Nate Hoffelder

Amazon has just announced a third color option for the Kindle Oasis 2. In addition to graphite and gold, you now have the choice of champagne gold.

It is up for pre-order today for  $279.99, and it will start shipping on 22 March. It is only available with 32GB of storage and Wifi (but not 3G).

It seems rather odd to release a limited color option like this, given that the Oasis cases are going to cover the back and render your color choice irrelevant, but at least it is pretty.

Amazon is building bookstores that look like they were designed by an AI(*), but Beijing  is going one better. The Beijing International Book Mall is now home to a completely automated bookstore.

From The Beijinger:

Late night shoppers looking with a need to buy books will have their very specific conditions met in Beijing as 20 new staffless bookstores that will operate 24 hours a day are expected to open throughout the city this year.

Book-selling franchise Xinhua opened the first of the planned stores last month in east-end Tongzhou. Featuring an automated system with no regular human staff, the all-day bookstores are planned to be built at Beijing universities, government offices, and shopping malls.

Like other staffless stores, the "Xinhua Lifestyle Store" requires all customers to register their real names using their WeChat accounts and have their faces scanned before entering. And because the store has access to all their users' purchasing information, it can offer "precise and humanized" book suggestions to all of its customers.

…

Despite its convenience, the staffless store faces a number of drawbacks. For one thing, the 30-square-meter shop doesn’t offer a wide selection of books. The store’s book selection is limited to popular bestsellers that aren’t regularly updated. And, if customers are able to hold off their purchases until normal business hours, they would find a wider selection of books at the 80,000-square-meter Beijing International Book Mall, inside which the staffless bookstore is located.

That doesn’t sound appealing at all.

In an age where anyone in a hurry can download a book rather than get a paper copy, is there really a need for this kind of store?

P.S. I have visited an Amazon Books, and I am working on a post.

Misusing a book’s metadata is a well-known blackhat marketing technique. Amazon knows this, which is why for a decade now they have enforced a strict list of rules on what publishers and authors can’t put in metadata.

And now the UK’s Book Industry Communication is coming out against the practice. They have a released a statement to that effect:

Some publishers and other metadata providers are using the subtitle, and sometimes the title fields, in metadata feeds to carry marketing and promotional text. For those interested in best practices, magazineic.com offers valuable guidelines on proper metadata usage. By this we mean using phrases such as ‘Sunday Times Best Seller’, ‘Gripping read from…’, ‘The Richard & Judy Book Club thriller 2017’, ‘” The best thriller writer alive” Another Author’, ‘Man Booker prize winner’ and so on. It is important for discoverability, good customer experience and an efficient data supply chain that these data fields reflect only the true title and subtitle text that appears on the title page. The valuable promotional text should be included in separate and dedicated promotional text fields, and all metadata recipients, including wholesalers and retailers, should be using these fields appropriately.

There has been a significant escalation of this practice over the last twelve months, despite consistent feedback from BIC members across the book trade that this is causing substantial time-consuming work to correct at various points throughout the supply chain. BIC has seen numerous examples that are confusing and misleading for consumers trying to make a buying decision. Feedback received to date also reveals this poor practice is having an adverse effect on supply chain efficiency both in terms of the timing of product to market and costs incurred by retailers and aggregators having to remove the unwanted text.

BIC understands the need to provide promotional and marketing text and the temptation to include it in the subtitle field, but advises publishers and other metadata providers that the title and subtitle fields should only ever be populated with the true title and subtitle, as would be used on the book’s title page.

It’s all well and good to condemn the practice, but a more effective approach would be to get retailers and distributors to adopt quality standards and then follow through and enforce those standard.

We know Amazon does this, and if everyone else in the industry followed suit then this would not be a story today because the cheaters would be stymied everywhere they went.

So rather than shaking its finger at the offending parties, BIC should really be asking the rest of the industry to step up and help fix the problem, don’t you think?

image by kaleidoscopist

After news broke last week Audible was paying an abysmally low royalty rate for its romance audiobook service, Audible Romance, the audiobook retailer promised to patch the problem with a bonus, but wouldn’t give specifics.

