Nate Hoffelder

Amazon has quietly added a new feature to book listings on Amazon.com that will quickly prove to be both a boon and a bane.

Authors on Facebook and KBoards have told me that Amazon has added a new "Related Video Shorts" section under the editorial reviews and product descriptions. At first glance this looks like it is intended for book trailers, but it turns out anyone can upload a video for any product. When you upload a video, you get to choose from a list of categories of what the video is about ( unboxing, product demonstration, etc.).

I found several book listings with reviews, including Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. No one appears to be using the feature to post book trailers or other positive reviews yet, but I have found a few videos where buyers had uploaded a video as part their review and detailed problems with the print edition of a book.

Edit: I’ve just read in a (closed) FB group that author can’t upload videos to their book listing. This explains the lack of adoption. Thanks, Mark!

Edit: And apparently Amazon changed the rules some time before August 2018, because Indies Unlimited says authors can upload their own video.

Amazon has supported uploading video reviews of products for several years now, but this option is still not widely used. But now that the videos are being added to listing pages, authors would be wise to upload their own videos and take advantage of the new promotion opportunities.

This could be a great way to get readers interested in not just this one book but also the author’s other work.

NPD reported on Wednesday what everyone already knew from the past few years of AAP monthly revenue reports: publisher ebook sales are down.

From PW:

Unit sales of traditionally published e-books fell 10% in 2017, compared to 2016, according to figures released by PubTrack Digital, part of the NPD book group. The service, which tracks sales from about 450 publishers, said e-book unit sales hit 162 million last year, down from 180 million units in 2016.

NPD reported that combining print sales from its BookScan service with PubTrack digital sales, e-books accounted for 19% of total units (both print and digital) last year, down from 21% in 2016. The top selling e-book among the trade publishers, it reported, was The Handmaid’s Tale published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Back in 2015, when PubTrack Digital was still owned by Bookscan, PubTrack Digital reported that 223 million ebooks were sold by publishers in 2014.

That was shown to be under half the market then (around 44%). All independent reports suggest that the ebook market has not significantly shrunk in the intervening years, which means that the  PubTrack Digital data points to a significant drop in market share for the publishers who supply data.

I would put it at around a third of units sold, but I am still waiting to see if Data Guy has estimates he can share from the Author Earning report.

I will update this post with his data if I can.

image by San José Public Library

Amazon has wrapped a number of file formats around the magazines it has sold on the Kindle platform over the past ten plus years. The original magazine format was based on the old Mobipocket format, and it was replaced by magazines in the KF8 format, which launched in 2011/2012.

And now KF8 is being replaced by KFX as the preferred format for magazines on the Kindle paltform.

Amazon released a new update today for its Kindle app for iOS. According to the changelog, the updates lets users return ebooks to Kindle Unlimited and Prime Reading. There’s also a mention of "a new mobile-friendly" magazine format.

I haven’t seen the magazines myself (no iDevice) but I have asked around and the consensus is that the new magazine format is based on KFX, the "new" file format Amazon debuted in 2015.

You can find the app in iTunes.

Changelog:

• Return Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited books from within the Kindle app. Simply long press on a book cover and select “Return book”.
• Read your favorite magazines in a new mobile-friendly format. Initial titles include Food Network, Cosmopolitan, Life & Style, Us Weekly, and 15 others.
• A new setting lets you enable the highlight menu so it shows up when you select text.

It turns out Kobo has a lot in common with the major trade publishers; in both cases,  much if not all of their growth comes from acquisitions rather than growing sales.

According to Rakuten’s annual report to investors, which was released in February,  Kobo’s net content sales were up 60.4% in the firth quarter over the same period in the previous year.

The report also showed that Overdrive’s total checkouts were up 17.5% in that same quarter.

Rakuten did not reveal any additional detail in the report or in the presentation for investors. In fact, Kobo wasn’t mentioned in the presentation at all.

