Nate Hoffelder

Reports are coming in today that the latest version of Requiem, an app that removes Fairplay DRM from music and videos sold via iTunes, will now also remove the DRM from iBooks ebooks. It may have taken a couple years, but Apple is now as safe to buy from as any other ebookstore. You don’t have to worry about losing future access to content that you buy there.

Note that I am looking for confirmation that the app even exists; I’ve never seen, much less used, it.

Update: Several readers hve confirmed the app and one sent me  copy. Thanks!

For some time I’ve had a theory about DRM, and I’d say that today’s news confirmed it.

I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it. Take Requiem, for example. It’s been round since 2008 (and iBooks since 2010) but it was only recently that the developer turned his eye towards iBooks. (Maybe he was bored.)

There’s a similar story behind Kindle DRM. The Kindle shipped in November 2007, and the first hack to remove the DRM showed up in January 2008. Why so quick, when iBooks took 2 years?

I think the Kindle DRM was hacked quickly because of all the hype. The rumored launch of the Kindle was a hot story all through 2007. In fact, the hype was so high that the DRM was cracked by someone who didn’t even have a Kindle. Apparently it was just a technical challenge, not a personal need.

Also, the early Kindle DRM was only slightly different from that of Mobipocket, and Mobi DRM had been broken in mid-2007.

There’s a funny story here. Mobi DRM wasn’t hacked via any heavy duty reverse engineering; no, it was  human error. Back in 2007 (before Amazon started killing off Mobipocket), there were a number of third party ereader that read Mobi ebooks and supported Mobi DRM. One developer, Irex, accidentally posted a complete firmware for the Illiad, their 8″ ereader.  It was online for a couple weeks before they realized their mistake. In that time, at least one hacker downloaded it and took it apart. The hacker then disassembled the reading app to get at the DRM code.

That story illustrates why DRM never works in the long run. It’s  digital lock, yes, but for customers to read what they bought they must also have the key. Key+lock equals hacked DRM, once it gets in the hand of the right developer.

And once it’s been hacked, there’s really no justification for it.

image by Austen Hufford

Mike Cane turned up the following video on Youtube, and it’s going to blow your mind. A hacker over at the XDA forums has figured out a way to enable a fast refresh mode on the Nook Touch.

The image at right isn’t a video error, nor is it display bug. The Nook Touch is refreshing so fast that half the screen is left behind.

It’s so fast that you have to see it to believe it.

If you ask me, that is faster than the Sony trick I showed you a month ago. It’s even faster than anything that Bookeen has shown us.

What’s even more amazing is that you’re looking at a standard hacked Nook Touch.  Anyone with a hacked NT can install the code that makes it possible. You can download the install file over at XDA forums.

You know, we’re almost at the point where you can watch video on a hacked Nook Touch. I cannot wait to see it.

The Google eBookstore has had an affiliate partnership program ever since it launched 14 months ago, but recent signs suggest that they might have killed it off.

PW was the first to notice that Google isn’t letting bookstores join the affiliate program anymore. They’re reporting that several booksellers cannot get in. A little bit of digging has revealed that this has been going on for nearly a month, with at least one website owner (it’s not clear what type of site he has) attempting to join the program on 28 January. He couldn’t get in.

There’s even been an official response from Google that, while vague, does confirm the situation.

The Google eBooks program is currently not accepting new applications at this time. Thank you for contacting us and pointing out the directions on the page

It’s not clear from my viewpoint exactly why Google closed just the one affiliate program – but not any of the others. Does anyone know what is going on?

Update: In what cannot be  coincidence, I just got an email from Google about my Adsense account. They’re making a number of changes to their policies, and I’m betting that the Google eBookstore issue is directly related. If anyone gets an email in the next couple days about your gBooks affiliate status, please let me know. It’s going to be interesting.

The rumor-mongers at Digitimes have come up with another juicy story today. They’re reporting on a story in a local Chinese business newspaper. According to Economic Daily News, E-ink has landed its first order for 6″ Triton E-ink screens.

Amazon is due to accept the first shipments in March, with total number of units expected to hit 3 million this year. There’s no hint on the ship date, but Amazon could easily have the Kindle Color on store shelves this year.

I usually have to suppress my gag reflex while writing about Digitimes rumors, but this time around I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they’re probably correct.

