure for the copying of an entire article. No, the NNI wants to charge for links like this, this, or this.

For those 3 links, I now have to pay the NNI 300 euros. Seriously. Apparently this group of 15 newspapers is under the impression that merely mentioning an article on one of websites is not legal; they think it is copyright infringement.

Don’t hurt yourself trying to understand their reasoning; it’s utter nonsense. First and foremost, let’s consider the business aspect. There’s the fact that naming a work’s title does not and cannot be copyright infringement – not under US law (I’m not familiar with Irish copyright law). A link (or the URL inside it) is little more than a name, so arguably the same rule would apply. And even if it is more than a name, the URL can be regarded as a factual statement (you can find the content here) and facts arguably cannot be copyrighted in the US (some courts disagree).

Crazy, no?

Unfortunately this is not the first time this insanity has appeared, though none have gone quite so nuts as the NNI. There’s an ongoing push in Germany to pass a law which would force Google to pay publishers for using the tiny snippets in Google’s search results, and Belgian newspapers recently settled a similar dispute with Google.  France is also considering a similar law.

What’s even better is that the Belgian settlement came after Google lost the court case, and complied with the judge’s order to delist the newspapers from the search engine. That of course cost the Belgian newspapers a lot of traffic and reducing their revenue.

And that, my dears, is the true crazyness about demanding payments for links and snippets. A link from one website to another is free advertising. It’s a source of page views which the recipient didn’t have to pay for.

One commenter on the source article put it into perspective:

By that same rational….. Do the newspapers intend to pay for each link to an advertisers site that they host? Possibly ending up paying more for the traffic they drive to advertisers sites than they receive for hosting links in the first place? Surely they’re killing their own revenue model.

What we’re really talking about here is that these Irish newspapers want everyone else to pay for the privilege of giving the NNI member websites more traffic. That alone is enough to show what a nutty idea this is.

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It’s long been obvious that the pipedream of selling content on the iPad was never going to generate as much revenue the early hype suggested, and today there are new signs that selling subscriptions to the digital content might not be as lucrative as some had believed – a detail which the failure of The Daily made quite clear.

David Carey, president of the magazine and media publishing conglomerate Hearst, sent out a "state of the company" email this week. There are a bunch of interesting details in the email (which you can find here) but I just want to cover exactly 2 points:

Print is doing very well, with a number of new titles launching successfully in a bunch of international markets. Digital is not doing quite as well, though Mr. Carey is still pleased with the progress:

In keeping with our UNBOUND positioning, we made impressive gains in digital media. By the end of the year, we counted nearly 800,000 monthly digital subscriptions in the U.S. across iPads, NOOKs, Kindle Fires and Android devices—the highest in the industry. Those subscriptions are now generating profits after 24 months of investment. And how exciting to see how this business is developing organically: More than 80 percent of our digital subscribers are new to our files, and their engagement levels meet or exceed the high levels we see from our print products.

While 800 thousand subscriptions sounds like a lot, it really isn’t. According to their website, Hearst publishes 20 titles in the US, so if you divide the total number of subscriptions by the title count you end up with a much less impressive 40 thousand. Considering that any one of those 20 titles has a subscription base in the millions, 40,000 subscriptions isn’t a whole lot.

Take Seventeen, for example. While I’m sure all Hearst magazines have their subscription data where advertisers can find it online, I happened to find this one first. This magazine boasts 2,000,000 print subscriptions. Cosmopolitan, another Hearst title, has 3,000,000 print subscribers.

Between the 2 magazines, Hearst has 5 million print subscribers vs a nominal 80,000 digital subscribers. That’s not much, and that figure comes nearly 3 years into the iPad app era, 3 years from the point where digital magazine content was supposed to have taken off. What’s more, Hearst has actually been into digital magazines since long before the iPad. I can find them listed as a Zinio partner way back in 2006 and 2007.

Just to put this into perspective, Hearts boasts of reaching 87 million Americans each year, making the 800 thousand worth only about 1% of their reach.  They also launched a new title this year, HGTV Magazine, and its print subscriptions hit 750,000 subscribers this year.

I won’t go so far as to say digital magazines are a failed concept, but I do think that we still have not yet seen the ignition point. Sales are growing, but they’re not exploding like ebook sales were after the Kindle Store launched.

People simply aren’t adopting digital magazines in droves.

If anything, I think publishers are going to have to rethink the magazine paradigm. Existing print titles are tied to the idea that the content comes out in a huge monthly (or weekly) bundle, half of which is adverts. That single monthly bundle is a business decision, not one based on the original non-ad content, and it perhaps should go by the wayside.