The bonus payments have started to arrive, and we still don’t know any more than we did before.

Authors are reporting over at KBoards that the bonus payments started arriving in their bank accounts yesterday without any new update to the situation. They haven’t heard anything from Audible, and neither have I (I just sent another email), so we are still trying to puzzle the method to Audible’s madness.

So far the reports from authors include:

• I received my bonus. It was $140. I only made $5 in the program.
• I got $25 and I had no minutes for the period.
• I made one cent from two books and got a $25 bonus.

Without more data to go on, all I can tell is that Audible paid each other at least $25 for having a book in the program, and is scaling the bonus somehow.

If you got a bonus, can you share your details below? It would help us all figure out what Audible is doing.

While it’s great that Audible is making up for last quarter’s disastrous royalty payment, they still haven’t said anything about how they will fix the fundamental problem of the Audible Romance subscription service.

The service simply isn’t workable under its current setup. Right now romance fans are allowed to listen to as many audiobooks as they want for a low monthly fee ($15, or $7 for existing Kindle Unlimited or Audible subscribers).

Romance fans are voracious readers,  and they are going to listen to a lot of audiobooks when they join an unlimited plan like Audible Romance. This means that Amazon is going to have to pay an unacceptably low royalty to authors if it wants to break even, or it will pay a decent royalty and lose a ton of money each period.

Whose bright idea was this, exactly?

image by ActuaLitté

After a two-year pause, the Pew Research Center  has at long last conducted a new poll on media use in the US.

A total of 2,002 adults were polled in the first week in January, and the report found:

About three-quarters (74%) of Americans have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January. Print books remain the most popular format for reading, with 67% of Americans having read a print book in the past year.

And while shares of print and e-book readers are similar to those from a survey conducted in 2016, there has been a modest but statistically significant increase in the share of Americans who read audiobooks, from 14% to 18%.

Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read four books in the past 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when the Center first began conducting the surveys of Americans’ book reading habits.

This is of course a survey on reading habits, not buying habits, a detail worth remembering when these stats are misused when someone proclaims (once again) that ebooks are dead.

Pew

Sony is about to release a third model in their Digital Paper line of writing tablets, only this time it’s not made by Sony.

The Taiwan OEM Netronix filed a new set of FCC paperwork today for what Netronix is calling the Digital Paper DPT-CP1. According to the test reports and the FCC label info submitted in the paperwork, this device belongs to Sony.

All the interesting details, including the manual and product photos, have been embargoed until mid-April, but Sony’s name as well as the Digital Paper brand is mentioned repeatedly throughout the paperwork.

I couldn’t find any details on the screen size, but we do know that this device was tested for Wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC.  There’s also no mention of a headphone jack or audio, but the paperwork did note that the power is supplied by a USB cable.

We’re going to have to wait for a month or so to find out more.

If this really is a Sony device (and I beleive it is) then it will be the third model in Son’y line of large screen E-ink writing slates. The first model, the DPT-S1, debuted in 2013, while the second model, the DPT-RP1, launched last April.

You might be surprised that the new device has been outsourced, but I am not because I am 100% that the DPT-RP1 had also been outsourced.

Sony started developing the Digital Paper line back when it had an ereader division, but by 2017 the company had gone through several rounds of downsizing when unprofitable divisions where shut down. It would make a lot of sense to outsource hardware development at this time, and focus on software.

This explains why the first Digital Paper ran Android 2.1, just like Sony’s previous Sony Readers, while the second Digital Paper ran Android 5; someone else developed the OS running on the hardware.

And now the new Digital Paper is coming from Netronix.

Coincidentally, this company also makes ereaders for Kobo and B&N, and it files FCC paperwork on their behalf – covered in the respective brands.

The German ebook aggregator Libreka is partnering with Hamburg-based DigitalStores to offer ebooks on Ebay and Höbu (an audiobook retailer).

More than 1,000 publishers whose ebooks are exclusively to Libreka, will be covered by this deal. Initially it will only include ebooks that can be sold without hard DRM.

Libreka currently distributes over 3.5 million ebooks. The company supplies library service providers corporate networks, and retail platforms.