I’ve checked with my source at E-ink and he has not yet denied this story. This particular source is the one that told me that told me that confirmed that Sony has interesting plans for E-ink screens. He would know about this new Amazon contract, and the fact that he hasn’t denied it speaks volumes.

Update: My source just now checked his email (it’s a holiday) and called me. This is absolutely not true. It is a complete and utter fiction. In fact, I have been told that Amazon couldn’t be shipping a color E-ink Kindle for at least the next year.  That’s how long it would take to set up  production line, which hasn’t happened yet.

E-ink has reportedly been ready to make the Triton screens for some years now, but it wasn’t until last summer that the screen finally hit the market in China. This was the 9.7″ Triton screen, not 6″. The same device has recently started shipping in the US and Russia as the Ectaco Jetbook Color.

I have a Jetbook Color, and I really hope that the Kindle Color doesn’t have a screen that is as gray as on this ereader. This isn’t a light gray like you might expect on one of E-ink’s screens; it’s more like a medium to dark gray. It’s actually darker than the screen on the original Kindle.

The online writing community announced Monday that they are following in the footsteps of Wattpad BookCountry.

Update: BookRix shared this news with me last week, but for some reason they delayed the general announcement by a week.

Later this month BookRix will be launching an ebookstore where member authors can sell the fruits of their labors, and BookRix is also going to offer to distribute those ebooks to Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Sony, and iBooks.

But also like BookCountry, this doesn’t look like a very good deal for authors.

BookRix is charging  both an upfront fee (like BookBaby) and an ongoing commission (like Smashwords). The initial charge is $40, which is not so unreasonable – until you combine it with the commission. BookRix pays authors 55% of sales from their ebookstore, and 43% from 3rd party bookstores. By any standards, that is ridiculously low.

Perhaps I shouldn’t use the word ridiculous, but let me give you  yardstick. Smashwords pays a higher commission (both on ebooks they sell and vi 3rd party sellers), and they don’t charge a fee. BookBaby charges a higher fee, but they pay 100% to the author. (They don’t charge a commission, but there is a small yearly fee per title.)

Now, some might argue that BookRix offers a useful service, and that the ebookstore builds upon it. This is true. BookRix does let authors develop their work with community feedback, surrounded by over 400 thousand enthusiasts. And being able to sell your work to the community of readers around you is a good thing, yes.

But BookRix isn’t the only book and writing community that does this. Have you looked at Wattpad?

They are even bigger than BookRix, and they have offered ebook distribution options since July 2010. That’s when Wattpad formed a partnership with Smashwords. Rather than try to handle distribution themselves, Wattpad signed with what was the best self-pub platform at the time (still one of the better options). Wattpad also has Lulu as a partner, thus giving authors print options as well.

For the life of me, I don’t see why anyone would sign up to distribute their ebooks via Bookrix.  The terms of the deal  are simply terrible; this is one case where virtually any other option is better.

Piotr Kowalczyk, a Polish author, blogger, and all-around geek, received  rather odd email from Amazon last week.  He’s self-pubbed a few ebooks in the Kindle Store, but as of Friday he is down by one title. According to Amazon’s email, they pulled the ebook because it was written in Polish and that language isn’t supported.

That does make some sense; Amazon only officially supports ebooks in 6 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

But the really odd part of the tale is that not all of Piotr’s Polish language ebooks were taken down on Friday. It seems that someone inside the Kindle Store noticed that this one particular title was written on Polish, even though the language was set to English. That faceless drone changed the language listed in the ebook’s  metadata and then removed the  ebook.

The rest of Piotr’s Kindle ebooks are also marked as being written in English, and Amazon missed those  titles (even though one has the description and content in Polish).

Update: A friend commented on Twitter that Amazon has long had a policy of removing content sold in unsupported languages. This is true. I got interested in this particular situation because of the rumored launch of the Polish Kindle Store. Also, I find the haphazard enforcement rather strange.

Now, as odd as this may sound, I can probably guess why this happened. It’s a technical issue, and it has to do with fonts and character encoding. There is a valid concern that an ebook sold in an unsupported language might not display all the characters properly. The Kindle does not have complete support for all unicode characters, so removing an ebook that might be using an unsupported character makes sense (in a bureaucratic sort of way).