Edit: As Jon Jermey pointed out in the comments, a monthly magazine issue is to an article what the CD was to a track. I think it’s time to break up the bundle into smaller pieces of content, and possibly even to selling the individual article. Given the growing recognition of  short works like Kindle Singles, it’s not such a stretch to think that this could be a functional business model.

The digital magazines which I will be watching this year are the several newbies which have only a few stories per issue. The Magazine and Symbolia are offering content in smaller bite sized bundles rather than the single huge monthly bundle. This could be the way forward.

The Nikkei reported today that Apple will be expanding their ebookstore soon. Some time in the near future, possibly as early as next month, Apple will start selling ebooks in Japan. They have reportedly already signed a number of Japanese publishers, including Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and others.

Apple reportedly has 80 thousand titles lined up, all from local publishers. When combined with their dominance of the Japanese tablet market (iPad has a 60% market share), Apple will likely have a sizable advantage over the competition, one which is should be enough to help overcome the fact that Apple was beaten to the Japanese ebook market by Kobo, Google, and Amazon.

All this competition is expected to boost the growth of the Japanese ebook market. It’s currently estimated to be worth 70 billion yen, and some believe it will grow to 200 billion yen in the next few years.

If today’s news is a sign of what’s to come then 2013 promises to be a very interesting year.

Not sure what I mean?  If you look at the pattern of the ebookstore launches in the past 60 months I’m sure you’ll see why I think that.

Twice in the past 6 months one of the maj0r ebookstores launched a local store, just to have their competition follow suit weeks or months later.

• Brazil? Kobo, Apple, Amazon
• Japan? Kobo, Amazon, Google, and Apple (soon)
• China? Amazon, for now
• India? Amazon again

The pattern of where you don’t see competing launches, China and India for example, is going to make for an interesting comparison. Will those ebook markets grow as fast as the hyper competitive markets?

More importantly, which ebook market will be the next to see multiple ebookstores launch? I’m thinking Russia, myself, B&N is already sniffing around in that market, so Amazon is probably hot on their heels.  If there’s anything that I learned from the Waterstones-Amazon deal, it’s that Amazon won’t let B&N get the slightest advantage. Why else did Amazon sign with Waterstones if not to keep the bookseller away from B&N?

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image by thms.nl

In what was perhaps the shortest beta test in recent memory, the ebook distributor/retailer Smashwords has just officially launched their new Epub only distribution channel.

Smashwords Direct had originally been announced late last year in the response to the requests from quite a few authors, publishers, and ebook pros (myself included). A lot of us take pride in the ebooks we make, and it bothered us that we had to make a DOC file which would then be automagically mangled into a dozen different file formats.  The automatic process is all well and good, but given that we often make a good quality Epub anyway it is galling to watch a poorer quality file be be distributed to iBooks and other ebookstores.

But with Smashwords Direct, the gall is gone.

Authors and publishers can now upload an Epub file and either use it to replace the Epub which had been produced by the MeatGrinder, or, and this is the good part, they can upload an Epub for a new title and not have to make the DOC file to feed into the MeatGrinder.

That second option is going to open up a lot of possibilities for making use of the finer aspects of Epub, which starts at dropcaps and ends with Epub3. But one thing that the second option blocks is the ability to sell in multiple formats, and if an author only uploads the Epub they’ll also lose out on the samples which would be available to any ebook fed through the MeatGrinder. Luckily future plans include allowing for authors to upload PDF, Kindle, and other formats. Support for samples is also planned.

And even in all this good news there is a few serious issues. SW Direct was tested over the weekend and while many of the Epub files looked nice quite a few also failed Epubcheck. Mark reported that nearly a third of the test Epub files failed EpubCheck and thus doesn’t comply with the Epub specification. That is a sign that the ebook is not well made, a detail which is both embarrassing and a aserious issue which will hinder that ebook being sold in all the ebookstores. Apple in particular requires the ebooks to pass EpubCheck.

There was also a few Epubs which reportedly didn’t look as good as the Epub which come out of the MeatGrinder. A survey of the tools used to make the Epub files returned a surprisingly diverse set of answers, including:

• Adobe InDesign
• Nisus writer pro
• OpenOffice
• Jutoh
• Atlantis
• Epubmaker
• LibreOffice
• Writer2epub
• Scrivener
• HTML
• Sigil
• Calibre

The last 3 were the most popular by far, and to be perfectly honest there are at least 2 names on this list that I have never heard of before.

In any case, files uploaded to Smashwords will need to comply with the Style Guide. They will still need to meet certain requirements, some of which are so they can be distributed to the ebookstores (they don’t like you mentioning the competition).

Has anyone tried this yet? How well does it work?

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What is an ebook blog without ereader reviews? I don’t know, but that’s what this blog has been for quite some time. Today that changes.