Did you look at that first chart?

Kobo got a huge boost when they took over operations of Tolino early last year, but ever since then their revenues have declined. That comes as a surprise given that I have not heard any complaints from users which would indicate they were turning away from Kobo.

And yet, that is probably what is happening given that Overdrive did not see a similar dip in checkouts, and Author Earning reports showed that the ebook market continues to grow.

Have you stopped buying your ebooks through Kobo/Tolino?

Amazon China announced on Tuesday that it will launch Prime Reading in China.Amazon Prime members in China can now enjoy unlimited access to more than 500 Kindle titles, including several best-sellers and issues of popular magazines.

Gu Fan, head of Amazon Prime China, said that a recent study showed the digital reading adoption rate had increased in China for eight straight years, reaching 68.2% in 2016. "Reading has been one of the most frequently-requested new benefits from members since Day One of Prime in China. We will continue innovating for Prime members in China by adding more benefits, making Prime the best deal."

Amazon revealed yesterday that it has over 100 million Prime members in the US.  It has not revealed numbers for China, noting only that subscribers to its Prime service in China increased more than threefold, year-on-year, in 2017,

"Prime Reading enables us to connect with Amazon Prime customers, and we look forward to bringing additional titles to Prime members in the future," said Wang Ziqi, senior vice-president at DuKe Publishing, which will join Prime Reading with 38 of its most popular titles.

BookFrere

Amazon has released a new update for its Kindle app for Windows and macOS. Kindle for PC version 1.23.1 adds a number of new features, include a half-dozen new font options and a new multi-column option that is being mislabeled as a "two-column mode".

Install the update and you can choose from six additional fonts Baskerville, Caecillia, Helvetica, Helvetica Light, Lucida, Palatino). Along with Bookerly, Amazon Ember, Amazon Ember Bold, and Open Dyslexic, the app now offers ten font options.

There’s also a new viewer that lets you zoom in on images and scroll around. It also works on equations and footnotes (I haven’t had a chance to test the latter two, though).

And last but not least, Kindle for PC now has a multi-column mode. For the longest time it has had an option for displaying text in two columns like the facing pages of a book, but now it can automatically adjust the number of columns to fit your screen size and the font size.

Select the right options and it can like this:

Changelog:

What’s new in Kindle for PC 1.23.1

1. New Fonts: You can choose from six new fonts (Baskerville, Caecillia, Helvetica, Helvetica Light, Lucida, Palatino) in addition to Bookerly, Amazon Ember, Amazon Ember Bold and Open Dyslexic in the Aa(Fonts) menu.

2. Two Column mode: You can now choose to read with one column, two columns or with the number of columns determined automatically based on the font size selected and the page width.

3. Viewer for Images, Math equations and Footnotes – Double click on an Image / Math equation to launch the viewer.

4. Split View support: You can now read in Split View on your PC.

You can find the update on Amazon.

If you have an account on Createspace then you might want to change your password – and while you’re at it, double check your payment details.

There has been no public discussion yet, but I have read multiple independent reports in several closed Facebook groups from authors who say that someone hacked their CS account.

Many of the reports go something like this:

We got an email from Createspace last night that our payment info had been changed. Fortunately, CreateSpace notifies you if this happens. I fixed the info and changed my password ASAP.

Today’s lesson: Don’t ignore messages like that from CreateSpace. They could be important.

It’s not clear at this time that Createspace has been hacked, and judging by the low number of reports I would say that is unlikely. (There are only a handful of reports, not hundreds or thousands.)

This hack is most likely the result of a hacker piling up all the passwords and emails from other security breaches, and then using them to try to access accounts on Createspace en masse. Most of the passwords won’t work, but if one does then the hacker immediately changes the payment details.

To reiterate: If you have an account on Createspace then you might want to change your password – and while you’re at it, double check your payment details.

