Nate Hoffelder

Discounted gift cards are an old retailer trick as well as one we’ve all enjoyed at one time or another. It gets customers in the door and gives retailers an opportunity to use the funds long before they’re spent. But have you ever consider what would happen when the gift card comes up against a market where the retailer isn’t allowed to offer discounts?

That’s what is happening right now in Germany.

The German Apple blog iFun is reporting this morning that Apple has temporarily blocked access to the German iBookstore. It seems that German retailers like offering discounted iTunes gift cards just as much as US retailers (Walmart has an iTunes gift card on sale right now), which Apple is more than happy to accept. Unfortunately, Germany also has laws regulating the price of books and ebooks.

Last week the Buchpreisbindung, the price regulator for the German book market, sent a letter to Apple complaining about the discounts and pointing out how they violate German law. Unlike the US, Germany has strict laws covering the discounts that retailers can apply to books and ebooks. Attempts to skirt those laws can lead to a lot of expensive lawyers buying expensive cars, though I’m sure most retailers comply before that point.

In response, Apple has restricted access to the German iBookstore, resulting in a rather odd situation where Apple has to block a subset of their customers from using validly purchased gift cards to buy validly for sale ebooks.

If you’re wondering how Apple can tell the difference between a gift card sold under a discount and the rest of the iTunes gift cards, that’s where things get interesting. These cards sell for a 20% to 30% discount, and I seriously doubt that the money is coming out of the retailer’s pocket.  That suggests that Apple is giving up the discount, so they are likely also initiating the sale. It would seem that they are in a position to issue specific gift card numbers to the retailer who is selling them, numbers which could then be recorded.

If my supposition is correct then Apple wasn’t just an accidental violator. They were the ones organizing the sale of the gift cards, so they really should have known they were breaking the law. Whoops.

But as much as we might enjoy pointing fingers at Apple, they’re not the first to run afoul of Germany’s book price laws. For a while there Amazon thought they could get around the restrictions on discounts by offering free shipping. Needless to say, that didn’t work.

Germany enacted these laws to protect local booksellers and prevent the rise of the big box bookstores like Waltons, B&N,  Borders, and others.  The laws didn’t succeed completely, considering that Thalia has 200 bookstores in Germany, but Thalia’s smaller competitors aren’t under quite as much pressure as indie booksellers in the US. And that’s a good thing.

iFun

Lots of people in publishing get upset when readers object to the price of some ebooks, and often times you hear a retort about a cup of coffee. Brent Weeks made just that remark earlier this week, and his tweet set a minor record for insider retweets.  But have you ever considered whether the comparison of ebook prices and the cost of a cup of coffee was a valid one?

I hadn’t, but lucky for me earlier this week one reader sent me a link to a blog post by Josh Lehman.  Josh takes a look at the differences in markets for Starbucks coffee and apps, and while an app is not an ebook a lot of his points do transfer over.

Fact: Starbucks Coffee is a Trustable Experience

This is coming from a non-coffee drinker, but people buy Starbucks because they know what it’s going to be like. It will meet their expectations, and while it’s an experience that won’t change their lives it will be the same every time. People know that each cup of coffee will be exactly like the last. And if it’s not, Starbucks will remake it until the customer is satisfied. Would you make that same guarantee with your ebook?

Fact: Your eBook is a Total Gamble

I don’t know what your ebook will be like until I start reading it. Unlike Starbucks coffee, ebooks can vary by quality, genre, and even style – and that’s just for a single author, not the ebook market. The problem grows when you factor in situations where readers find an author for the first time. The experience of reading your ebook is not trustable. I have dozens of ebooks sitting unread on my computer right now; why should I shell out $13 for yours? Why should I even shell out $8 to get one of the ebooks on your backlist? Frankly the risk is too high for a potential gain of nothing.

