Nate Hoffelder

So as you may know, I used KDP to list a couple of my workbooks in the Kindle Store last fall. I wasn’t expecting to sell a lot, and I really saw the effort as background research that would enable me to help clients. (Plus, having my workbooks in the Kindle Store meant I could also set up an author page on Amazon.com).

That investment has borne unexpected fruit.

I just got an email from Amazon informing me that the retailer has added a new section to KDP called the eBook Quality Dashboard.  This is where Amazon will communicate any formatting issues. complaints, or errors reported by users.

I can’t see that page right now (neither of my workbooks have problems ATM) but I get the impression from the related help page that the EQD is intended to make it easier for those who have dozens or hundreds of titles in KDP to respond to multiple bug reports. The EQD will let users sort and filter the reported issues by attributes like:

• Title
• Author
• Status (e.g., suppressed, warning)
• Issue type (e.g., eBook content, metadata)

Users can then respond to an issue by clicking one of three buttons: "Cannot fix", "I will fix", and "Not an issue". The process for fixing an issue is of course the same as before; depending on the issue. a user will either have to upload new content or change a book’s metadata.

I have attached the email below.

Did you get it? What do you think of the new EQD?

Email

Hello,

As a valued KDP publisher, we’re including you in an invite-only release of our new eBook Quality Dashboard. Starting today, this dashboard is the way we’ll communicate alerts about your eBooks' quality issues.

What’s new:

• If you have quality issues to review, you’ll see a yellow bar with a link to the Dashboard at the top of your KDP Bookshelf.
• On your Dashboard, you can see all issues for all your titles and fix them.
• For any new suppression or quality warnings, we’ll send you an alert email as soon as possible.
• Every Monday you’ll receive a weekly notification email for any open quality issues, and will no longer have to manage individual emails for each eBook.

What’s not changing for you:

• The information we provide to understand and locate quality issues.
• The options to resolve each issue.
• You can still contact KDP Customer Support for any questions or to follow-up on an open issue.

To learn more about the eBook Quality Dashboard, check our Help page:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/GWCUU33VBJHFSRYN

Please contact KDP Customer Support to provide feedback or ask questions.

Best,

Kindle Direct Publishing

I was hoping to present at the Writer’s Digest Conference in NYC this August, but now it looks like the conference could be canceled.

Forbes reports that F+W Media filed for bankruptcy last week.

F+W Media, facing near-term liquidity issues with only about $2.5 million in cash available and $105.2 million in outstanding debt, yesterday filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code, citing in various documents a perfect storm of secular industry decline, poor investments, and even mismanagement.

The New York-based company, one of the country’s largest publishers of specialty and enthusiast media, said it plans to sell its businesses while continuing to operate, in order to "maximize the value of their estates for the benefit of all their stakeholders."

F+W Media also launched and ran the Digital Book World Conference for 8 years between 2010 and 2017. The conference was shut down following a drastic decline in attendance in 2017, and was later sold off.

Other assets were also sold during that period, including a knife show, a quilting e-commerce business, and others, but neither the sell off nor a reorganization could stem the bleeding. F+W was unfortunately still mostly a publisher of special interest magazines, and like many it saw both its ad revenue and subscriber count shrink over the past decade. Subscribers left because they could find similar content elsewhere (Youtube, forums, niche interest sites) and of course advertisers flocked to Google and Facebook.

F+W now owes money to just about everyone. The filings show that it owes somewhere between $100 million to $500 million to an estimated 1,000 to 5,000 creditors.

In comparison, its assets were estimated at $50 million to $100 million.

Basically at this point the company is dead, and the only thing left is to sell parts of the corpse in the hopes that the parts can live on.

image by mikecogh via Flickr

When Amazon opened its first pop-up store in 2013, one might have assumed from the name that the stores would be temporary. That didn’t prove the case in the long run, with some of the stores remaining in the same location for four years or more (the one closest to me has been there for a couple years).

