Nate Hoffelder

When I reported two weeks ago that due to a bug ebooks were being automatically removed from sale in the Kindle Store, I used a "don’t panic" graphic. I figured Amazon would fix this issue within a few hours, so there was no reason to jump up and down about it.

I was wrong.

Not only has the problem continued, a significantly larger number of authors are being affected. What started as only a handful of reports two weeks ago has grown to scores if not hundreds of authors reporting, all in the past couple days, that Amazon has taken one or more of their books down from the Kindle Store.

Many of the reports sound like this:

I woke up this morning and two of my ebooks have been pulled for sale from Amazon.com. I checked my competitors as well as ebooks in other categories and they have also been pulled down too. There are ebooks in the top 100 charts that have been pulled too. I checked my KDP account and the ebook status is 'live', but when I click the link to the ebook on Amazon.com, there is no buy box for the Kindle edition — only for the paperback edition.

If you think that report was scary, try this one on for size. Amazon is apparently showing only a random selection of each author’s ebooks to each visitor, and leaving the rest hidden.

Yesterday, I had friends outside of my country (I’m in Canada) check the status of my books. Rhode Island, could see half my books, but not the other half or they said unavailable for purchase. Florida couldn’t see any of the kindle books for sale. Ohio could see and buy them all. Australia could only see half.

What this report means folks is that even the authors who think they are unaffected can never be 100% sure that they escaped Amazon’s ebook massacre. For all they know their ebooks are being hidden from the next customers.

And to make matters worse, there are also reports that the trick of "republishing" an affected ebook doesn’t always solve the problem. At least two authors I know tried the trick and their ebooks are still affected.

Now is the time to panic, folks.

Amazon was contacted before the previous post was published, and did not respond.

Update: Amazon finally acknowledged the issue. This was posted on the KDP support forums:

Hello,

We’re experiencing an issue that has made some eBooks unavailable in the Kindle store in different marketplaces. Our engineers are working to solve this issue as quickly as possible. We’ll update this post to keep the Community informed once this issue has been resolved.

We appreciate your patience and understanding in the meantime.

Regards,

Kindle Direct Publishing Team

When ex-CEO Demos Parneros filed suit against Barnes & Noble in August, he mentioned that another  bookseller nearly bought B&N earlier this year.

Now the WSJ is reporting that the mystery retailer was WHSmith,

For months, people in the publishing industry wondered about the identity of the mystery would-be buyer.

People familiar with the situation say it was WH Smith PLC, a U.K. retailer that sells books, stationery and other products.

A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment. The company said last month that it is evaluating a possible sale and noted it had received interest from multiple parties, including executive chairman, Leonard Riggio.

Representatives for W.H. Smith didn’t respond to requests for comment.

I don’t think WHSmith was really that interested – not after it got a look at B&N’s books, anyway – but this story is quite plausible. After walking away from the B&N deal, WHSmith announced it was paying $148 million for InMotion, an airport retailer with 114 stores in 43 airports.

With annual revenues around $1.6 billion, it’s not hard to guess why WHSmith  passed on buying B&N.  Not only is B&N significantly larger, it is also financially unhealthy and is run by a management team that is given to turning what should be well-kept secrets into embarrassing public spectacles.

If B&N interacted with WHSmith with the same nasty infighting as B&N is now conducting itself in public, no wonder WHSmith backed out of the deal.

image by Shardayyy via Flickr

When I reported 3 days ago about MyIdentifiers.com’s extended downtime, I made an offhand reference to a report about credit cards being stolen on the site. I didn’t really trust that unconfirmed story, but it was later confirmed by another author, and now Bowker admitted that due to their sloppy website security, they were indeed hacked.

From Bowker:

Bowker was recently made aware by the payment card networks of patterns of unauthorized charges occurring on cards after they were legitimately used on Bowker’s website, www.myidentifiers.com. We immediately launched an investigation and engaged a leading forensic firm to assist. Our investigation has identified unauthorized code that was added to the checkout page on our website. Based on currently available evidence, our investigation is focused on determining if the code was active from May 1, 2018 through October 23, 2018. However, because our investigation is continuing, complete findings are not available and it is too early to provide further details on the investigation. We anticipate providing notification to any affected customers as we get further clarity about the specific timeframes and orders that may have been affected.

Bowker has not said when their site will be online again, but they did say that you can still buy a single ISBN through a different site. You can also buy a block of ISBNs by downloading an order form and faxing it in.