Fact: Starbucks Has No Free Alternative

We cannot get a free cup of coffee, and even the cheap alternatives to Starbucks aren’t as good. But I can find alternatives to paid ebooks virtually everywhere – legal ones, too, and sometimes even from the same publisher as the one you want us to buy.

Fact: Free eBooks Are Often A Great Alternative

There are far more good free ebooks available right now than I could read in a lifetime, and I’m not just talking about the dregs of self-publishing. Baen Books, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg stand as 3 examples of quality free ebooks. And then there are the many authors like Cory Doctorow who have released some or all of their work for free, whether as a limited time offer or under a CC license.

Fact: Cheap Paper Books Are Often A Great Alternative

Here’s a point which Lehman couldn’t make, but definitely affects the price and value of ebooks. The used book market hasn’t gone away with the rise of ebooks; instead it has grown with the rise of Amazon and other sites. Publishers not only have to t compete with paid and free ebooks from other sources, but they also have to compete with their own cast off and used titles.

Fact: My Existing Library Is A Great Alternative to Your eBook

I can also read the many ebooks I’ve bought over the years instead of buying yours. While they are not your ebook, they do stand as a viable alternative for the few hours of diversion I’d get for the $13 I’d spend on your ebook.

Is There Hope for the Paid eBook?

Yes there is. You just have to give readers a good reason to buy.

Speaking as someone who balks at paying more than $6 for a fiction ebook, I myself bought a $15 ebook from Bane Books this week. It was an advance reader copy of the next Bujold novel (which won’t be published until November). The sample, which I read online, ended at a cliffhanger. That ebook was an experience I was willing to risk my money on because the free sample was a worthwhile read and the itch to finish reading the ebook was so great that I didn’t mind paying a high price.

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Thanks, Merrill!

Sony officially unveiled their new ereader on Thursday, and according to a report from one of my readers it showed up in Sony stores that same day. I couldn’t make time to go get one until Saturday, but I have followed through on my promise to get one and see what changed.

I’ve known the general details on the T2 since it leaked over a week ago, so I won’t repeat them here.

I’ve now been playing with the T2 since yesterday morning. The new ereader has a matte shell, and Sony replaced the buttons with less obvious (but still physical) buttons. And of course the sound option is gone. But aside from those few details this device is functionally identical to the T1.

That’s pretty much what I expected when I got it, but I still have to wonder what the hell Sony was doing for the past year?

Okay, the fact there’s only minor differences should really come as no surprise. For the past several years Sony has been in a holding pattern when it comes to their ereaders, and if you look at the record you’ll see a stagnation which stretches back to 2009. That was the last time that Sony released a device which could even jokingly be called innovative. Since then they’ve been picking one change to make each year (while at the same time the competition has been adding several new hardware and software improvements each year).

In 2009, Sony released a trio of ereaders: a budget model with limited abilities, a mid range model with touchscreen but no connectivity, and a high end model with a touchscreen and a 3G connection which could be used to buy ebooks. In 2010, Sony added better touchscreens – but no new connectivity. And then in 2011 Sony released the T1, which effectively replaced all 3 models with one Android based device that had the same features (it does work better admittedly).

And now in 2012 Sony replaced the T1 with new device that is virtually identical. What the hell, Sony?

Do you want to know how little work Sony put into this? The one feature I like about the T2 is the new support for Evernote (you can back up all your notes). But that’s a software feature, so there’s really nothing stopping Sony from releasing a new update for the the T1 and giving it the new feature as well.

At this point I’m trying to come up with a good reason to suggest that someone buy the T2 over a refurbished T1. I cannot. The devices are so similar that I’d get a T1 simply because it’s cheaper. A refurb has the  same lifespan as a new unit, and unless the user really wants the matte finish or new software features, there’s little reason to spend the extra dough.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the hacks for the T1 don’t work yet on the T2. I didn’t really expect them to, but it would have been nice to have hacked the T2 so quickly.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Internet-posted fanfiction from the ‘90s comprised some of the original on-line “e-books”. And it’s still insanely popular today, even occasionally spawning professionally-published books that go on to become mega-hits. But the question of the legality of fanfic continues to be a controversial one. How do you know if your fanfic is “legal”? And what should you do if you get a cease-and-desist notice?