But all things do come to an end at some point, and that includes Amazon’s stores.Amazon has told me that they are closing all 87 pop-up stores:

Across our Amazon network, we regularly evaluate our businesses to ensure we’re making thoughtful decisions around how we can best serve our customers. After much review, we came to the decision to discontinue our pop-up kiosk program, and are instead expanding Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star, where we provide a more comprehensive customer experience and broader selection. We look forward to opening additional locations of both stores this year. We are excited to introduce even more customers to these in store shopping experiences where they can discover highly rated books, toys, games, home and kitchen goods, electronics, Amazon devices and more.

The stores typically occupy a few hundred square feet of space in high-end shopping malls, and showcase Amazon’s gadgetry such as the Echo, Kindle, and Kindle Fire. All locations are expected to close by the end of April.

Bookbub has launched a new deals service  to sell publisher audiobooks. On Tuesday they announced they had partnered with Findaway to launch Chirp, a site where you can buy discounted audiobooks.

The deals featured on Chirp are supplied by authors and publishers and curated by the same team of BookBub editors behind our ebook Featured Deals. To make it easy for selected partners to get their audiobook deals onto Chirp, we’re now a supported retailer at Findaway, a company that provides audiobook distribution services to the industry.

Early responses from readers testing Chirp have been overwhelmingly positive, but the service is still in beta. Only a small percentage of BookBub’s millions of members have been invited to join so far. We anticipate a broader rollout over the coming year and expect the platform to evolve as we make improvements based on early user feedback.

We wanted to let our partners know this new venture was in the works, but being in beta also means we aren’t yet able to work with all authors and publishers, though our aim is to get there as quickly as possible. In the meantime, if you are interested in having your audiobooks featured on Chirp in the future, or if you want to hear more about Chirp as it develops, please join our partner waitlist.

The site is in beta, which in this case means that buyers are welcome but publishers are only being allowed to join in limited numbers. Or at least I assume buyers are welcome because I signed up and got in right away.

I’ve been browsing the site this afternoon, checking out the deals. The selection is sparse, which was to be expected on launch day. There were only 74 titles available, and from what I could see all were either public domain titles or audiobooks from traditional publishers such as HarperCollins, Penguin, or S&S.

The audiobooks are priced from $0.99 to $4.99. I found a couple $3 deals I wanted, and bought them. Strangely enough, I had to buy them one at a time, but once I did they were both listed in my account.

Listening options include Android and iOS apps, or streaming via the website. (There was no option to download the audiobooks so I can listen to them in another app.) The streaming page is basic but workable, and offers a speed range from 2x to 0.2x.

O O O

It’s not clear whether authors will benefit from Chirp (Bookbub has shown that they would much rather do business with publishers) but buyers will come out ahead and so will Findaway.  Since Findaway is handling the tech side, anyone who wants to offer a deal through Chirp will first have to sign up with Findaway. That makes Chirp a quiet but potentially very effective disruptor in a market dominated by Amazon/Audible.

Chirp is what audiobook retailers like Libro.fm wish they were; a service that beats Amazon by offering something that both buyers and publishers want, and which Amazon doesn’t offer (while Audible does have deals, they really aren’t very good at promoting them). *

Of course, there is a downside; you can’t buy the audiobook deals inside the app, and you can’t load the audiobooks into another app. This means you can only buy via the website and are forced to carry around yet another redundant app.

That tiny bit of grit in the gears could have a major impact; it makes it harder for buyers to make full use of Chirp, thus giving them an incentive to stay with the app they are already using.

This is something Bookbub will need to address if they want to really trounce Amazon.

Assuming, of course, that Audible doesn’t simply match the prices. I could not find out their policy on this; do you know?

QAnon, for those who don’t know, is a conspiracy theory that makes Pizzagate look sane and rational. According to QAnon, the world is run by a Satanic cabal lead by Hillary Clinton, and that President Donald Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller are secretly working in tandem to eliminate the cabal. (There are more nuances and intricacies to the conspiracy theory, but after seeing FB moderators being radicalized by the content they are moderating, I’d rather not look further.)

The reason this has come up on this blog is that one of the several dozen books on Amazon that espouse QAnon beliefs has recently started climbing the charts on Amazon.

From NBC:

The book, “An Invitation to the Great Awakening,” is currently No. 9 in all books about politics, and No. 1 in all books about “Censorship,” one slot ahead of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” and immediately followed by classics “Lord of the Flies,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and “Of Mice and Men.”