BTW, did anyone else notice they didn’t tell anyone about the hack until two days after I first reported it? Does anyone else think they would never have said anything publicly if I hadn’t already posted my scoop? (I do)

P.S. This is why I continue to blog; I love being two days ahead of the official announcement.

The latest chapter in the three-month-old soap opera which began with B&N firing CEO Demos Parneros arrived today in the form of a counter-suit.

From Reuters:

Barnes & Noble Inc on Tuesday filed a countersuit seeking damages from the former chief executive officer it fired in part because of claims he sexually harassed a female employee.

The largest U.S. bookstore chain said Demos Parneros breached his duties of loyalty and good faith by sexually harassing the female employee, bullying subordinates, and attempting to "sabotage" a potential sale of the New York-based company.

…

In its countersuit, Barnes & Noble said Parneros' lawsuit "downplays what occurred," and that the company should recoup his salary, bonus and other benefits during the period of his "disloyal conduct" and cancel his outstanding equity awards.

Barnes & Noble said the female employee reported two incidents in which Parneros allegedly subjected her to unwanted touching or comments of a sexual nature.

It said that in the second incident, Parneros allegedly pulled the employee toward him so their faces touched, and as she tried to pull away he said she seemed like someone who "would put out" if he "wined and dined" her.

Barnes & Noble also said Parneros derailed a takeover that would have cost him the CEO role, after portraying the company as an "ugly mess" that had "no realistic prospects for success" in a June meeting with executives of the potential acquirer.

According to the countersuit, Barnes & Noble has received "additional complaints about Parneros' inappropriate behavior toward women" at the company since his termination. Barnes & Noble declined to elaborate.

Parneros has denied B&N’s allegations.

What an utter mess – exactly what B&N doesn’t need right now.

Whether or not the allegations are true (the situation is so muddled that at this point picking a side  says more about one’s biases than the case) this case is the exact opposite of what B&N needs right now.

B&N needs to portray the image of competence and professionalism so as to allay fears about its downward spiral. Instead, this case makes the senior management look like jackasses. It is putting the question in everyone’s head that if B&N can’t even manage to fire its CEO without causing a scene, can we really trust them to run a company?

That is not the question you should want your creditors asking.

image by jjbers via Flickr

Amazon’s Kindle platform is fraught with bugs and inexplicable behavior. When it’s not blocking ARC reviews, it’s ignoring the final version of an ebook and instead sending out a draft copy.

And when it’s not deleting reviews because authors engaged in the SOP marketing practice of connecting with their fans on social medial, it’s removing ebooks from sale for literally no reason and with no notification.

Over the past couple days numerous authors have discovered – quite often by accident – that their ebooks have been removed from sale on Amazon.com. The ebooks have not been deleted, and in many cases the title is still available in other markets, but on Amazon.com the buy button has been replaced with this notice:

I have read about this bug in a couple Facebook groups, and on KBoards. It is reportedly a widespread problem affecting a lot of authors, but Amazon has elected not to notify affected authors.

One author on KBoards explains how they discovered the bug:

Last night, I got a message from a reader that one of my books was unavailable for purchase. I thought the customer just had the wrong link, but I confirmed that when I go to the book’s page, it says "this title is not currently available for purchase" instead of the price. In researching this, most people who report the problem have just uploaded their book and are told to wait. In this case, the book has been available in the Kindle store since August and I’ve been selling copies all the way up until yesterday evening. I checked in the Dashboard and it still lists the book as live, even though the actual store says it’s unavailable.

With authors only learning they had been impacted after  meticulously checking their listings, it is hard to say how widespread this bug is.

Fortunately, one author has identified a possible solution. They reported that making a minor edit and then republishing the ebook is enough to restore it to available status.

It remains to be seen whether that will help all affected authors, however.

image by Sarabbit via Flickr

This probably will not amount to much in terms of real impact.

From Motherboard:

The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office just proposed new rules that will give consumers and independent repair experts wide latitude to legally hack embedded software on their devices in order to repair or maintain them. This exemption to copyright law will apply to smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices.

The move is a landmark win for the “right to repair” movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of “lawfully acquired” devices for the “maintenance” and “repair” of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.

Specifically, it allows breaking digital rights management (DRM) and embedded software locks for “the maintenance of a device or system … in order to make it work in accordance with its original specifications” or for “the repair of a device or system … to a state of working in accordance with its original specifications.”

The thing about jailbreaking devices is that the federal government stopped trying to prosecute anyone for this all the way back in 2010. The act of jailbreaking was already effectively legal because everyone knew they would get away with it.