While Createspace automatically sends out emails when those details are changed, you do not want to take the chance that the email they sent you got lost. You also don’t want to take the chance that the hacker can access your account today, and is biding their time while waiting for a better opportunity.

Go change your password today, and make sure it is both long enough that it’s hard to guess and easy to remember.

image by The Preiser Project

Google’s developed a new way to ask its search engine research questions, and it could make English Lit classes a breeze.

Talk to Books is Google’s solution to answering fuzzy or nonspecific questions like "What smell brings back great memories?".

From Friday’s blog post:

Natural language understanding has evolved substantially in the past few years, in part due to the development of word vectors that enable algorithms to learn about the relationships between words, based on examples of actual language usage. These vector models map semantically similar phrases to nearby points based on equivalence, similarity or relatedness of ideas and language. Last year, we used hierarchical vector models of language to make improvements to Smart Reply for Gmail. More recently, we’ve been exploring other applications of these methods.

Today, we are proud to share Semantic Experiences, a website showing two examples of how these new capabilities can drive applications that weren’t possible before. Talk to Books is an entirely new way to explore books by starting at the sentence level, rather than the author or topic level. Semantris is a word association game powered by machine learning, where you type out words associated with a given prompt. We have also published “Universal Sentence Encoder”, which describes the models used for these examples in more detail. Lastly, we’ve provided a pretrained semantic TensorFlow module for the community to experiment with their own sentence and phrase encoding.

I’ve been playing around with it for a few minutes this morning. While it was interesting on a tech level, I couldn’t see a practical use for it at first, but then I got into it and I was reminded of my high school English Lit class.

The sample questions provided by Google, and the answers found in the books, remind me of test questions from that class. This could make it a whole lot easier to crib your way through class without learning anything, but at the same time this will be a useful tool for non-native English speakers who want to understand the semantics of a sentence (as opposed to its literal translation).

Literal translations are easy compared to understanding the meaning of a sentence, and Talk to Books might help with that.

Have you tried it yet? What did you think?

While the Kindle Unlimited funding pool grew by 5% in March 2018, the per-page royalty did not.

Amazon announced on Friday that the funding pool increased to $21 million in March, up from $20 million in February. At the same time the per-page rate dropped to $0.00449 in March from $0.00466 in February 2018 and $0.00448 for January.

From Self-Publisher Bibel (please fill in the missing numbers):

• US: $0.0045 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0031 (EUR)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0045 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.0046 (CAD)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0109 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5568 (JPY)
• UK, Mexico, Australia, Canada, India: unknown

P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million
• March 2017: $17.7 million
• April 2017: $17.8 million
• May 2017 :$17.9 million
• June 2017: $18 million
• July 2017: $19 million
• August 2017: $19.4 million
• September 2017: $19.5 million
• October 2017: $19.7 million
• November 2017: $19.8 million
• December 2017: $19.9 million
• January 2018: $20.9 million
• February 2018: $20 million
• March 2018: $21 million

Amazon is destroying the Kindle Store from the inside out by letting broken algorithms run the show, punishing innocents while letting major scammers off scot-free.

Createspace, in comparison, would better be described as the wild west. Amazon’s POD operation is supervised by neither person nor machine, which is why I have found a massive textbook piracy scam there in 2015, and why someone was able to run a money-laundering operation under Amazon’s nose.

And then there is the piracy operation that I just found today.

Early this morning Dave Zatz brought my attention to the plight of Jamie Lendino. Jamie is the editor in chief of a tech blog owned by Ziff-Davis, and he is also the author of Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation (also published by Ziff Davis). That book is being sold through the Kindle Store and distributed through Createspace, and it is also being pirated through Createspace by an exceptionally lazy pirate going by the pseudonym "Steve S.Thomas".

The pirated copy of the book not only has the same content, it literally uses the same layout and even the same page headers (which include the original title). All the pirate did was cut a few pages like the copyright page, and then slap on his own cover (which was a graphic pirated from a classic video game).

https://twitter.com/acht_bits/status/984549576878194688

Given that the original book was published through Createspace, it should not have been possible to also pirate the book in Createspace.