The paperback, which cost $17 at press time, features outlandish claims, sometimes written in rapid succession with no evidence. On one page, the book baselessly claims that the United States government created AIDS, polio, Lyme disease, some natural disasters, two Indiana Jones movies and the Pixar movie Monsters Inc.

…

The book posits that Monsters Inc. shows off a government plan to collect children’s blood “that gives [government figures] some form of high or youthful looks.”

When I first found the book’s listing on Amazon this morning, it ranked at #50 in the books category on Amazon. As of writing this post, the book has risen to #30. This was mostly due to all the press attention and a highly effective marketing campaign.

The only thing that separates this book from conspiracy theory books about "The Protocols of Zion" is the amount of publicity it’s getting (well, and the topic).  This type of book has been around for decades, but they’ve never gotten this much attention before.

This is an expected result of online communities forming their own networks for sharing what is important to them. In this case, most of the attention is probably coming from videos posted on Youtube.

For example, YouTube conspiracy theorist JoeM, who has more than 127,000 YouTube subscribers, claims to have contributed to the book, and several other anonymous YouTube and Twitter conspiracy theorists who have pushed Qanon in the past have claimed credit for writing chapters of the book.

All of these Youtubers have been heavily promoting the book to their audiences since it launched a week ago, so it is really no wonder that it ranks this high on Amazon.

image by PJ Nelson via Flickr

There is a budding controversy in SF that is on the verge of become a minor scandal. It seems a Facebook group called 20Booksto50k may or may not be the source of a slate of nominees for the 2018 Nebula Award. I was going to write a post covering this issue, but then I found Cara Buhlert’s work and Camestros Felapton’s posts on this topic and was no longer sure I could do better.

Writing about fandom really isn’t my thing, so perhaps this is just as well.

So instead of a post, here’s a recommended reading list to help you catch up on the story. (Since the FB group in question is closed, and thus can’t be read by non-members, all of the links lead to blog posts.)

You should start with the thoughts and musings section at the end of Cora Buhlert’s post from 21 February. Then go read Camestros Felapton’s post from 21 February on the not-a-slate. Then read Buhlert’s reaction post from a week later, and head over to File 770 to read the official statement from the SFWA and a statement from the originator of the "slate".

I have been distantly following this story since the finalists were announced a couple weeks ago, and I am a member of that group (since April 2018, to be exact). I don’t beleive that either an official or unofficial attempt to nominate a slate. The group in question is dedicated to helping authors _legitimately_ achieve commercial success through writing stories that people want to buy.

I do not believe this was an attempt to game the system, but that is, however, what ended up happening.

image by JSJ1946 via Flickr

In the late ereader era, the major ereader makers (such as Amazon, Pocketbook, Kobo/Netronix, and B&N/Netronix) are sticking to designs so boring that the 7″ Kindle Oasis seems novel and refreshing even though it is really just copying features found on earlier models from competitors.

Seriously, I would be giving up in despair if not for small companies like oGadget. This is the latest in a line of small companies which  are using crowdfunding to bring niche ereaders to market. (Without companies like this, we’d be stuck with watching Onyx come up with great designs that we cannot buy.)

This is why I was thrilled when I read over on Liliputing that oGagdget is teasing the launch of a new 10.3″ E-ink notepad called the Eewrite E-Pad.

Edit: oGadget is the promoter, not the developer. I’m told this is being developed by a company called Wiskey.

This device only exists as very pretty renders on oGadget’s website, but according to the company it will sport a deca-core CPU with 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage, and it will run Android.

Here’s a run-down of the E-Pad’s key specs:

• Screen: 10.3″, 1872 x 1404 E-ink display (227 ppi)
• OS: Android (with Google Play Store)
• CUP: unknown seed, Deca-core CPU
• RAM: 2GB
• Storage: 32GB, microSD card slot
• Touchscreen: Capacitive touch + Wacom pen input
• Mike, speaker
• Connectivity: WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 4G LTE
• Weight: 392 grams (14 ounces)

The E-Pad is expected to have a retail price of $699, but the first 200 folks to back the crowd-funding campaign will be able to reserve one for $399. That campaign won’t be starting for another 4 weeks, but you can sign up on oGagdget’s website to be notified when it does.

