Nate Hoffelder

For a period of around 5 hours on the night of 9 January, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing portal offered users a new royalty option of 50%.

The option vanished as quietly as it appeared, but not until after it was seen by dozens of authors and after David Gaughran snapped this screenshot:

Even though Amazon has since explained this away as an error, that was not enough to forestall frenzied speculation.

There is a seven page long thread over on KBoards as well as a post on the ALLi blog. No one really knows what this means, but it is not unreasonable to conclude that changes are coming.

One author noted in the KDP support forum thread that they were only offered the 50% royalty on ebooks that were not in Kindle Unlimited. This suggests Amazon is going to use the lower royalty rate to encourage putting ebooks into Kindle Unlimited by tying the 70% rate to KU.

Remember, Amazon has already restricted ebooks sold in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and India so that they can only earn a 70% sales royalty if the ebooks are also in Kindle Unlimited.

If it becomes official, the 50% royalty rate would be a further step in the same direction.

That is a big IF, and here’s a second complication: We still don’t know if Amazon will use the new rate as a carrot or a stick.

Will Amazon reduce royalties from the 70% rate for ebooks not in KU? This is similar to what they did several years ago with audiobooks sold through Audible. That is a market where Amazon has no real competition, which, come to think of it, describes the ebook market.

But of course, in the absence of a formal announcement (or a more comprehensive leak) this is just speculation.

Createspace is best-known as Amazon’s POD service, but they also provide paid publishing services.

Or at least they used to. South Carolina’s The Post and Courier reports that Createspace will be laying off staff later this year as it exits the services market.

Amazon’s self-publishing service, Createspace, is laying off workers in its editing, marketing and design division in July because the company is getting out of the business of offering services to writers. The layoffs will mostly affect customer service positions. Createspace will continue to print books for authors with ambitions to sell their work without a publisher.

State records show that Createspace subsidiary is cutting 58 jobs in North Charleston. Layoffs will start in March, and the service division will close in July, according to a letter the company sent to the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce on Thursday.

…

"After a thorough review of our service offerings, we’ve made the decision to discontinue Createspace’s paid professional editing, design and marketing services," Amazon said in a statement. "We will work closely with impacted employees through this transition to help them find new roles within the company or assist them with pursuing opportunities outside the company."

This is the second time in as many years that Amazon has cut positions in that area; last year they also moved one of their printing facilities from Charleston to elsewhere in the state, taking 150 jobs with it.

I have to say I was surprised to learn that Createspace was in the services market, much less that they were getting out of it. I’ve never met an author who had used these services, or even heard of them before.

Were they any good?

Thanks, Joe, for the tip!

image by MikeBlogs

Amazon’s second major ebook market, Kindle Unlimited, continued to grow in December 2017, reaching $19.8 million (plus bonuses). That was an increase of $100,000 from November 2017.

At the same time, the rate Amazon paid per page also rose in most markets, exceeding half a cent in both the US and in much of Europe.

• US: $0.0051 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0035 (EUR)
• UK: £0.0039 (GBP)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0050 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.0040 (CAD)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0123 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.6276 (JPY)
• India: 0.0989 (INR)
• Australia, Mexico, Canada: 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

Self-Publisher Bibel

image by Got Credit

Print has survived the rise of ebooks, they say. Consumers aren’t abandoning print for digital, pundits say in articles that are now read more online than in print.

And yet somehow print sales are down in Canada, according to BookNet Canada. They put out a press release this morning with the news that print sales in Canada fell 3% in value and 4% in volume.

Print is doing so well that consumers are buying less of it. Or at least that data from a limited subset of retailers is saying; we don’t know that it is accurate until there is independent confirmation (and Data Guy is too busy to get on this soon).

press release

Print book sales in the Canadian trade market fell in 2017, dropping by 4% in units sold and 3% in value sold compared to 2016. This is according to sales from a subset of retailers who report consistently to BookNet Canada’s sales tracking service, BNC SalesData, and so can be used to track year-over-year changes in the print market. SalesData does not track the sale of ebooks, digital audiobooks, or used books, any of which could have an impact on declines seen in the print market.