Several weeks ago I got a new ereader shipped to me from Europe. It’s the Boox i62HD Firefly, and it’s Onyx’s latest and greatest 6″ ereader with the new HD E-ink screen, frontlight, and pretty much all the same great hardware as  the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Glo as well as a couple things the other ereaders lack, namely a microSD card slot and page turn buttons.

Opinion

I generally found this to be a run of the mill ereader, and given that it costs 30 euros more that the European price for the Kobo Glo I’m not sure I see the point. Also, given the poor quality of the frontlight I feel I must discourage anyone from buying this ereader.

Hardware

In terms of looks, the Firefly would best be described as a cross between the Nook Touch and the Kindle Touch. It matches the gray color of the KT, while adding the page turn buttons of the Nook Touch on the sides of the screen. It also has a single button below the screen like the KT, and on the bottom edge it has a headphone jack, microSD card slot, and mini USB port.

The back is a smooth but largely featureless gray. As I hold it in my hands, I find that it is quite the heavy ereader. It feels like there’s a noticeable difference, even though according to the specs the KPW is only about 30 grams lighter (12%).

The frontlight is best described as splotchy and fragile.  I can see distinct  shadows and bright spots on the screen when using the Firefly, and when I look at the screen edge on the unevenness of the lighting is even more distinct.

This ereader also failed the drop test.  Remember when I reported that you could drop keys on the Nook Glow and damage the frontlight? The Firefly has the same problem. In fact, the first couple dings on the screen happened before I tested this ereader – even though this ereader came with a case.

Software

It works adequately well as an ereader, and the page turn speed is about as fast as on my K4. You can highlight, type notes, and look words up in the dictionary. There’s also bookmarks, search, and TTS, though that last is painful to listen to.

While this ereader should have shown that a nimble smaller competitor could put out a better product than the big guys, the i62HD is actually missing the one thing I was looking forward to.

I have owned past Onyx devices, and I had come to know and love the annotation options. The earlier ereaders had a Wacom touchscreen, and you could use the stylus to write notes on the text. There were certain limitations, but being able to scribble, underline, or highlight relevant notes was really cool.

Absent the note-taking, this is simply a more expensive, heavier, and somewhat less desirable alternative to the Kobo Glo or Kindle Paperwhite.

Update: It turns out I was wrong. The annotation features which I recalled using with past Onyx models only ever worked with PDF and images, not Epub or other text based ebooks. Please note that I tried to fact check that feature before posting this review; none of the Onyx reps corrected my mistaken assumption.

Where to Buy

The Firefly seems to only be available in Europe, where it is sold by eReader-Store.EU.

You will be able to get the same ereader (albeit with a different firmware) from Onyx-Boox.com in January. I would suggest that you buy from the latter site, even though it is more expensive. I have found that eReader-Store.EU doesn’t exactly want to communicate with me. The alternate model is also worth considering because it has a better TTS engine. According to the website it will use the Ivona engine.

Specs

• HD E-ink screen (758×1024)
• Frontlight, IR Touchscreen
• 800MHz Freescale i.MX508 CPU
• 4GB Flash, micro SD card slot
• Wifi
• supported Formats: FB2, TXT, PDF, DJVU, DJV, IW44, IW4, RTF, HTML, PRC, MOBI, CHM, EPUB, DOC, HTML, TCR, CBR, CBZ
• Weight 250g
• Size: 171 ? 124.8 ? 10.9 mm
• Additional features: Text-to-Speech, Dictionaries, Widgets, Web Browser, Music Player

The social reading site Goodreads  had a very good year in 2012, better than me in fact (my traffic only increased by 50%).  They posted the following infographic to share the good news.

The site’s 13 million members have contributed over 20 million reviews and added 210 million titles to their virtual bookshelves this past year.

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The Pew Research Center has just released the results of their fall surveys into gadget ownership, and it’s a lesson in why you shouldn’t try to compare the results of 2 different consumer surveys, no matter how close the survey topic.

In a seeming contradiction to last week’s Forrester news, the Pew Center reports that tablet ownership is up noticeably, while the number of Americans who own an ereader is only negligibly different from Pew’s January 2012 survey.

Around 2300 Americans were polled in October and November, and 24% now own a tablet of some kind. That’s a nice increase from the 19% of respondents in the January survey who reported owning one, and a significant change from the 10% who reported last December  that they owned a tablet.

eReader ownership stayed at 19%, the same as in January, though that figure is higher than the 10% of respondents who owned one in December of last year. This statistic comes as no surprise, because in spite of the many ereaders which launched this year E-ink repeatedly reported that their earnings were down (link). The market guesstimators at iSuppli concur in the flatline of ereader ownership; in fact they predicted that only 2/3rds as many ereaders would be made in 2012, compared to 2011.