Over on io9, Lauren Davis has consulted with fanfic law maven Rebecca Tushnet to produce a lengthy, detailed analysis of how copyright pertains to fanfic, how fanfic fits into the four-factor test for fair use, and what to do if your fanfic gets a cease-and-desist order. The article goes into a number of legal precedents and is quite interesting in a number of ways. (Found via Techdirt.)

Of course, the only real way to find out whether a particular fan work is “fair use” or not is to take it to court and let a judge decide, and not many fanfic writers are going to want to do that. Fortunately, more and more creators are coming to recognize the promotional power of fanfic as an incitement to readers to investigate and purchase the original works.

But perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the article comes in the comment thread that follows it, in which Steve Vander Ark, creator and publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon website and subsequent book, discusses the legal reasoning behind and the impact of the lawsuit that prevented the book from being published in its original form.

He points out that the original website had asked and been granted permission by all parties concerned with Harry Potter copyright ownership to use copyrighted material on its website…so why was it suddenly not kosher to use the same material in a book that was just that same website in another form? That being said, he was nonetheless happy with the judge’s decision, as it provided guidelines he could use to rewrite the book to pass legal muster and be published after all.

Image by Eric J. Heels, originally posted to erikjheels.com, “Drawing That Explains Copyright Law” – reproduced here under Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/. Previously used here.

I was on an expedition this evening to my local electronic stores when I happened something new. Conde Nast is now selling magazine subscriptions in Target stores. They’re currently offering a half dozen titles, including Wired, GQ, and Glamour.

I was making the rounds and checking to see if any store had the new Sony Reader (just announced today). None did, but while I was at Target I stopped to check out the Livrada ebook gift cards. I told you about them last month; they’re a new product by a young Calif startup which is trying to bring ebooks into brick-and-mortar stores.

Hanging on hooks next to the Livrada cards were a set of cards I’d never heard of before. There were a half dozen titles, all priced at $20, and from what I could tell they were all Conde Nast magazines.

The card is good for a 1 year combined subscription to Wired Magazine’s paper and digital editions. Once you activate the card you can choose to get the subscription via the Wired iPad app or the Nook or Kindle Stores. And you do have to have the card activated; it works just like the phone cards and gift cards that you’ve probably seen everywhere.

As I said, this is new to me. I can’t find anything on the Target or Conde Nast websites, and what little info I found on the Wired website at wired.com/target was simply an activation page (with a customer service phone number). I can’t even find any sign of this program in Google (now that is weird).

But I did find some technical info. While I’m pretty sure that Conde Nast is handling this in house, the cards are based on a system developed by Incomm called Fastcard. Now that has a website, and apparently there’s a parellel program for selling paper subscriptions with similar cards. Also, Incomm has been running a number of gift card type programs for a while now. In fact, I’ve probably bought one card or another at some point.

Conde Nast is a US publisher with 18 magazine titles and numerous websites. They were one of the first publishers to jump on the iPad app bandwagon, and they were also one of the first to offer the dual subscriptions. With that in mind, today’s news is more of a puzzler than a surprise. I’m puzzled by the lack of publicity, not the cards.

Still, I do find it interesting that these cards first appeared in Target. In the past I’ve said I expected Target to replace the ereader hardware sales (they dropped the Kindle and Kobo Touch) with something that would let them cash in on content sales; clearly they’ve found it.

Do you recall all those rumors about Amazon is working on a larger Kindle Fire, and how that tablet is expected to be released this fall? I think it cleared the FCC yesterday.

Now here’s something guaranteed to wake you up this morning.