Overall, Canadian book buyers purchased 51.5 million print books for just over $1 billion in 2017. Of these, 40% were Juvenile (including Young Adult), 32% were Non-Fiction, and 26% were Fiction, which shows minor gains for Juvenile at the expense of the other two categories since 2016, when the breakdown was 38%, 33%, and 27%, respectively.

Though Juvenile as a category once again reigned supreme, the five bestselling print books of the year were adult titles. Looking at unit sales in SalesData, which tracks 85% of the print market in Canada, the top seller of the year was the trade paperback edition of the self-help juggernaut The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, followed by The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur, Origin by Dan Brown, The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware, and Milk and Honey also by Kaur. In 2016, the Poetry category saw a 79% spike in sales that was largely due to Milk and Honey, and the debut has continued to see strong sales in 2017. In the Juvenile category, the top seller for 2017 was The Getaway by Jeff Kinney, which was released in early November, followed by Wonder by R.J. Palacio and Dog Man Unleashed by Dav Pilkey.

It’s interesting to note that two of the top five books — The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Milk and Honey — are both backlist titles, having been published in September 2016 and October 2015, respectively. The edition of Wonder that came in second among Juvenile books is also an older title; the trade hardcover came out in February 2012. Sales of that title, of course, were likely buoyed by the film adaptation starring Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, and Jacob Tremblay that was released in November. In 2017, 60% of all print book sales were for backlist books, which is up by 2% over 2016.

More information on 2017 book sales, broken out by category, will be released later this winter in our annual report, The Canadian Book Market 2017. Further information on sales trends, format breakdowns, reading behaviour, and more can be found at booknetcanada.ca/research.

image by archer10

Earlier this week Ars Technica expressed the hope that Congress won’t pass another extension to the term of copyright in 2018.

Citing public opinion and internet activism, Timothy Lee wrote:

Until the 1970s, copyright terms only lasted for 56 years. But Congress retroactively extended the term of older works to 75 years in 1976. Then on October 27, 1998—just weeks before works from 1923 were scheduled to fall into the public domain—President Bill Clinton signed legislation retroactively extending the term of older works to 95 years, locking up works published in 1923 or later for another 20 years.

Will Congress do the same thing again this year? To find out, we talked to groups on both sides of the nation’s copyright debate—to digital rights advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge and to industry groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. To our surprise, there seemed to be universal agreement that another copyright extension was unlikely to be on the agenda this year.

"We are not aware of any such efforts, and it’s not something we are pursuing," an RIAA spokesman told us when we asked about legislation to retroactively extend copyright terms.

"While copyright term has been a longstanding topic of conversation in policy circles, we are not aware of any legislative proposals to address the issue," the MPAA told us.

Presumably, many of the MPAA’s members would gladly take a longer copyright term if they could get it. For example, Disney’s copyright for the first Mickey Mouse film, Steamboat Willie, is scheduled to expire in 2024. But the political environment has shifted so much since 1998 that major copyright holders may not even try to extend copyright terms before they start to expire again.

If this does come to pass then 2019 will be the first year since about 1992 that a US copyright expired, and works entered the public domain*.

Given that the term of copyright is still ridiculously overlong and enables many to profit from works they did not create**, this would not be great news so much as news of a "the beatings have stopped" type, but it is still not bad news.

Nevertheless, I am not getting my hopes up.

Between the tax plan, ending net neutrality, and trying to kill Obamacare, this government has engaged in far too many unpopular activities this year for "popular opinion" to be considered a good deterrent.

I’m very skeptical that Disney/Hollywood won’t try to get this administration to do their bidding once more, perhaps by claiming that it somehow protects jobs. That is exactly the argument that was used to raises taxes on the middle class so they could be cut on corporate income. This is obviously a false argument, but that is no impediment to making the argument.

Frankly, the major corporations don’t need another copyright extension to protect their revenue sources; they can use trademark law as a pseudo-copyright to block the use of works in the public domain. That is how the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate maintains control of the Barsoom stories, and this is also the trick that the Conan Doyle estate used to extract a payment from Miramax in 2015.

While that is not a pleasant situation – a work in the public domain should be truly available to the public – this would still be a better option than a copyright extension. The only works that would remain a monopoly would be the works that a corporation would invest a lot of money in defending. That leaves about 99% of works created in a given year joining the public domain.

This is unpleasant but still a palatable solution.