But on the upside, digital reading was up this year. It seems that more people are reading n tablets and smartphones than before, with 23% of respondents saying that they read an ebook, up from 16% last December.  At the same time the number of people who had read a paper book had dropped from 72% to 67%.

All in all, this is good news. eBook adoption continues apace, just not with a similar increase in ereader ownership. Instead it seems that Americans are moving more of their reading on to tablets, smartphones, and the like.

And library ebook are also seeing greater demand. The Pew Center also reported that ebook borrowing was on the rise (now 5% from 3% in December 2011), though it still only represents a very sliver of the population. Of particular interest is the footnote that this statistic was defined by the respondents; some may have included the ebooks they shared via the Nook LendMe program or the ebooks borrowed from the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library.

And on a sidenote, the Pew Center has changed how they define library users and ebook borrowers.  That means the news from back in June that 12% of Americans had checked out a library ebook is no longer relevant; the current statistics are defined differently. (more to come on this point; I want to better understand what changed)

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image by Keith Williamson

There are companies that like to be coy when they leak news, and then there are companies like Google Asus which like to use the exact same leaks with each of their new tablets, just to make sure the leaks are noticed by tech blogs.

Take the promotional campaign for the Nexus tablets, for example.

The first step is to leak the specs and possible release date to Digitimes. Step 2 involves posting the benchmarks online, and step 3 involves using the new device to take photos which are posted to Picasa – from an official account, no less.

That’s the pattern Google Asus laid down when the Nexus 7 launched in June and Nexus 10 launched this fall. And today it seems pretty clear that they are once again repeating these steps in preparation for the launch of the new $99 Nexus tablet.

I’ve just found a set of photos on Picasa which look to have been taken by a not-yet-released Asus gadget, the ME172V. While we only have unsubstantiated rumors concerning this device, the pattern of rumors and leaks suggest that this is the new Nexus tablet.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the ME172V is going to be the highpoint of CES next month. The photos leaked today don’t have any other purpose other than to prep the blogosphere for a launch event.

And while Asus may not have a booth at CES, Google has a meeting room in the back of South Hall. I expect that we’ll find the new tablet there.

According to the benchmarks and the leaked specs, this tablet will be running Android 4.1.1 on a 1GHz CPU provided by WonderMedia. It also has a 400MHz Mali GPU, screen resolution of 1024×600 (the size is assumed to be 7″).  One of the leaks included other details about the specs, including a mention of 1GB of RAM, a 1MP front-facing camera (this was confirmed  by today’s Picasa leak), and a microSD card slot.

The current rumors say that this tablet will cost $99, and given the pattern I think the price is correct.

Picasa

Way back in January I was inspired by the launch of iBooks Author to post on how poor students will get left behind in the so-called digital textbook revolution. I lamented that school districts with limited funds  won’t be able to take advantage of the benefits of digital textbooks (I still believed in the hype back then) because of the sometimes expensive hardware costs.

Recent events now suggest that the bar for adopting digital textbooks is a lot higher than I expected, and it turns out that even a well-to-do suburb of D.C. can face insurmountable issues – ones so bad that they have to go back to paper textbooks.

According to the Washington Post (and confirmed on an official website) Fairfax County Public Schools is currently in the process of replacing some recently licensed math textbooks with even newer paper copies.

FCPS has always been at the forefront of adopting new tech in classrooms, whether it is  setting up 1:1 classrooms or pushing for greater participation in BYOD programs, and this school year they decided to go into digital textbooks in  big way. FCPS signed up 3 publishers, Pearson, Holt, and McGraw/Hill to provide online math textbooks for all students in all grades, K-12.

That’s an ambitious project, no? It would save students the effort of carrying the textbooks around while avoiding the need for expensive hardware like the iPad. I mean, almost everyone has a computer with internet access at home right?

Well, no, they don’t. And even for the ones that do have access, it turns out that access alone is not enough.

One or more of the digital textbook platforms (I’m not clear on which one) apparently requires not just an internet connection but a fast DSL connection, which not all households have. They don’t need it otherwise and frankly because not everyone can afford the more expensive fees.

And even when students did have a fast internet connection at home, sometimes they were unable to use it due to other connection issues such as the time that storm damage from Hurricane Sandy took out Pepcom and parts of the local telecoms coverage.

And so the school district has decided to replace some of the online textbooks with paper textbooks. This is expected to cost around $2 million, and the new copies should be available for students by the time they return to school in January.

As we can see from FCPS error, one problem with rushing forward in pursuit of same great idea is that someone is always going to be left behind. This might not be an issue in most endeavors, but education is supposed to be the great equalizer. Public education is supposed to give people the chance to pull themselves up by enabling more opportunities.

This great rush to adopt more and more gadgetry is actually going to have the opposite effect, and I’d say that is a good reason to take a step back and reconsider what a school’s priorities really are.

image by rob.wall