The new rules aren’t going to change the legal status quo, and they also aren’t going to stop companies from putting up all sorts of extra-legal roadblocks to keep you from fixing your device.

Remember, Apple has an established reputation for being an absolute dick to repair services who dare to use third-party parts in fixing iPhones (they also recently bricked iPhones that had been repaired with a third-party screen). And then there are companies like HP and Epson that attacked printer owners by releasing firmware updates that blocked you from using the third-party ink cartridges you had already installed.

So really, the new rules don’t actually mean anything. The federal government doesn’t care one way or the other, and the tech companies beleive they own you and will do whatever they want to establish and maintain their control.

image by FHKE via Flickr

For the past few years one of the most widely known "secrets" was the identity of Data Guy, the pseudonymous creator of the Author Earnings Reports (at right).

Many people in book publishing knew the name of the person who had upended the book publishing industry with his market analytics reports (including the companies which had hired him as a consultant), and thousands of people who listened to him speak at conferences knew him on sight.

But in spite of the fact that many people knew his name, and in spite of the fact that he  had built the Author Earnings Report into a market analytics startup called Bookstat.com, no one has ever publicly connected the Data Guy pseudonym with the person behind it.

Until today.

According to his LinkedIn profile, the CEO of Bookstat, the company founded by Data Guy, is a former gaming exec by the name of Paul Abbassi.

Edit: Just so you know, I didn’t actually know Paul’s name until this morning. I was not in on the secret, so I had nothing to betray.

Formerly the CTO at Digital Chocolate and the VP of Data Analytics at MaxPlay, Abbassi has two Master’s Degrees in electrical engineering, as well as a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Berkeley.

He has a decade of experience in running gaming companies, and then in 2012 he turned his attention toward book publishing. According to his profile his various projects include Booklead.com, a now defunct deals site, an unnamed company that aggregated book reviews, and then there’s this entry:

Pseudonymous cofounder and chief data scientist for the trade publishing industry’s preeminent independent data-reporting and author advocacy watchdog group. Coauthor of popular industry reports that track shifts in publishing market share by using a scalable cloud of custom-coded web spiders to scrape the public sales rankings of millions of individual titles at the largest online bookstores in real time.

While I do not have explicit confirmation that Paul Abbassi is Data Guy, that description is specific enough for me to safely say that I found the right guy. Furthermore, Abbassi 's profile photo bears a striking resemblance to the person I met as Data Guy at DBW 2015 (shown above).

I have queried several sources, including Data Guy, for confirmation, and no one responded at the time I published this post. If you can confirm his identity, please leave a comment below.

After 4 years and several moderately useful designs, Dasung is finally launching an E-ink monitor with the one feature that I have wanted since the first time I saw the Paperlike at CES 2015.

It has a touchscreen.

Now live on Indiegogo, the Paperlike Pro (Touch) is a 13.3″ E-ink monitor that connects to your PC or mobile device over HDMI. It has a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200 as well as a capacitive touchscreen. The pre-order price is $800.

The Paperlike gives you all the pleasing reading experience of a Kindle’s screen, only scaled up to the point that you can get real work done. As you can see in the video, it’s a pretty cool device. It’s going to finally give me something I wanted, which is to sit back and read with the screen in my lap. (Yes, I can do that with an Onyx Max, but after getting burned once when I paid retail for a disappointing and marginally functional Max unit, I am not going to buy Onyx again.)

I just wish that Dasung had passed on launching the earlier models and instead waited until they could launch this one.

The thing is, I have two very good Paperlike monitors on my desk. A lot of people bought those earlier monitors, and they work great. But those models were also so expensive that a lot of the people who bought one of the previous models will have trouble justifying the purchase of the new Paperlike Pro (Touch).

This could limit sales, possibly to the point that Dasung won’t have enough orders for a production run.

Indiegogo

When Walmart and Rakuten Kobo first announced their partnership in January, a few hopeful souls thought that Amazon finally have a real competitor in the ebook market.

I am sorry to disappoint them, but Walmart doesn’t care as much about this market as they do.

I finally had a chance to visit my local Walmart today and look for the ebook display. It took up two panels in the book section, and was located in a great spot: the corner of two of the main aisles.

That was all it had going for it. According to the pricing stickers, the display had been there since August 22, but no one had bothered to fully set it up or maintain it. They hadn’t even bothered to put out the display units:

Do you see those Kobo Aura boxes? They’re supposed to be behind the counter in the electronics department.

And that shrink-wrapped packet of cards is supposed to be on one of the hooks, only no one had bothered to follow through.