The retail price makes the E-Pad one of the more expensive 10.3: devices around, but it is also the only one with 4G connectivity.

Do you think that is worth the extra $100 over the price of the Remarkable or Sony Digital Paper?

Eewrite via Liliputing

Amazon offers a free conversion service where you can send documents to your Kindle, but there is a problem: it doesn’t work with Epub files.

Even though there are services you can use to automatically send DRM-free files to your Kindle account from Dropbox and other cloud services, Amazon still won’t let you send an Epub file to your Kindle.

Fortunately, there are several work-arounds.

Your first option is to use a website like Send Epub to Kindle.

Send Epub to Kindle

This site will let you upload an Epub file and provide your email address, after which it will convert the ebook into a Kindle format and send the ebook to your Kindle account.

• Pro: It’s the easiest option.
• Con: Do you really want to trust your ebook to a site you don’t know?

If your answer to that question is no then there are other options.

Send a ZIP File

For example, eReader Palace brings our attention to the fact that you can send a ZIP file to your Kindle account. In other words, you can rename the Epub file by giving it a ZIP suffix and then email the ZIP file to your Kindle account.

Yes, that does work – to a limited degree. I’ve tried it, and I found that Amazon will accept the ZIP file only if you have fewer than 25 files in the ZIP file. This means that Amazon will reject more complex Epub files if they are made of too many parts.

If that happens then your next best option will be to use calibre to convert the ebook so you can send it to your Kindle account.

Calibre

The ebook library tool calibre is fully capable of converting your ebook to and from Kindle, Epub, and other ebook formats. This tool can even email your documents directly to your Kindle account.

I have never used that feature, though, so I can’t tell you how well it works.

Addendum

The reason I have never used calibre’s email feature is that I keep a copy of my ebook files in both Kindle and Epub, and I send the Kindle file to my Kindle account whenever I want to upload an ebook to my Kindle account.

It’s just less hassle that, way, in my opinion.

Do you have a preferred method for sending Epub ebooks to your Kindle account? Let us know in the comments!

image by Jamais Cascio

The internet is overflowing with nearly as many free audiobooks as ebooks. There are dozens if not hundreds of sites with free audiobooks, and I have pulled together a short list of seven sites where you can find a broad selection.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is best known for being the first website to offer free public domain ebooks, but they also have audiobooks for you to download. The selection is drawn from a variety of sites, including Librivox, AudiobooksForFree, and LiteralSystems.org.

LibriVox

LibriVox is a non-commercial, community-supported, ad-free site which audiobook recordings from public domain titles released by Project Gutenberg which have been read, recorded, and released for the public’s listening pleasure.

The audiobooks are created by the public, and you too can volunteer to read a story. Or you can just download from LibriVox’s acoustical library of good books.

StoryNory

This site stands out from the other free audiobook sites because it is the one site that focuses on audiobooks for kids, offering popular titles such as Little Red Riding Hood. It also produces original content, which comes with transcribed versions of the story.

Open Culture

This site is one of the better gateway websites for educational and cultural media (video, text, audio, and more. Open Culture aggregates content from all over the internet, and it has a decent collection of audiobooks that you can stream or download in a variety of audio formats for later consumption. The audiobooks are listed alphabetically by the author’s last name, and are organized by genre (fiction and literature, nonfiction, poetry, etc).

The Internet Archive

The IA is out to backup everything, and that includes audiobooks. The site has a library of audiobooks and poetry readings from a variety of sources, including the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive, LibriVox, Project Gutenberg, Maria Lectrix, Internet Archive users, and more.

If you look elsewhere on the site you might also find audiobooks uploaded by users, but I would be careful about downloading those; at least some of the user uploads are pirated copies.

Learn Out Loud

As you can tell from the name, LOL is focused on educational audiobooks. This site has a collection of more than 10,000 educational and inspirational audiobooks, only some of which is free. A lot of the free content is sourced elsewhere, including other sites on this list like LibriVox, but this site’s clean look and good organization might make it worth checking first.