Clearly this isn’t actually a problem with Polish; Piotr 's customers could read his ebooks just fine. But I do understand why some unnamed drone in the Kindle Store pulled the ebook.

On a related note, this bit of news has thrown a spanner in the rumored launch of the Polish Kindle Store. Amazon appears to be discarding content just weeks before they are predicted to support it officially. That seems a little self-destructive, in my opinion.

In any case, this move is also shortsighted. There are a reported 60 thousand Kindles in use in Poland, even though the language isn’t officially supported. That might be a small number in terms of the many millions of Kindles in use, but it is also a group that Amazon is actively discouraging from owning  Kindle.

via eBookFriendly

It looks like the meeting that the ALA held with major publishers on Wednesday went even worse than I thought. On Thursday afternoon Penguin announcedthat they were permanently ending their relationship with Overdrive.

In these ever changing times, it is vital that we forge relationships with libraries and build a future together. We care about preserving the value of our authors’ work as well as helping libraries continue to serve their communities. Our ongoing partnership with the ALA is more important than ever, and our recent talks with ALA leadership helped bring everything into focus.

Looking ahead, we are continuing to talk about our future plans for eBook and digital audiobook availability for library lending with a number of partners providing these services. Because of these discussions, as of February 10, 2012, Penguin will no longer offer additional copies of eBooks and audiobooks for purchase via Overdrive.

TBH, I’m not surprised. Penguin had already made this decision months ago; this was merely confirmation that it was permanent.

Update: And now it gets worse. Penguin also cut off the over-the-air Kindle support.

Starting tomorrow (February 10, 2012), Penguin will no longer offer additional copies of e-books and download audiobooks for library purchase. Additionally, Penguin eBooks loaned for reading on Kindle devices will need to be downloaded to a computer then transferred to the device over USB. For library patrons, this means Penguin eBooks will no longer be available for over-the-air delivery to Kindle devices or to Kindle apps.

According to the following infographic, the answer is paralegals, iPod owners, and country club members.

The market research firm BlueKai pulled this together from  number of sources. It’s focused on the ad potential of ereaders, but it is still a fascinating read.

The full sized infographic is after the break.

O’Reilly will be holding their annual digital publishing conference next week, and I will be there, helping with the ereader petting zoo. But do you know who else will be there? Ryan Knapp, one of the founders of Inkling.

As you probably know, Inkling was one of the hot iPad startups of 2010. They were developing an enhanced textbook platform on the iPad, and they’ve been selling textbooks via their own app. But besides launching and periodically going back for more capital, Inkling hasn’t done much that is newsworthy of late. But soon that will change.

I have now heard hints from no less than 3 sources that next week Inkling plans to unveil ebook authoring tools. I don’t yet know what those tools are, but given the nature of the textbooks that Inkling sells, I suspect that this is going to be an alternative to iBooks Author.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any more details. My attempts to contact Inkling (email and Twitter) failed, so really all I have to go on are the hints. But still, this is an interesting story.

Inkling was one of several companies that I half expected to vanish under the deluge of hype surrounding the launch of iBook Author. I’ve been watching them in the weeks since, and it’s good to see them keeping calm and fighting back.

I, for one, am really looking forward to next week’s news. I’m hoping that Inkling’s tools aren’t quite so encumbered as iBooks Author. WIth that app you can only make enhanced ebooks in the one format and you re only allowed to sell that ebook via iBooks (after Apple gives you permission to do so).

While I am sure that Inkling wants you to make textbooks for their iPad app, I am still holding out some small hope that it will offer cross-platform support. Even just a minimum level of Epub output would be great.

This might be an ebook blog, but the cost of textbooks has always been an important topic for me. I’ve written a number of times about how to get the best value for your textbook dollar, including a detailed look at exactly how I went about it.

I’m taking a couple college classes this semester and that has given me a good reason to revisit this topic. I’ve said that in the past that rented textbooks weren’t a good value, and after buying my textbooks for this semester I’ve concluded that it is still true.

I’m not going to list the specific steps that I used to buy my textbooks; you can find that in an earlier post. I’m also not going to list the books I bought; the prices won’t matter in 6 months.