A friend of mine has tipped me to a set of FCC documents which were posted yesterday. They don’t show any useful detail, but they do lead somewhere interesting. Like Amazon’s past FCC submissions, this paperwork belongs to a new front company. This time around the company is Harpers LLC.

The thing is, folks, every time Amazon has sent a device through the FCC they’ve used a new front company and then hid the paperwork. This is what Amazon has done for every ereader and tablet since the second Kindle. (The first leaked accidentally.) In fact, when the K4, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Fire went through the FCC, Amazon used 3 front companies.

I know Harpers LLC is a front company because the address leads back to a storefront rented by CSC Entity Services, and the guy named on the paperwork as the President of Harpers also works for CSC.

Stephen Facciolo shows up on LinkedIn as a service leader for CSC, and that leads me to conclude that CSC is the legitimate front company (corporate services provider) that Amazon hired to run a second front company so that this FCC paperwork wouldn’t get back to them.

Yeah, that worked well.

I don’t have anything beyond the label, but after looking at the dimensions I’m guessing that this is a 9.7″ or 10″ tablet. The general screen geometry is likely going to be 4:3 (like the iPad), and not widescreen like many Android tablets. And since some of the hidden parts of the FCC paperwork will be revealed in December, this device will clearly be launched this fall.

FCC (YJM-0725)

Amazon seems to be in the mood to duplicate the work of others today. They just announced a new plugin for Google Chrome called Send to Kindle, and as you can guess from the name it will let you clip webpages and email them to your Kindle.

Color me underwhelmed. There already was a Chrome plugin that did this. It came out in January 2011, and it too is called Send to Kindle. The latest stats for that plugin show 128 thousand users, with a 4 star rating.

You can find Amazon’s version in the Chrome Web Store. It looks to have a better interface, and comes with the little menu you see at right. Other than that the  plugins are quite similar. Both clip webpages and both offer previews.

The older plugin is from klip.me, a lesser known read it later type of service. It’s worth a deeper look. That site also offers plugins for Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE9. It even has a bookmarklet that will let you save webpages to Evernote or Instapaper.

Folks, today I get to show Sony and everyone else the value of being the one major blog not included in Sony’s NDA. I’ve just come across a screenshot from an ad, and it shows the new Sony Reader as going on sale next month.

You can click on the image at right to see a larger version, but it shows the new Sony Reader PRS-T2 being marked down from $129 to $99. The ad also mentions the dozen dictionaries found on the last Sony Reader, and it specifically calls out the free Harry Potter ebook that ships with each device.

I can’t find the ad online myself, but it’s been attributed to MCX Brands, a company that runs retail stores on US Marine Corps bases. It’s supposed to come from their anniversary sale, which looks to happen in the middle of September. Okay, so that’s not terribly useful unless you have access to a military base, but it’s still an interesting bit of news that Sony’s new ereader is going to go on sale almost immediately.

Well, I’m not sure I’d call it a sale, given that the Kindle costs less. You can also get the B&N Nook Touch for $99, and if you don’t mind a refurb you can get the Nook Touch for $60 on Ebay. (Now that’s a sale.) Sony’s sale price here looks to be the usual sleight of hand that device makers use. They invent a higher fictional retail price and then sell the device for the real retail price, which is usually much lower.

The real retail price is probably going to be $99, so if you plan to get one I would wait for that price.

I was one of the 2 blogs to break the story on the Sony Reader late Thursday night, and like my competition I’m not terribly impressed. This ereader looks to be little more than a slightly improved version of Sony’s last ereader. It has the same screen, general design, and aside from a couple new software features there appears to be only one important different between the T1 and the T2.

The new device appears to lack a headphone jack.  That means there’s no audio. Sony has removed one of the few strengths that the T1 had over the Nook Touch, and now there’s really not much of a reason to get a Sony Reader anymore.

P.S. There was a marked lack of coverage of last week’s leak, and that’s why I believe that Sony has some of the major blogs under a non-disclosure agreement. Those blogs have already been briefed on the new ereader, and thanks to the NDA they cannot post the leak. While my guess that a launch would happen today turned out not to be true, I do expect the new device to launch soon.