DigitalStores’s many services include e-commerce solutions for publishers and brands. Content such as ebooks, audiobooks, and music are distributed through a network of landing pages marketplaces, and retail sites.

BuchReport.de

image by maltman23

Multi-line Braille ereaders are the holy grail of reading technology, and it looks like one may soon be available to buy.

UK startup Bristol Braille Technology has developed the Canute, a multi-line Braille reader that is expected to retail for "around the cost of a new iPhone, not far off the price of a Perkins Brailler," BBT said on their website. "That’s around twenty times cheaper per cell than existing digital Braille devices."

Canute is the world’s first viable multi-line refreshable Braille e-reader; a ‘Kindle for blind people’. Available for a price comparable to a new iPhone or Perkins Brailler, Canute has been developed by Bristol Braille Technology with, by, and for the blind community.

Canute has been in development since 2012. In March 2018 it will begin its final pre-production testing pilot, prior to beginning sales later in the year. We’d love to give a specific release date, but its important to us to be transparent with our users: we want to hear back from the pilot programme feedback before we give a definitive date, and we don’t want to rush to market, only to deliver a sub-standard machine.

The Canute is supposed to hit the market later this year, but in the mean time BBT is showing off the Canute next Friday at the Royal National Institute Of Blind People. So if you are in London, you can check it out.

Other Braille tablets include the Blitab and an ongoing research project at the University of Michigan. Neither device has been released yet.

The New York Times is launching an audiobook best-seller list on Thursday.

The lists, which combine digital and physical audio sales, will debut online on Thursday, March 8, and in print in the Sunday Book Review on March 18.

Moving forward, the Best-Seller Lists, which previously published online on Fridays, will now publish on Thursday mornings.

“The vibrant growth of audiobooks in the industry has created a need for an impartial, reliable source for tracking and reporting the top-selling audiobooks across the country,” said Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review. “The Times recognizes the increased reader and listener interest in audiobooks, as well as in the Book Review’s increasing depth of coverage of audiobooks, and we’re thrilled we’ll be able to provide them independent data they can rely on.”

The Book Review will continue to publish in print the Combined Lists and Hardcover Lists each week. The third page will highlight other Best-Seller Lists on a weekly rotating basis, including the following categories: Paperback (Trade Fiction and Paperback Nonfiction), the four Children’s Books lists, and Audiobooks.

The Children’s Books Lists and Paperback Lists will continue to be updated and posted weekly online, and in response to reader interest, the Paperback Lists will now expand from 10 books to 15.

They won’t name their sources, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this list is invalid. While Amazon is notoriously protective of their sales data, there are companies, including that new venture from Data Guy, which could supply data to the NYTimes.

It could be  Data Guy, or the NYTimes could be teasing audiobook sales data out of Amazon Charts, or getting data from smaller audiobook distributors like Findaway and Downpour.

But let’s face facts: Amazon controls close to 90% of the audiobook market, and if the NYTimes isn’t getting data from Amazon then this list has absolutely no connection with reality.

image by Jon Grado

So you are an author, and you need help with your next book, but you don’t know where to find it. You could ask other authors for recommendations, or you could visit one of the many publishing services marketplaces.

This is a term I coined in 2014 for directory sites where freelancers and companies list the services they offer.

I know of 8 such sites, and now StreetLib has thrown their hat in the ring:

We are very happy to announce the launch of StreetLib Market. Simply put, it’s an online marketplace where you can contact and collaborate with independent book publishing professionals. With StreetLib Market, an author or publisher based anywhere in the world can commission the best editor, designer, marketer, and more for the job, regardless of their country of residence, and with minimal hassle in terms of billing, international tax issues, document exchange, and more.

Why StreetLib Market? First of all, everyone who hopes to write a great book needs an editor—that’s just a fact. To publish successfully, you need even more assistance. It used to be that to gain access to this help, you had to snag a book deal, and ideally one from a major New York or London publisher. Now you can locate freelance editors and designers online with just minutes of Googling. Still, one has to wonder: Will this person leave me poorer but without a stronger book? There’s much guesswork and minimal accountability. The search was daunting, for many people.