Speaking of ebook cards, the hooks are still covered in the tape that was used during shipment to keep the cards from sliding around. You literally cannot buy an ebook, audiobook, etc without removing the tape:

How many people do you think would even bother?

I did, which is how I know that the cards offer zero incentive for me to complete a sale. The back of the cards don’t even have a blurb, much less any other detail that would appeal to readers.

Folks, this is not a serious attempt to sell ebooks – not in any way, shape, or form. This display tells us that the only thing Walmart cares about is being about to boast that they sell ebooks in store.

So long as Walmart can say that in their quarterly statements, they are satisfied. Actually selling ebooks – well, I doubt that is even mentioned on the same slide deck.

Next!

Amazon PR gave me the runaround on this launch so I have nothing official to tell you, but luckily for me the new Kindle has already leaked on Wired.it. The new Paperwhite is an incremental improvement on the last model. It is waterproof, but not really that much improved over what we have know.

The official announcement will be made in about 40 minutes.

Here’s the product listing on Amazon.com. The price is $249 (that is a placeholder, obviously).

* * *

reposted under a CC license from Wired.it

With tablets being cheaper and offering better color and decent battery life, color-E-ink is a dead duck.

But don’t tell Onyx that; they just showed off a new educational ereader at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Johannes Haupt got up close and personal with the Onyx Youngy Boox, an ereader equipped with a 10.7″ color Carta E-ink screen.

Sporting a resolution of around 150 ppi, this device has a camera of unknown resolution, a stylus, and what looks like an electromagnetic touchscreen (I don’t think we see them using their fingers). It runs academic software and is only available in China.

That is a shame, because this would be a great device to see.

FYI: The reason this device has a screen resolution of 150ppi has to do with how it gets its color. This is actually a 300 ppi grayscale Carta E-ink screen with an RGBC filter applied on top. The filter  adds red, green, or blue on top of a pixel on the E-ink screen (the C is for "clear"). The filter requires 4 pixels on the grayscale screen underneath to give you a single pixel on top This reduces the resolution to 150 ppi.

Here’s a fascinating footnote to tomorrow’s Amazon news.

I have official confirmation today of a rumor that circulated in March: Amazon has shut down its screen tech sub, Liquavista.

An Amazon rep told me this morning that they "can confirm that Liquivista is no longer operating". However, they were unable to tell me whether Amazon still be pursuing this tech, if Liquavista’s R&D work been shifted to another unit, or the state of their screen production.

If Amazon stays true to form, this information will probably be released to Techcrunch or another major news site after I break this story.

It is also entirely possible that Liquavista will play into tomorrow’s announcement, but that is really just a wild guess. (I am not playing coy; due to Amazon PR giving me the runaround I really don’t know anything about tomorrow.) That is unlikely, however; I was first tipped to this story by a reader who noticed the Liquavista website went down 3 weeks ago. (Thanks, Javi!) If Amazon were still doing something with Liquavista, the site would have been restored when I pointed it out to Liquavista weeks ago.

Launched in 2006 as a spin off from Philips, Liquavista had been developing a unique type of screen tech that was based on running an electric current through a liquid. This is called electrowetting technology, which is a fancy way of saying that each pixel in a Liquavista screen contained 3 liquids (red, green, blue), and that the color shown by a pixel depended on the amount of power fed into each liquid.

Here’s a demo of a Liquavista screen from 2013. Recorded shortly before the Amazon acquisition, this was the last time Liquavista showed off their screen tech.

The screens were originally being developed as a solution to the battery life issue. Mobile battery life was terrible back in the pre-iPad, pre-iPhone, and pre-netbook era, and people were willing to pay a premium for a screen which used less power than typical LCD screens.

That was why the company was launched, and why Samsung bought it in 2011, but by the time Amazon bought Liquavista in 2013, it was pretty clear that there was no broader market for this tech. The problem of mobile battery life had been solved and battery capacity was already improving year by year, and screens were getting more and more energy efficient.

Coincidentally, I was the first to report that Samsung bought Liquavista in 2011, and the first to report that it had been sold to Amazon in 2013, and now I am the first to officially report Liquavista’s demise.

Liquavista never did get their screens into production; I see from my archives that mass production was supposed to begin in 2013; however, nothing reached the market, and it’s not clear that they even started production.

Liquavista were one of many startups that competed to provide a low-power screen solution, and most of them are dead now.  The lucky few like Pixtronix and Mirasol lived long enough to be acquired, while the majority declared bankruptcy or simply shut down.