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The hot story in digital publishing this week was the Lendink Witch Hunt.

A little over a week ago a bunch of authors noticed that a site by the name of lendink was showing covers of their ebooks. Without confirming what was going or or what the site was doing, these authors flew into a rage and started issuing a shitstorm of demands that their ebooks be removed from the site and that Lendink stop pirating their ebooks.

I covered this story myself on Monday. I didn’t really know what was going on, so I reached out to a bunch of the authors who had issued the demands. I’ve just heard back from one of the authors.

I’m going to assume that everyone knows about Lendink by now and that you know the site wasn’t committing piracy. But if you’re finding this for the first time, you can read my post from Monday, Lendink’s response, or you can read this.

The author in question is O. G. Tomes (here’s her blog). I found her via Lendink’s Facebook page. That’s where Tomes had posted 2 bogus DMCA takedown notices in which she says that Lendink was hosting a copy of her ebook. You can find a copy of the notices here (search for the name "Tomes").

Not only is she not contrite, she still doesn’t understand what Lendink did nor the terms of her contract with Amazon. Her ignorance is so mind-boggling broad that it will stand as a milestone for future generations of authors.

Here is Tomes' explanation for her part in the lynch mob:

This situation is a sad one and warrants an explanation for all the parties involved. If at any time I had received a reply from Lendink or Amazon had taken a clearer stance maybe I could have avoided being compelled to demand removal of my works; ie their links and covers. I was never contacted by anyone requesting permission to display my works for sale or lend by Lendink. I did not authorize them to pursue their activity of listing any of my books. The site openly admitted to losing their affiliation with Amazon yet continued to work toward that moment when they could once again get paid for their referrals. My attempts to contact Lendink to answer my requests for information on their procedures were ignored. Attempts to join the site to find out the information were blocked. I followed "Lendink’s" directives for filing notices directly from their site. I have attached a copy to this email.

I think the matter warrants discussing but in a rational manner.

At this time, I must state that I do not grant permission for this conversation or any information contained or attached herein to be used in any public forum.

Sincerely, O. G. Tomes

First, let me say that I don’t need her permission (snicker) to post a copy of her email; I’m posting it for its news & commentary value so I have a clear fair use justification.

I’m at a loss to figure out where she is the most wrong. Is it the fact she admits she didn’t confirm exactly what lendink was doing before sending the fraudulent takedown notices? Or is it the way she blames Amazon and Lendink for her own ignorance of the contracts she signed?

Folks, I don’t even have to look at her contracts with Amazon to know that she agreed to everything and anything that lendink was actually doing. And from what I can tell, all Lendink did was show her covers; the site didn’t have a copy of her ebooks (that’s what she claimed in the takedown notice).  Everything Lendink did was allowed by Amazon’s contracts with their suppliers. These clauses are in the contracts so Amazon’s affiliates can do their marketing thing and boost Amazon’s sales.

And you can ignore everything she writes about Lendink losing their relationship to Amazon; the site might not have been able to earn a commission as an affiliate but it still had permission from Amazon to post the images. Trust me, that’s an unrelated technical matter having to do with how sites (such as the blog you’re reading right now) can pull info from Amazon (only with Amazon’s permission, basically).

Now, you might be thinking that Lendink should have limited the offered titles to only ones which were lendable. So far as I know that is not information which can be accessed from outside Amazon. All lendink could do was offer ebooks which its members had listed on the site.

Perhaps you think that Lendink should have only shown the titles listed by members? Maybe,  but listing titles which weren’t lendable is at worst annoying, not piracy. What’s more, titles shown to potential readers will sometimes result in a sale. Is that really such a bad thing?

I know that I have at least a few authors who follow this blog so I’d like to make a suggestion.