 Lit2Go

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can easily search for audio book titles here by genre, author or collection, and they even grade a book’s readability for your children by Flesch-Kincaid grade levels. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified.

Over the nine years that I have run this blog I have seen many scams. There are the sites that pretend to have pirated ebook but really just want your credit card numbers, sites that pretend to offer digital textbooks for a low fee and really just sent you to free ebook sites, and the various fake, pirated, and counterfeit textbooks found on Createspace.

I have even seen a half-dozen different scams where companies send me emails and try to sell me worthless domain and SEO services.

But it wasn’t until today that what I had always thought was an online scam actually arrived in the form of a paper letter.

On 19 February 2019, I got a paper letter from a Florida-based web design firm called “Main Street Web Pros”. I have never done business with this firm before nor have I heard their name, but after looking online I found that MSWP does have a rather sparsely filled out website.

Their online presence provides a veneer of legitimacy, but it is really just a cover for the scam letters they send in the mail.

This firm sends out letters that closely resemble a bill and is designed to make the recipient think MSWP hosts their website, and that the recipient owed them $180 for this service.

You can find the letter at the end of this post.

The scammers find their targets by looking up website domains, and checking to see which ones have contact details listed publicly. (These details have to be provided when a domain is registered or renewed, unless you opt to pay extra to keep them private.)

This company has tried to convince at least two other people I know of that we owe MSWP money for their services.

I got one of these today to my now closed design firm. It's a total disgrace that any company thinks it's okay to do this. I've seen similar scams from domain registrars, but this is the first hosting one I've seen.

— George T. Probst ? (@GeorgeProbst) February 18, 2019

From what I can tell, this same scam has been going on since at least July 2017.  I found a post talking about this exact same scam, from this exact same company. They even had an identical letter  (but with a mailing address in Delaware, not Florida).

If you get one of these letters, do not respond.

Do not send them money.

Instead, take the letter to your local post office and tell the clerks that you have received mail fraud. This is a crime, and the USPS takes it seriously.

Mike Cane brought my attention to a story over on The Register:

Some 617 million online account details stolen from 16 hacked websites are on sale from today on the dark web, according to the data trove’s seller.

For less than $20,000 in Bitcoin, it is claimed, the following pilfered account databases can be purchased from the Dream Market cyber-souk, located in the Tor network:

Dubsmash (162 million), MyFitnessPal (151 million), MyHeritage (92 million), ShareThis (41 million), HauteLook (28 million), Animoto (25 million), EyeEm (22 million), 8fit (20 million), Whitepages (18 million), Fotolog (16 million), 500px (15 million), Armor Games (11 million), BookMate (8 million), CoffeeMeetsBagel (6 million), Artsy (1 million), and DataCamp (700,000).

…

Bookmate 8,026,992 accounts for 0.159 BTC ($572) total

1.7GB of data taken July 2018. Each account record typically contains a username, an email address, SHA512 or bcrypt-hashed password with salt, gender, date of birth, and other profile details. This alleged security breach has not been previously publicly disclosed. British Bookmate makes book-reading apps. A spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Bookmate is one of the smaller ebook startups, and its main focus is a subscription reading platform.

While this report is entirely plausible, I have seen no announcement of a breach, so we have no way to know for sure that this actually happened. And since I know of at least one "breach" that turned out to be a nothing-burger, I decline to draw a conclusion.

If you have an active account with Bookmate, ask them about this.

This was originally published in mid-January, but it just crossed my desk this morning,

Over at InvestorPlace Bret Kerwell lays out the figures that show B&N is just one bad quarter away from having to file for bankruptcy.

As of the most recent quarter, the company has $11.2 million in cash and $63.7 million in accounts receivable. While it doesn’t have any short-term debt, it does have over $621 million in accounts payable. Further, long-term debt sits at $278 million.

Despite this seemingly lopsided situation, the company still pays out a dividend. Its yield is near 9.9%, a red flag to be sure. And even though the company turned in one of its best holiday comps in recent memory, management warned on profit, saying it may fall up to 10% year-over-year.

It’s been years since since BKS turned in an annual income statement without red ink on its net income line. This one’s bankruptcy seems inevitable at some point down the road.