The one survivor from that era is E-ink. First commercially produced for the Sony Librie and later the original Kindle, E-ink screens still dominate the ereader market, although with the way that market is shrinking due to people holding on to last year’s model (it still works great), it is hard to predict the company’s financial future.

Liquavista’s future is equally uncertain.

There are two frequently repeated misconceptions about the ebook market that continue to be repeated no matter how often they are debunked.

The first is that AAP publisher ebook revenue is the sum of global ebook sales, and the second is that ISBN registrations equals the number of titles published by indie authors each year.

The first misconception still hasn’t died out despite numerous repetitions – including in every AAP press release – explaining that the AAP stats reflect publisher revenues, not what consumers paid to retailers, and that the stats reflect less than half the market (indies and non-AAP publishers account for the rest).

The misconception about ISBNs, on the other hand, looked like it had died out a couple years ago after countless repetitions pointing out that an ISBN is not required to bring an ebook to market, so a lot of authors don’t bother getting one and thus the reported stats about ISBNs registered every year don’t mean what you think they mean.

Alas, Bowker, the company that administers ISBNs in the US, seems determined to revive this misconception. For reasons known only to them, earlier this week they misrepresented their annual report on ISBN registrations:

According to the latest report from ProQuest affiliate Bowker, self-publishing grew at a rate of more than 28 percent in 2017, up from an 8 percent increase during the prior year. The total number of self-published titles grew from 786,935 to 1,009,188, surpassing the million mark for the first time.

Self-publishing of print books increased by 38 percent in 2017 for a total of 879,587. This is the fifth consecutive year of print growth – driven by a 50 percent increase at CreateSpace, a self-publishing platform. Self-published ebooks decreased by 13 percent, continuing a downward trend for the third successive year. Two service providers, Smashwords and Lulu, accounted for 105,037 ebook titles, 81 percent of the ebook total of 129,601.

As the numbers confirm, self-publishing continues to grow each year. According to Beat Barblan, Director of Identifier Services at Bowker, "Self-publishing shows no signs of slowing down and continues to grow at a steady rate. CreateSpace was very popular in 2017 – and now that its customers are moving to the new Kindle Direct Publishing platform, we don’t expect any decline in self-publishing."

While the statistics are factually correct, Bowker’s description is utter hokum.

Here’s some background for those just hearing about this issue for the first time.

• An ISBN is more or less a serial number for  a book. You must get one for a print book or it can’t be distributed, but the same is not true for an ebook (although there are benefits to getting an ISBN for an ebook).
• ISBN registrations are handled by a different agency in each country. In the US, that is Bowker.
• Since Bowker charges for ISBNs, a lot of authors save money by not getting an ISBN for their ebook.
• Bowker only license ISBNs in the US, and nowhere else, sothey can’t tell you the number of ISBNs registered by self-published authors in, say, Canada.

This means that Bowker’s claim of a million indie titles published is a miscount that ignores the entire rest of the world as well as the majority of ebooks published in any given year.

To put it simply, folks, we have no clue how many ISBNs were registered by indie authors, much less the number of titles published by said authors.

Next!

Whatever subcontractor is now running B&N Press on behalf of Barnes & Noble sure is doing a bang up job. They just announced a bevy of new features, including:

• Print Pre-Order: Now available for all print books on sale. Set your publication date up to 180 days in the future without needing final cover or interior files. Don’t forget, eBook pre-order is already available up to 12 months in advance of publication!
• Order advance copies of print books ahead of publication: Don’t forget, you can order personal copies of your print books, even if the book is available for pre-order, before your on-sale date.
• Customize your print book spine: You now have the ability to customize your print book’s spine if you’re uploading separate front and back cover files. Match the color of your book’s spine to any color in your existing cover files, and choose your font size and style.

Does anyone know who is running B&N Press now?

I have looked and I can’t find any info.

It looks like Amazon may have begun its irregularly scheduled leaks in anticipation of a new Kindle launch.

Earlier today an announcement was made on the Weibo social network that Amazon would be holding an event in next week on the 17th in Beijing. The event will be held at the Beijing·Zhuzhong Art Museum at 1:30 pm local time (1:30 am US eastern time).

The graphic doesn’t say anything specific about the new Kindle, although to be honest I’m not sure exactly what it says (Google Translate doesn’t work well with Chinese).

I have queried Amazon on this topic, but I have not received a response. It’s hard to tell you what that means, but I can assure you I will be keeping an eye out for additional leaked details.

Stay tuned.

Kindle Frere