Folks, don’t be this person. Don’t join a lynch mob, but more importantly please for the love of Phil make sure you know what the hell is going on before you make an idiot of yourself.

If you don’t know what’s going on, ask someone.

One of the more infuriating parts of this lynch mob story is that there are a dozen or more places where the authors could have asked questions before joining the lynch mob. There’s Goodreads, Wattpad, Amazon’s own forums, MobileRead, Twitter, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Heck, if you don’t understand a situation you could always ask me. I might not answer your email, but I would love to find and crush a real pirate site.  What’s more, I just love finding information. And at the very least I can point you in the right direction.

And if you don’t have a network of people you can ask for advice, what the hell are you waiting for? Go start building one.

image by Kiwi NZ

FutureBook yesterday featured a piece on an experiment in the UK between Osprey publishing imprint Angry Robot and independent bookshop Mostly Books to bundle a free electronic edition of an Angry Robot novel with each print copy of it sold. (We’ve previously mentioned Angry Robot’s e-book store and e-book subscription plan.) After just two weeks, Osprey’s CEO revealed that the bundling initiative had tripled the publisher’s sales at that store, and plans are in the offing to expand it to other independent bookstores.

The article included opinion pieces written by Angry Robot’s sales manager Roland Briscoe and Mostly Books’s Mark Thornton about the lessons of the experiment. Briscoe talked about giving readers what they said they wanted—the permanence of a physical copy plus the convenience of an electronic edition. Thornton discussed being able to woo e-book fans back to the bookstore fold so they can enjoy the discoverability of seeing titles in person but still be able to read them on their favorite electronic platform.

The idea of print/e-book bundling has been around for some time—Baen even does it to a limited extent with some of its first-printing hardcovers that include bound-in CD-ROMs—but the way the market has worked so far in the US has prevented it from seeing much use. However, one of the stated goals of the settlement between the Department of Justice and the agency pricing publishers was to make possible this sort of experimentation in the US market—bundles of e-books sold together, or e-books sold together with their print version.

From a costs standpoint, bundling seems like an idea whose time has really come. It costs zero cents (or close enough to zero cents to be negligible. Maybe a few pennies in overhead costs?) in marginal costs to add an electronic copy to a printed copy—so if doing that sells more printed copies, isn’t it worth it?

Publishers have long had a problem getting over the mindset that every individual “copy” has to be paid for individually. (I remember, in the good old days when they were allowed to talk to people, the Pendergrasts of Fictionwise and eReader bemoaned the fact that publishers insisted that each different encrypted format of e-book sold in their store had to be sold separately.) And yet, given that Angry Robot’s experiment sold three times as many books as normal, that means they took in as much money as they would have if they’d gotten paid for the normal number of print books, that many e-books, plus the same amount extra.

Could bundling work for every book from every genre? Probably not. It will take more experimentation to know which ones will succeed. I hope that if the settlement paves the way, we might end up seeing more of that.

Thanks to some FCC paperwork we’ve known for about a months now that Sony had a new ereader in the works, but due to the confidentiality requests that was about all I knew.

Until today.

I’ve just come across a new product listing on the J&R website for the new Sony Reader. From what I can tell the PRS-T2 looks to be almost identical to the current Sony Reader with only a few minor cosmetic differences as well as some tweaks to the software.

Update: The listing page on J&R is down, but someone did grab a .

The T2 has the same Pearl E-ink screen, Wifi, touchscreen tech, and microSD card slot found on the current model, but the dimensions show it as being slightly smaller and (possibly) slightly thicker. As you can see from the image at right, the T2 swaps out the hard buttons found on the T1 with either smaller buttons or touch-sensitive pads (it’s not clear from the photos). I’d say it’s probably even running Android, just like the T1. And this ereader is also going to come with a pre-loaded copy of a Harry Potter ebook.