All it would take to stop the piracy is a very simple measure where Createspace embeds digital watermarks in books when they are submitted, and then also checks incoming books for said digital watermarks. Any book that has digital watermarks that match an existing book would be held for review by a person.

This doesn’t require a brilliant engineer; a competent high school student – say, one that is on a BotBall team – could have coded the anti-piracy measure.

It is that simple.

And yet Createspace didn’t bother.

This indifference has enabled the pirate to distribute not one, but 11 pirated books through Createspace. A quick check of BookFinder shows that "Steve S.Thomas" has eleven books through Createspace, including:

• a book on organized crime, originally published by Springer,
• proceedings from a security conference, also originally published by Springer,
• a book on wireless security, originally published by Artech House Publishers, and
• a book on food safety, originally published in 2004 by Wiley.

I found the original books through the incredibly advanced investigative technique of Googling snippets from each pirated book’s summary (the summaries had also been pirated).

Createspace could duplicate that technique as an anti-piracy measure by hiring a college sophomore as an intern over Christmas break, and having them code it.

And yet Createspace hasn’t bothered.

It’s the wild west over there, y’all.

P.S. Amazon was not contacted before I published this post. I saw no reason to wait on a generic statement expressing concern when Amazon has demonstrated that it doesn’t care enough to fix the problem. When I reported on the textbook scam in 2015, I asked Amazon what they could tell me about the anti-piracy measures they were going to implement to prevent the scam from happening again. Amazon did not answer at the time, but it is now over 30 months later and the answer is obviously diddly squat.

image by Interval

eBook app development is almost a dead field, but after years of only being able to report on new features in the Kindle apps, I am pleased to report that multiple Epub3 apps have been released in under a month.

A couple weeks ago EDR Lab released the first alpha version of its app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and now I can report that similar apps have been released for Android and iOS.

Released last month, Lea Reader is an Android app that uses the open source Readium  SDK as the core of a custom and easy-to-use Android SDK. The app has basic features like management of personal book collections, bookmarks, annotations, and full-text search, and supports both reflowable and fixed-layout ebooks.

This is an evolving app and it will get many new options in the coming months such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud integration. You can find the app in Google Play.

Just released this week, R2 Reader is an iOS app from EDRLab. According to the listing:

This free reading application demonstrates the power of the open-source Readium-2 architecture for accessing Epub and Epub3 publications. It is compatible with Readium LCP, the non-proprietary and user friendly solution for distributing protected publications. It supports OPDS feeds, and therefore allows users to access easily a multitude of free ebooks from multiple providers.

Edit: R2 Reader also supports the new Readium DRM. No one sells ebooks with this DRM, but you can test it here.

You can find R2 Reader in iTunes.

If you ever wondered just how many links you see on Twitter were shared by a person, the answer is: not too damn many.

We still don’t know what impact they have, though.

From Pew Research Center:

In the context of these ongoing arguments over the role and nature of bots, Pew Research Center set out to better understand how many of the links being shared on Twitter – most of which refer to a site outside the platform itself – are being promoted by bots rather than humans. To do this, the Center used a list of 2,315 of the most popular websites¹ and examined the roughly 1.2 million tweets (sent by English language users) that included links to those sites during a roughly six-week period in summer 2017. The results illustrate the pervasive role that automated accounts play in disseminating links to a wide range of prominent websites on Twitter.