It’s not just doom and gloom; Barnes & Noble really is in dire financial straits, just like its quarterly reports suggested.

The company is one bad quarter away from needing to file for bankruptcy protection and pray that it can work something out with its suppliers.

And we all know how well that worked out for Borders, don’t we?

image by MikeKalasnik via Flickr

The Association of American Publishers has published its annual revenue report for the 1,375 publishers who submit their revenue data to the AAP. This info is not to be confused with sales data or the sum total of the US book market, although it will likely be misconstrued that way.

Publisher revenue rose $342 million last year, to $7.49 billion. While on the one hand 5% growth rate looks awesome, a closer look shows that most of that growth was due to increased sales of audiobooks and hardback books.

In 2018, publisher hardback book revenues grew 6.9%, adding $196.8 million in revenue, while audiobook revenues grew by 37.1%, adding $127.1 million in revenue compared to 2017.

press release:

Revenue for trade (consumer) book publishers was $7.49 billion in 2018, an increase of $341.5 million (+4.6%) compared to 2017, according to the StatShot Monthly report from the Association of American Publishers. Each of the trade book categories – Adult Books, Children’s/Young Adult and Religious Presses – saw revenue growth. Revenue for trade books includes sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, etc.

Since 2013, downloaded audio has been the trade book format with the greatest percent growth. In 2018 it grew by +37.1%, adding $127.1 million in revenue compared to 2017. Hardback books had the most revenue gain from actual dollars, with +6.9% revenue growth adding $196.8 million in revenue in 2018.

Overall publisher revenue for all tracked categories (Trade, PreK-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses) in 2018 was relatively flat at $14.55 billion (-0.4%) with a decrease of $57.0 million compared to 2017.

Trade Publishing

Jan. to Dec: Trade Book Revenue (in millions)

While all three categories of trade books saw increased revenue, the industry’s largest category – Adult Books – grew the most ($247.4 million) compared to 2017. Revenue for downloaded audio and hardback increased by double digits within the Adult Books category, but not every format benefitted from the category’s growth – mass market books and physical audiobooks saw declining revenue compared to 2017.

Both Childrens/Young Adult Books and Religious Presses bounced back from slight revenue declines in 2017, with $68.4 million (+3.3%) for the former and $25.7 million (+4.5%) for the latter in 2018 compared to 2017. Within Religious Presses, revenue for hardback books and eBooks increased while revenue for paperback books declined.

Jan. to Dec.: Total Trade Revenue by Format (in millions)

Print books and downloaded audiobooks experienced revenue growth in 2018, while eBooks declined slightly. This is the third consecutive year that audiobooks saw double-digit growth (+37.1%) and eBook revenue declined (-3.6%).

Education and Scholarly Publishing

Revenue for education and scholarly publishers declined in 2018 in all categories (Professional Books, PreK-12, University Presses, Higher Education.) This is a departure from 2017, when PreK-12 was the only category to decline.

Jan. to Dec: Education and Scholarly Publishing (in millions)

Publisher net revenue is tracked monthly by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and includes revenue from about 1,375 publishers, with participation subject to change over time. The StatShot Annual, Higher Education Annual, and PreK-12 Annual reports for 2017 are available for purchase; additional information about them can be found here.

image by jrladia via Flckr

Here’s a bit of news that will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with academic libraries.

Forbes reports that Amazon is still a distinctly second-tier retailer in the academic library market. The dominant player is Ebsco:

Is Amazon taking over the academic library industry? That’s what a new study from a higher-education-focused non-profit takes a look at, and their findings might surprise you as long as you haven’t read the title of this article too closely.

For the study, Ithaka S+R gathered acquisitions data from 124 U.S. higher education institutions in fiscal year 2017 along with data from 51 institutions covering between 2014 and 2017. The report has more than one interesting takeaway about the under-examined world of academic literature, but here’s the big one: Amazon isn’t anywhere close to controlling the academic library market.

The study found that the academic book vendor GOBI Library Solutions provides 68.7 percent of print book sales and 86.4 percent of ebook sales to academic libraries. Granted, Amazon took second place in the print book category, but it was by a massive margin, with just an 11-percent piece of the pie compared to GOBI’s 68 percent. And Amazon didn’t even sell enough academic ebooks to qualify as having any sort of meaningful presence.