As for the software, I don’t see any changes to format support (no Epub3), but there is a mention of Evernote Clearly and Facebook support. I’m not sure how the Facebook integration works, but Evernote Clearly looks to be a way for you to save blog posts and news articles from your browser so you can read them later. This sounds similar to Pocket and Instapaper, so I guess this means you’ll be able to push web content to the PRS-T2.

And of course the new T2 will have support for direct download of library ebooks, just like the T1.

There’s no mention of a release date, but I expect this ereader to hit the market some time in the next couple months. The current retail is listed as $129,but that could change.

All in all this ereader looks to be just a minor improvement on the current model. And that is deeply disappointing. For a couple years now I’ve been annoyed with Sony because in that time their ereaders have been consistently a step behind the competition. They released a cheap Wifi equipped ereader over a year after Amazon and B&N, they released a competitor to the Nook Touch and kobo Touch close to 4 months behind them, and now Sony has basically re-released their current ereader.

The Sony Reader PRS-T2 looks to be effectively the same damn device as the T1. For the past year, Sony stood still while B&N, Amazon, and even frigging Kobo advanced their designs.

So what could Sony have added to the T2? Color E-ink is out; the 6″ panel is not in production. But Sony could have used a higher resolution screen. I was half expecting that the new T2 would have the HD E-ink screen (1024×768) that LG Display announced earlier this year. When you combine the improved resolution with the Sony Reader’s annotation ability, the resulting device would have been droolworthy.

Hell, I’m dumbstruck to figure out why Sony isn’t at least using the high resolution screen that LG Display released last year; that would have been enough to make everyone want this ereader.

Eh. Sony used to be a good company once; clearly that time is past.

J&R website

I don’t know about you, but I can never get enough of infographics. Here’s one that compares the known details about the various English language ebook markets (UK, CAN, USA, AUS). It also covers the relative sizes of the ereader, tablet, and smartphone ownership in the 4 countries.

Interesting read.

More Infographics

More Infographics

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A press release came across my desk today, and after I got over the fit of giggles I realized that the site mentioned did serve a purpose and was worth a post. The site is called PDF SB, and it’s a search engine that focuses on just a single type of ebooks: PDFs.

Like many I don’t usually regard PDFs as ebooks, and that’s half the reason I giggled. But once I looked at the site I understood its value. This site indexes ebooks that generalized search engines might have trouble finding and that specialized search engines would tend to ignore.

My favorite ebook search engine is Inkmesh.  This site helps me find free and paid ebooks in any of the major ebookstores, but when it comes to PDFs Inkmesh also has a couple defects. It only searches ebookstores and it doesn’t sort by format.

The thing about PDFs is that there’s a lot of noncommercial content released as a PDF which can’t be found in another format. Consider your average user manual, owner’s manual, or tech support docs. Inkmesh won’t see these files at all because they’re not for sale anywhere, and Google might not be able to find them in all the vast amounts of content cluttering the web. But PDF SB will find these ebooks, or at least it has a better shot at it.

Every so often I get requests for help in finding info on a device. This search engine should make it a lot easier to find the manuals, some of which are rather well hidden on the various support sites. It currently claims to list over 40 million files. It was originally launched just over 5 months ago, and recently went through a series of updates where the servers were updated and the algorithms were refined.

Positive hype aside, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure this search engine does a better job than Google. I tested for several PDFs which I know can be found through Google; PDF SB couldn’t find them. Mike cane has also pointed out that this search engine ignores some basic tricks like quotation marks.

Still, I’m hoping the site will improve, and at the very least I plan to bookmark it.

PDF SB

Amazon has their fingers in a lot of pies, including selling new and used textbooks, selling and renting digital textbooks, and even buying back textbooks from students. This has put them into competition with quite a few companies, including everyone from B&N to half.com to Coursesmart.

In fact, Amazon does virtually everything with textbooks except rent them. Today that changes.