Nevertheless, I am still expecting someone in Congress to tack a copyright extension rider on to the budget, or some other critical bill. It would cost Disney too little, and benefit them too much, to pass up the opportunity.

Or do you think I am wrong?

O O O

P.S. US copyright law is weirder that you might think. Due to a law passed in 1992, works from 1964 onward were granted an automatic copyright renewal. Works published in 1963 or earlier had to have their copyright renewed in their 28th year, and any that didn’t entered the public domain (mostly). Meaning, there are works from before 1964 in the public domain.

P.P.S. The only parties who benefit from an overlong copyright term are the corporations profiting off of a work long after the creators are dead, and the "estates" of dead creators, which are really just more corporations profiting off of a work long after the creators are dead.

Amazon just released a new version of its comprehensive standards guide for Kindle ebooks (PDF).

The new edition features a new rule about cover images and a list of fonts that should not be embedded in a Kindle ebook (because they are system fonts). I have also heard on Twitter that the new guidelines explains how to create pop-up footnote references.

Changelog

• Updated 4.1 Marketing Cover Image is Mandatory: To provide consistency with Kindle Direct Publishing guidance, changed the 2700 x 1688 pixels recommendation to 2560 x 1600 pixels and changed the 5MB file size limit to 50MB.
• Updated 9.3.4 Avoid Using Fixed Values for Most Elements: Removed references to line-height.
• Updated 9.3.8 Using Embedded Fonts: Added list of Kindle fonts that should not be embedded in eBooks.

I like to stay on top of relevant news and development in the publishing industry, but sometimes I might miss a story and only find out weeks or months later. I used to kick myself for missing stuff, but in the future I will remind myself that at least I am not as bad as The Authors Guild and the SFWA.

These two august organization have just noticed that the Internet Archive is running a lending library called the Open Library where members can borrow digital copies of the print books that either the IA has archived in its warehouses, or a partner library has in its catalog. (There’s also an extensive catalog of public domain titles.)

Teleread reported back in December that The Authors Guild regarded it as piracy, and this week the SFWA has weighed in. They’re calling it piracy:

The Internet Archive (Archive.org)  is carrying out a very large and growing program of scanning entire books and posting them on the public Internet. It is calling this project “Open Library,” but it is SFWA’s understanding that this is not library lending, but direct infringement of authors’ copyrights. We  suspect that this is the world’s largest ongoing project of unremunerated digital distribution of entire in-copyright books. An extensive, random assortment of books is available for e-lending—that is the “borrowing” of a digital (scanned) copy.  For those books that can be “borrowed,” Open Library allows users to download digital copies in a variety of formats to read using standard e-reader software. As with other e-lending services, the books are DRM-protected, and should become unreadable after the “loan” period. However, an unreadable copy of the book is saved on users’ devices (iPads, e-readers, computers, etc.) and can be made readable by stripping DRM protection. SFWA is still investigating the extent to which these downloadable copies can be pirated. Unlike e-lending from a regular library, Open Library is not serving up licensed, paid-for copies, but their own scans.

The thing that gets me about this story is not the legal issue, although I will address it.

What surprised me about the SFWA’s missive is that the Open Library is not a new endeavor. I first wrote about it in 2010, but the program initially launched in 2007. It has been running for ten years, and the SFWA only just now noticed.

For some reason I still don’t understand, few really pay attention to the activities of the Internet Archive. To name one example, I’ve never read stories on its status as a pirate site. (I’m not referring to its archival activities but all the pirated copies uploaded by users; search for Harry Potter, and you will understand what I mean.)

That collective blind spot means that the IA can toil along in obscurity for years before anyone other than the occasional blogger raises legal questions about its programs.

And that is unfortunate because it leaves critical legal issues unresolved.

We can’t know for certain until an appeals court rules on the matter, but what the Open Library is doing is probably illegal. I could find no relevant case law on lending the digital copies of physical books. The closest is a part of copyright law that allows libraries to digitize books in its collection and let patrons use digital copies, but that only covers use when the patron is in the library building itself, while the Open Library has no such restriction.

But there have been several cases where startups have bought DVDs in order to stream the DVDs under a one copy, one stream model that is functionally very similar to the Open Library’s system. All of the startups I could find were sued, lost, and either shut down or changed their business model.