I wrote a round up post in 2014 that listed 8 sites ranging from Kboards yellow pages to Reedsy. I just updated it this morning to include Streetlib Market.

Authors are still reeling from the shock at how low the Audible Romance royalty rate was last quarter. While Audible has announced that they’ve fixed the royalty rate, they do have a bandage they will apply to the gushing financial wound inflicted on romance authors.

Earlier today Audible announced announced in a closed FB group for romance readers that it will be paying bonuses to authors who had audiobooks in Audible Romance last quarter:

To our Romance Community, regarding Q4 2017 Audible Romance Package Earnings:

In the short time since the launch of Audible Romance in November 2017, we have been focused on growing the audience for authors and actors whose works are included in the package. We created the offering to increase the reach and audience of romance audiobooks by bringing the works of authors and narrators to romance fans in an innovative, all-you-can-listen model that meets the needs of their voracious consumption patterns. We are happy to announce that in the first few months of the offering, customers are listening to content included in the Romance Package at rates that exceeded our initial projections. However, this has affected royalty payments in unintended ways.

To celebrate and thank participants in the early days of the first-ever all-you-can-listen service dedicated to romance audio, we are offering an early adopter bonus on top of Q4 2017 royalty earnings of the Package. Bonuses will be allocated based on how much customers listened to the authors' titles, and we will be distributing these bonuses within the next few days. We anticipate that as the program grows, royalties from the Package will reflect an additional revenue stream on top of unit sales. We are also examining the Romance Package based on current and projected listener behaviors to ensure we grow a sustainable offering that supports authors, narrators and romance fans alike. We remain focused on continuing to attract listeners with a pioneering new service that revolutionizes romance audiobook consumption.

Audible has not revealed how much they will be increasing the payment to authors, nor have they said whether authors will be released from the program early.

Audible was contacted before this post was published, and had not responded.

The one-time bonuses are nice, but it doesn’t address the fundamental problem with Audible Romance, which is that romance fans consume stories voraciously.

The thing about Audible Romance is that Amazon took a market where it both dominated and generated a tidy profit – romance audiobooks – and then disrupted that market with a flat rate subscription service, thereby cutting retail sales (according to several independent reports) and effectively putting a cap on what authors could earn from the program while also letting subscribers use as much as they want.

This led to an entirely foreseeable outcome of an extremely low royalty rate last quarter where authors were paid 57 cents when am AR subscriber finished  a ten hour audiobook.

That rate is so low that it has authors trying to leave the program ASAP, and has other romance authors reconsidering whether, given the expected low rate of return, they want to release audiobooks at all.

Would you blame them if they decided it wasn’t worth the investment?

image  by ActuaLitté

The Association of American Publishers reported on Thursday that tradpub were continuing to strangle their ebook sales in favor of print.

In terms of category, adult fiction and non-fiction revenues were up 3.6% while YAKids and religious presses revenues were down.

Revenues from hardback books and audiobooks were up 5.2% while ebook and paperback revenues fell.

press release

Publishers saw increased revenues in October, up $251 million (+27.6%) for October 2017 vs October 2016. The strong month brings revenues for Jan. – Oct. 2017 to $12.44 billion, up +1.7% for the year-to-date. Every category saw an increase in revenues for Oct. 2017, which include sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, etc.)

Trade books are up +16.5% for Oct. 2017 vs Oct. 2016 and +1.6% year-to-date. The greatest growth in the trade category was adult books, which saw $123.5 million (+25.8%) revenue growth. Publishers report that the significant increase is due to several factors including the book debuts from well-known authors.

Total Trade Net Revenue by Category for Jan. – Oct. 2017 (in millions)*

Trade Book Formats

In October, print books and audiobooks saw increased revenues, while eBooks declined in all categories except religious presses. The formats with the most significant growth in October were downloaded audio, up +41.4% and hardback books, up +25.1%.

From Jan. – Oct. for the year-to-date the hardback, board book and downloaded audio formats saw increased revenues.

Nine Month Total Trade Net Revenue by Format (in millions)*

Education and Scholarly Publishing

The education sector saw mixed results, with +5.4% growth in Higher Education Course Materials and a -3.4% decline in PreK-12 Instructional Materials from Jan – Oct. 2017.