I’ve just gotten an unconfirmed report that Amazon is renting paper textbooks. There hasn’t been any official announcement from Amazon (and I’m still waiting for confirmation) but it does look like Amazon is ideed renting  paper textbooks. There’s already a support page with an FAQ and instructions, and at least one textbook has a rent button (or had a button at one point).

If you check your calendar, you can see that this is a full semester rental. Unlike the Kindle rentals, it doesn’t look like Amazon is offering shorter periods than a full semester, but they do have an optional 15 day extension. Shipping is free if you have an Amazon Prime or Amazon Student membership. The program is only available to US residents, of course, but if this textbook is any indication then it is a decent deal.

Amazon doesn’t have this title as a Kindle textbook, so it’s not possible to compare the sale or rental price directly. But for other titles it does look like Amazon’s rental prices for paper are significantly better than for comparable Kindle textbook rentals, which are set by the respective publishers. That just goes to show that a free market tends to set a lower price than a monopolist might like.

You can find this title at Chegg , where it is renting for $58, and on half.com you can find it for around $60 (for a 125 day rental). Speaking of which, half.com has been running a textbook rental marketplace for at least 6 months (that I know of).  If you’re looking to rent, I’d go there first because like the textbook sellers the rental services have to compete.

Textbooks seem to be on Amazon’s mind this fall. I’ve been told that they’re making a stronger push to offer more Kindle titles, both for sale and rent, and that they’ve started pushing harder on textbooks in general. This is not good news for publishers, but the extra competition is a very good thing for students.

Amazon

I’m in the market right now to replace my (original) Samsung Galaxy Tab with a new Android tablet, so today I took a look at the Lenovo IdeaPad A1107. This 7″ tablet caught my eye when I was at BestBuy  yesterday. It’s priced at $200, making it a competitor to the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7, and its 3MP rear camera looked like it might  fill one of my core needs.

But as it turns out this is just a basic tablet. It’s a lot like the KF or N7 in that it doesn’t have all the best components that you’d find in a premium tablet. The A1107 is running Android 4.0 (great) – but on a single core 1GHz CPU. It has a high resolution (1024 x 600) 7″ capacitive touchscreen, but it also only has a VGA webcam in front.

That’s a rather odd mix of specs, isn’t it? I think this is old hardware. From what I can tell, the A1107 is an update of the IdeaPad  A1 tablet, which came out last year and ran Android 2.3. Aside from the newer version of Android OS there doesn’t appear to be any difference between the 2 tablets. The hardware specs look identical.

This post was going to be a roundup of reviews of the  A1107 tablet. Given that I was looking at this tablet for myself, I thought it might be useful to post my notes and opinions. Curiously enough it looks like no one has posted a review of the updated tablet (I think I might add this to my todo list). But a lot of sites reviews the original A1, and the hardware reviews were generally disappointing. They’re also from back in February, so by now (July) they are horribly out of date. I won’t quote them here because of how inaccurate they now are (several said that the A1 was a bad value at $250, but I did read them and will list them at the end of this post.

There were a couple details that were mentioned in most of the reviews which were enough for me to pass on this tablet. The rear camera isn’t as good as the specs make it sound, and several of the reviews described the screen quality as being less than that of the Kindle Fire (even though they have the same resolution). The screen complaint was rather funny to read; apparently 1024×600 is now a low resolution, and that surprises me. I didn’t know that so many reviewers were screen fetishists, but apparently it’s a growing trend.

My Opinion

This tablet has the screen, cameras, and now the OS to be a mid-rank competitor to other basic tablets like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire. At the $200 price point it is no great value; the features you gain in some areas cost you other features. Again like the KF, there are tradeoffs.

Reviews

• Android Authority
• Cnet
• Gadget Review
• GottaBeMobile
• Laptop Magazine
• Mobile Tech Review
• PC Magazine

Specs

• 1GHz CPU
• Android 4.0
• 7? (1024×600) LED screen
• Capacitive touchscreen
• 16GB Flash storage
• microSD card slot
•  Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS
• g-sensor