It pains me to say this, but at this point it looks like the Open Library is in fact a massive piracy operation.

On the other hand, there is also a chance the IA will convince a judge otherwise when they are sued for copyright infringement. Remember, Google won the Google Books case, and had its scanning activities legalized as fair use ex post facto. The IA might have the same luck, and in fact the IA has a stronger case than Google did; the latter had a commercial interest in its scans, while the IA is a non-profit out to serve the public good.

So really, at this point the legal case is a coin toss.

image by Jan David Hanrath

Amazon has a bad reputation for doing business with because they only care about customers, not suppliers, and because they manage both customers and suppliers with lots of automation.

But if you think that is bad, you should check out what some of Amazon’s tenants have been saying.

The retail giant is investing heavily in South Lake Union, a Seattle neighborhood. It has been building office towers by the truckload, and complimenting all the new offices with restaurants, bars, and other eateries. And since it’s an office district, there’s not a whole lot of nightlife (downtown Phoenix, AZ is the same way).

According to The Seattle Times, when restaurants tried to shut down early on nights and weekends because they’re not making any money, Amazon started throwing its weight around:

Lease requirements for restaurants in its Doppler Building property stipulate that venues must stay open late on weekdays and on weekends. That makes some tenants grumble.

Two former employees at Henderson’s now-defunct Bar Noroeste said it was cheaper to close early if sales were low.

On several Saturday and Sunday nights, revenues amounted to only about $100, not even enough to cover the cost of staffing, so management sent the staff home and called it a night, a common practice in the restaurant industry.

Henderson confirmed the restaurant got in trouble after Amazon’s security took note of the early closure, and the company then threatened to fine Noroeste for breaking the lease terms. Henderson said that’s no longer an issue at its new iteration, Kiki Ramen.

Two former employees there were less conciliatory, complaining that Amazon security guards micromanaged and created an uncomfortable working environment by tracking their every move and reporting what time they closed up shop.

Yes, Amazon is using its security guards as its private goon squad. Said rent-a-cops intimidate both tenants as well as press and anyone who passes by on the street.

Business Insider published a story today about one encounter its journalists had with Amazon’s enforcers:

A photojournalist had set up a camera on the sidewalk to film construction across the street. Two security guards were gathered around her asking questions and seemingly calling something in on their radio.

I snapped the above photo and walked past them.

As I did, the security guard pictured followed me, holding up his smartphone to my face. I stopped and asked him what he was doing. He replied that it is company policy to film all media personnel in the area. I had never identified myself as media.

After the guards left, I went back to the photojournalist and asked her about the incident. The photojournalist said Amazon security has tried to throw its weight around when she’s photographed in the area before.

"In my opinion, I think they think they own the city, and can patrol it how they want. But no one will stop me from taking photos on a public street,"  the photojournalist told Business Insider, asking to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize her relationship with Amazon.

This kind of behavior is typical of security guards in private developments, where a development company owns the buildings as well as the sidewalk and roads, but this happened on a public street in downtown Seattle.

Amazon is acting like it owns the city, where it is merely a leading employer. Can you imagine how it is going to act in any of the cities that are currently bidding to become Amazon’s second HQ?

Some of the cities such as Chicago and New York City already have records of repeated and systemic human rights violations. Mix in Amazon’s willingness to behave like a feudal lord and we have a recipe for disaster.

B&N has reported their sales from the holiday quarter, and the news was not good.

There’s no mention of Nook revenues, but B&N did say that total sales for the 9-week period were down 6.4%, to $953 million – or about what Amazon earns in a week.

press release:

B&N today reported holiday sales for the nine-week holiday period ending December 30, 2017.Total sales for the holiday period were $953 million, declining 6.4% as compared to the prior year. Comparable store sales also declined 6.4% for the holiday period, while online sales declined 4.5%.

Entering December, the Company was encouraged by the comparable store sales improvements throughout the second quarter and into November. However, sales trends softened in December, primarily due to lower traffic.

The Company’s book business declined 4.5%, outperforming the overall comparable store sales performance. Declines in the gift, music and DVD categories accounted for nearly half of the comparable store sales decrease.The Company said it remains focused on executing its strategic turnaround plan, which includes an aggressive expense management program.