The report also indicated that ebook purchases were negligible in that market, and that the market may be shrinking as libraries cut back on expenditures.  "The results show that while Amazon has become the second largest print book vendor to academic libraries, they actually are buying fewer books individually and below a certain price point, as measured by lower overall book expenditures within our sample," the study concludes. "The slight increase in spending to acquire ebooks is not high enough to offset the decline in spending to acquire print books. Nor does the increase in ebook expenditures necessarily mean that libraries are acquiring more books in digital format. Rather, ebooks appear to be becoming more expensive (including ebooks costing more than $350), making it costlier for libraries to acquire the same number of digital materials."

I had never heard of Gobi before, so I was initially surprised by this story. Then I Googled the name, and discovered that Gobi is just another name for Ebsco.

Yeah, that’s no surprise; ask any five academic librarians to guess which company sold the most books to libraries, and at least four will tell you Ebsco (the fifth will explain how you can find the info yourself).

Study via Forbes

image  by pnoeric via Flickr

Remember that tax deal that New York promised Amazon to bring the retailer to Long Island? Apparently it involved money that the state didn’t have.

Newsday reports that New York governor Cuomo has proposed expanding sales tax to all internet purchases (it’s not clear whether this will include ebooks and other digital content sales, which are currently exempt).

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is proposing to take advantage of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that would allow New York to charge sales tax on all internet sales, potentially adding to the cost of internet purchasing while providing an even playing field for traditional stores.

Cuomo proposes requiring all companies that sell products over the internet to collect state and local sales tax — about 7 percent in much of the state — which he said would result in $250 million in tax revenue to the state per year.

The measure has been sought for years by traditional stores with a physical presence in the state as internet sales grew. A new coalition of chambers of commerce on Long Island, along with Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, plans to lobby for the measure in Albany. The state budget is due April 1.

Without it, local businesses say they are at a disadvantage as internet-based sellers can avoid charging sales tax.

“It is counterproductive to principles of fairness, harmful to local economies, bad for Main Street and retail jobs,” said Morris Peters, Cuomo’s budget spokesman.

Don’t you just love what they said about fairness?

I mean, it was only a few months ago that they promised the world’s largest internet retailer a huge tax incentive package if it would open new offices in the state, and now they are saying that they need to be _fair_ to local retailers?

We are truly living in 1984, folks, if a politician can promise a huge tax break to a huge retailer and then talk about making things fair for smaller retailers.

Speaking of which, the Amazon tax break may never come to pass. It needs to be approved by regulators before it goes into effect in 2020, and it’s facing fierce opposition.

The Washington Post said Amazon is reconsidering the plan to expand in NYC:

Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City following a wave of opposition from local politicians, according to two people familiar with the company’s thinking.

…

Amazon executives have had internal discussions recently to reassess the situation in New York and explore alternatives, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the company’s perspective.

“The question is whether it’s worth it if the politicians in New York don’t want the project, especially with how people in Virginia and Nashville have been so welcoming,” said one person familiar with the company’s plans.

Hailed as an economic triumph when it was announced by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), the project in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens now faces withering criticism from some politicians and advocacy groups appalled at the prospect of giving giant subsidies to the world’s most valuable company, led by its richest man. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)

In the past two weeks, the state Senate nominated an outspoken Amazon critic to a board where he could potentially veto the deal. City Council members for the second time aggressively challenged company executives at a hearing where activists booed and unfurled anti-Amazon banners.

Key officials, including freshman U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose district borders the proposed Amazon site, have rallied against the project. And opponents went door-to-door to warn people in Queens of looming rent hikes and displacement, much as Seattle experienced during the company’s explosive growth there.

If Amazon loses the tax incentive, many of the promised 25,000 jobs will still end up in NYC simply because it is NYC. Amazon would have opened new offices there anyway because it is a tech, finance, and business hub (this is why many of us hated the tax incentive deals).

The final home of the rest of the jobs will likely depend on which jurisdiction is willing to pay the biggest bribe to the world’s richest online retailer.

And that will be hard to predict.

image by jjbers via Flickr