Among the key findings of this research:

• Of all tweeted links to popular websites, 66% are shared by accounts with characteristics common among automated “bots,” rather than human users.
• Among popular news and current event websites, 66% of tweeted links are made by suspected bots – identical to the overall average. The share of bot-created tweeted links is even higher among certain kinds of news sites. For example, an estimated 89% of tweeted links to popular aggregation sites that compile stories from around the web are posted by bots.
• A relatively small number of highly active bots are responsible for a significant share of links to prominent news and media sites. This analysis finds that the 500 most-active suspected bot accounts are responsible for 22% of the tweeted links to popular news and current events sites over the period in which this study was conducted. By comparison, the 500 most-active human users are responsible for a much smaller share (an estimated 6%) of tweeted links to these outlets.
• The study does not find evidence that automated accounts currently have a liberal or conservative “political bias” in their overall link-sharing behavior. This emerges from an analysis of the subset of news sites that contain politically oriented material. Suspected bots share roughly 41% of links to political sites shared primarily by conservatives and 44% of links to political sites shared primarily by liberals – a difference that is not statistically significant. By contrast, suspected bots share 57% to 66% of links from news and current events sites shared primarily by an ideologically mixed or centrist human audience.

As interesting as this may be, it is not terribly useful.

All this really told us is that the share count shown on popular websites is grossly inflated by bots. This report did not tell us anything about the impact of all that extra sharing.

Pew was wrong to say that this report shows "the pervasive role that automated accounts play"; while Pew did collect data about the bots, they did not collect anything that could explain the bots' _role_.

Did those bots have lots of followers, or hardly any? If they have no followers this doesn’t matter a bit, and if they have a lot of followers then it might mean the bots have value.

Rather than count the volume of shared links, a better question would be to ask how many people actually saw the typical bot-generated tweets. That would tell us if this was meaningless share count inflation, or if the bots were actually driving the conversation.

That would be interesting, but even then it might not tell us what you would expect.

I live on Twitter, and I have connections with software engineers that make Twitter and other bots. Those bots are far more common than you might realize, and the vast majority are both benign and useful (or at least amusing).

I know at least 6 different bots tweeting links to my site. Some of those bots have a lot of followers and get a lot of RTs because they are useful to the bot’s followers. If the bot is benign and valued by its followers, I really don’t have a problem with it.

As for those that are not, until you filter out the benign bots, there’s no way to grasp the scale of the impact of malignant bots.

And that is the question worth investigating.

Don’t look now, but the UK’s second-largest bookseller is up for sale, with a deal rumored to be closed this month.

So says The Bookseller:

The sale of Waterstones to hedge fund Elliott Advisors is likely to close at the end of this month, The Booksellerunderstands. The looming deal has caused a delay in increasing the pay of senior booksellers, after junior staff saw their salaries rise with the increase in the National Minimum Wage.

A source with knowledge of the situation, who wished not to be named, said they believed the deal was on track to coincide with Waterstones’ financial year end on 30th April.

Elliott Advisors is the UK arm of the American hedge fund founded by c.e.o. Paul Singer. Sky News reported in January that the firm was one of a small number of bidders to have lodged formal offers to buy the bookselling chain and had been granted a period of exclusivity, albeit for a sum “far lower” than the £250m speculated by previous reports.

Elliott Management has not responded for a request for comment from The Bookseller, while Waterstones’ managing director James Daunt has declined to comment.

Waterstones’ current owner Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut put the business up for sale in October, handled by N M Rothschild.

At 281 stores and annual revenues in the range of £400 million, Waterstones is the second largest bookseller in the UK.

There’s no word yet on the sale price, but according to rumors from last October the chain "could be worth £250 million". That is about five times what Mamut paid for Waterstones when he bought it in 2011.

image  by Neil T

Around this time last year Amazon released one more tool that let you make ebooks that could be sold in the Kindle Store.

That app was Kindle Create, and Amazon announced on Thursday that the new version of the app now supported six additional languages in its menus.