Also, I strongly urge you to do your own comparison shopping; don’t just take my word for it.

But I will discuss some of the things I’ve learned in the past few days.

First, digital textbooks simply cost too much, and renting the ebook wasn’t an option for any of the books I needed. The ebook prices looked good compared to list price, but the honeymoon ended when I matched them against the used price.  With one exception, the used price was far lower than the ebook price that I found on Inkmesh.  And that one exception still cost more than the used price, but only by about a dollar.

Next, rental prices might look good in the college bookstore, but when you go to a comparison site like allbookstores.com you will see that the used prices can get a lot cheaper than you might expect. Of the 6 books I need, the used price was often less than the best rental price. Even when renting presented a cheaper option, a used book was often less than a couple bucks more than the rental price.

And guess what? That price is strictly the out of pocket cost. While a rented textbook has to be given up at the end of the semester, the used book can probably be sold again. In the long run the used book will cost you less.

So at this point I have just found that all the hype about how renting saves you money, or how ebooks save you money, or that renting an ebook saves you money, is exactly that.

Hype.

I predict that used books will continue to be the best value going forward, and I think they will stay that way unless and until open source textbooks become popular. They have all of the benefit and none of the cost.

Jason Chen, formerly of Gizmodo (the stolen iPhone guy), is bout to launch a new ebook startup called StoryBundle. This new ebook seller was inspired by the pay what you want Humble Indie Bundles, and he plans to do for ebooks what Humble Indie did for apps.

Update: Jason says that he’s already talking to authors. The first bundle should be out this spring, and more bundles should follow about once every other month.

The company is just launching now, and about all there is to it right now is the website, Twitter, and Facebook account. I’m waiting to hear back from them, but in the meantime here is what the website says:

We give you a handful of ebooks (about five or so) for a low price that you choose, all DRM-free, delivered to your ereader.

We only choose quality independent authors so you can be sure what you’re buying is good. Plus, you decide how much these books are worth. Great reads delivered cheaply without killing a single tree? That’s something everybody can feel good about.

This might not look like such  great deal for authors, but the app bundles suggest that it might be worthwhile. I’ve bought a couple, and they usually included older games (like an author’s backlist) with the occasional newer game thrown in.

The current Humble Indie bundle has earned $578 thousand in less than a week, and it includes 4 titles. Iif we assume that everyone went with the default split then the app developers ended up with over $300 thousand to split between them.It’s not a whole lot per copy sold, but the possibility of making $70 thousand or more from a single tile in a short period of time should make this option very attractive.

On a related note, authors will need to be careful about the ebooks they offer via StoryBundle. If the same title is available via Amazon when it goes on sale at StoryBundle, Amazon will send their death squads after you.They take ebook prices seriously, and they will not let you undersell them elsewhere.

Kidding aside, in the past Amazon has matched sale prices found elsewhere, but I don’t know quite what they will do here (it’s complicated). They might even drop the price of your ebook to nothing. I’d still go for this, but do be careful.

StoryBundle

It’s been just over 2 months since the Kindle Fire shipped, and it has already turned the world upside down.

The market research firm Flurry released some startling stats today. They’re following up on their news about the spike in new Android and iOS gadgets over Christmas.

According to their tracking data, the Kindle now accounts for 36% of all Android tablet activity in January. That’s more than any other tablet, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Check out the graph below. Amazon has sold so many KFs (and increased the number of tablets in use) that the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s share shrink from a dominant  63%  to only 36%.

Here is a different way to look at it. The KF not only outsold the Galaxy Tab, in 2 months Amazon sold more Kindle Fires than the total number of Galaxy Tab users. Those rumors of 5 million KF sold lst year don’t seem so improbable, do they?

But it’s also important to note that the Galaxy Tab also saw a serious jump in activity. Flurry reported that they tracked a 50% increase in apps being run on the Galaxy Tab. Clearly the market as a whole got a lot bigger over the past couple months.

BTW, these stats don’t reflect how many tablets are in use. No, they show what percentage of apps are opened on which tablet. That’s not quite the same thing, but it is significant in its own right. The pie charts above reflect the intensity of the use. People who open 3 times as many apps re counted 3 times, for example. That means there are either a lot of KF in use or some being heavily used. Either way, that’s a big deal.

Flurry