Revenues for Professional Books increased by +41.1% for Oct. 2017 vs Oct 2016 and are up 10.2% year to date. University Presses increased +21.8% in October and 5.1% year-to-date.

About StatShot

Publisher net revenue is tracked monthly by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and includes sales data from about 1,200 publishers. Figures represent publishers’ net revenue for the U.S. (i.e. what publishers sell to bookstores, direct to consumer, online venues, etc.), and are not retailer/consumer sales figures.

image by Nikos Roussos

Back in 2013 Kobo responded to the then-current hand-wringing over adult content in ebookstores by launching a Kids Account option which had limited access to only what Kobo considered age-appropriate content (and could only buy ebooks with gift cards).

I think I may be the only person who ever used the program (and I am certainly the only one in media who wrote about it). I just got an email announcing that Kobo is ending the program:

Dear Valued Customer,

We wanted to let you know we have decided to retire Kobo Kids’ Accounts beginning April 3, 2018. Although we’ll no longer support accounts for children, we will continue to offer eBooks and audiobooks for young readers of any age.

As of April 3, all existing Kobo Kids’ Accounts will be merged with their corresponding parents’ accounts. This means any books and store credit on your child’s account will automatically be transferred to your own account.

I had one book in the kids account, and a credit for $10.51 which i must have added when I opened the account four years ago, and now both will be added to my main Kobo account.

When Audible launched Audible Romance last November, authors were thrilled at the idea that there was now a Kindle Unlimited for audiobooks where subscribers could pay a flat monthly fee and listen as much as they want.

That elation lasted until yesterday, when quarterly earnings statements from Audible arrived in authors' inboxes. Reports are coming in from KBoards that authors were dismayed to learn that Audible is paying $0.0009556 for each minute that an Audible Romance subscriber spent listening to their book.

If an audiobook is ten hours long, and an AR subscriber listens to the whole thing, Audible will pay 57 cents. (And to make matters worse, in many cases that 57 cents has to be split between the author who wrote the book and the narrator who recorded  it.)

If that audiobook had sold, the author would be getting a cut of $30 to $45 retail price, or of the $15 monthly credit.

The low pay in Audible Romance comes as a surprise given that Kindle Unlimited has worked out so well for many authors.

In comparison, the Kindle Unlimited rate was almost five times as high in January 2018, when Amazon was paying $0.0044795 for each page read by a KU subscriber. To put it another way, KU is paying just under a half of a cent per page, while Audible Romance is paying a tenth of a cent per minute.

With Kindle Unlimited, authors are getting almost as much when a book is read in KU as they would if the book sold.

The same cannot be said for Audible Romance. To put it simply, authors (and narrators) are getting screwed by Audible’s subscription service.

And the authors are pissed. "Not only is the rate absolutely terrible, but it is drastically hurting my normal sales," one wrote on KBoards. "This is ten times worse than kindle unlimited (where a novel length read through is "roughly" equal to a sale). I didn’t expect to be rolling in money, but this is far worse than even my worst expectations."

As a result many authors are discussing how they might pull their audiobooks out of Audible Romance, which could be a problem given that authors agreed to submit their audiobooks for a period of seven years.

However, several authors have said over on KBoards that they were told by Audible reps that they can pull their respective audiobooks out of Audible Romance simply by emailing Audible and making the request.

I’m still waiting for anyone to confirm that that worked, and even if it is possible to get out of Audible Romance it’s not clear whether that will help authors.

The thing about Audible Romance is that it is so popular that a number of authors have said that their romance audiobook sales evaporated when this service launched last November. "My romance audiobook sales pretty much dried up when they started this program," author Marty South wrote back in December. "I chalked it up to the doctrine of: Why buy the cow when you can subscribe to it for (practically) free?"

Audible Romance has put romance authors in a terrible position; they can join and be paid poorly, or they can sit out and see their sales fall. Neither option is great, leaving romance authors to ponder whether they should release audiobooks at all.

Given the poor returns romance authors are seeing in the audiobook market, that is not a crazy idea.