We launched Kindle Create in December and thousands of KDP authors have since used Kindle Create to help them publish their eBooks. Thanks to their feedback, the latest version of Kindle Create now includes support for formatting eBooks written in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch languages, in addition to English. The Kindle Create interface is also available in these languages. With Kindle Create you can:

• Automatically find chapter titles and create a Kindle table of contents
• Review and select visual themes designed to suit the genre of your eBook
• Preview your eBook to see what readers will see—and make the changes you want
• Quickly format using various book elements like First paragraph, blockquote, separators and more

Kindle Create works with .doc and .docx files exported from any source, including Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Google Docs, and other applications. It also supports creation of interactive textbooks from PDFs. Kindle Create is available for PC (Windows 7 and above) and MacOS (10.11 and above).

More information about Kindle Create is available here.

I installed the updated app. It still won’t let me make an ebook I can read, so I doubt I will be using it again.

Have you tried it? What do you think?

In September of last year Amazon filed for arbitration against several companies that were using various nefarious means to scam the Kindle Store.

Now Law360 brings us the news that Amazon has filed in US federal court to get an arbitration confirmed.

An Amazon subsidiary filed suit in Washington federal court Tuesday seeking to confirm an arbitration award against a British man and his book publishing companies stemming from claims that they abused a Kindle self-publishing program, breaching the e-commerce giant’s terms and harming writers and readers alike.

Amazon Digital Services LLC’s petition asks the court to enter judgment in line with a January award issued by the American Arbitration Association after the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary reached an agreement with Jake Dryan and his United Kingdom-based companies, Green Publishing Ltd. and Project Olympus Ltd., to resolve claims that they manipulated the Kindle Direct Publishing service.

The stipulated award that followed the confidential settlement barred Dryan and his companies from future violations of Amazon’s and the Kindle program’s terms and conditions, including publishing works that are essentially duplicates of other books already available for download and using bots or other tools to artificially increase page views, according to court filings.

“Respondents have not sought to vacate, modify, or challenge the award,” Amazon noted, saying it should thus be confirmed under the Federal Arbitration Act.

Amazon says that the defendants:

• created at least six Amazon publisher accounts, at least one of which engaged linkbaiting,
• published duplicate content – at one point in 2017, all five of their books on the bestseller list contained content that had been previously included in other works published through the KDP, and
• used bots or other tools to artificially increase page views in Kindle Unlimited.

Tuesday’s filing notes that Amazon already reached an agreement resolving its claims against this particular group of scammers. Now, Amazon seeks confirmation of the award under the FAA and an order enjoining Dryan and his companies from future violations of Amazon’s rules and policies.

The thing that gets me about this case is that it shows just how badly Amazon is screwing up Kindle Store operations.

As anyone who follows this topic can tell you, scammers are a serious problem in the Kindle Store. David Gaughran has repeatedly shown on Twitter that at any given time the top several spots in the Kindle Store best-seller list have been stolen by scammers like Jake Dryan.

This fellow was such a prolific scammer that Amazon actually filed for arbitration. That is a huge deal considering that we also know that Amazon takes action against authors when it finds sales and borrow irregularities for a single title, often times even punishing innocent authors.

To put it another way, at the same time that Amazon missed this scammer until he grew into a huge problem, it was also punishing innocents. As David explains, this points to not just an algorithm allowed to run amok in the Kindle Store, but also one that doesn’t work very well.

But to answer your question directly, because Amazon didn't want to dedicate actual human resources to policing this issue, and instead instituted a dumb, automated system which generated TONS of false positives and missed all the big kahunas. Quelle surprise.

— David Gaughran (@DavidGaughran) April 5, 2018

And it gets worse.

This wasn’t even one of the big scammers that David has been watching.

I don't know what size scammer he was, but he wasn't one of the big circle I've been watching. Maybe a test case, maybe an example, only Amazon knows.

— David Gaughran (@DavidGaughran) April 5, 2018

Amazon has huge problems that they are not addressing while at the same time they are letting a bot swat innocent authors.

That is not a business so much as it is a shit show, and it’s a wonder that Amazon’s competitors haven’t taken advantage of the situation.

image by quinn.anya