Based on the holiday sales results, the Company expects comparable store sales to decline in the mid-single digits and consolidated EBITDA to be in a range of $140 million to $160 million for fiscal 2018, excluding any unusual or non-recurring items.Barnes & Noble, Inc. will report fiscal 2018 third quarter results on or about March 1, 2018.

image by spwam1

Back in 2013 I was one of the first to try to answer the question of whether works generated by AIs were covered by copyright law. The answer back then was "it depends", and absent definitive court rulings we’re still waiting to see how this issue will play out.

In the years since we’ve seen the monkey selfie story reinforce the idea that only a person can author a work, so one might think this matter settled. However, that case involved an animal, and there is existing case law and copyright law that covers databases, so this is very much up in the air.

Last month the 1709 blog analyzed this issue from the perspective of EU law, and expressed doubt that an AI work can be copyrighted.

Another argument against the proposition that also non-human authors can be regarded as potentially eligible for copyright protection in their works is that, at the EU level, the general rule is that concepts used in different directives must in principle have the same meaning. So, in Football Association Premier League, C-403/08 and C-429/08, the CJEU clarified that if a directive in based on rules and principles already laid down in other directives, “given the requirements of unity of the European Union legal order and its coherence, the concepts used by that body of directives must have the same meaning, unless the European Union legislature has, in a specific legislative context, expressed a different intention.”

In the case of the InfoSoc Directive (as well as the Term Directive, with specific regard to photographs) this might mean that, similarly to what is instead expressly stated Software Directive, the concept of author implies that this is a human being. This is because, as the CJEU clarified in Infopaq, C-5/08, the InfoSoc Directive, as well as the Term Directive, is based – inter alia – on the same principles and rules laid down in the Software Directive.

It is impossible to definitively answer this question until after it has been hashed out in the courts, but at this point there is nothing to suggest that an AU-authored work could be copyrighted.

One could point to existing case law on copyrights on databases, but the existing law (in the UK) and case law (in the US) cover situations where a person put data into a database and then claimed a copyright on the database.

This means that on a fundamental level, existing case law is not strictly relevant to the issue of AI-created works where no human was involved in authorship.

image by michaelmusashi

Back before Christmas the Harvard Business Review published an article on recent research that showed that people valued physical objects for the act of possession more than for the use of said object.

 Participants valued a physical copy of The Empire Strikes Back more than a digital copy, for instance, only if they considered the Star Wars series to be films with which they strongly identified. Participants who weren’t Star Wars fans valued physical and digital copies similarly.

This is essentially a nonfunctional element of ownership – valuing something just for having it rather than what you can do with it.

Aside from price, that is the only thing keeping people buying print books over ebooks, which makes it all the more amazing when digital copies supplant physical copies in the marketplace as consumers choose to make the switch.

For example, much of non-fiction has been eaten by the web, and several genres (romance, thriller, SF) have gone digital to varying degrees. These are all categories where the use (reading) is valued more than ownership.

The researchers also helped explain why some creators profit off of memorabilia as much as from selling their content; it’s because fans value the physical good more than the digital, while non-fans do not.

This difference in ownership also allows us to identify when people will value digital goods no less than physical goods. Because ownership entails a link between a person and an object, we found the gap in their value increased when that link was easy to form and disappeared when that link was hard to establish. Participants valued a physical copy of The Empire Strikes Back more than a digital copy, for instance, only if they considered the Star Wars series to be films with which they strongly identified. Participants who weren’t Star Wars fans valued physical and digital copies similarly.

This in part explains why the collectibles market has waves where old toys suddenly become desirable and valuable, only to lose much of that value a decade later; it’s because the buyers for any particular wave are all of an age group that wants to recapture a memory from their childhood, so they all suddenly want to buy the same toy.

Fascinating.

There’s also something this research doesn’t quite get at but is worth mentioning here, and that is the impact on print book sales versus digital.

All the industry trade press is trying to convince us that ebook sales have plateaued, and that the market is stable. This research, on the other hand. shows that there is little keeping people buying print books other than the artificially inflated price of ebooks from legacy publishers.

The book fetishists are wrong; people don’t value a physical copy more than digital except where they have an emotional connection to the story or creator.

That suggests that the market is less a stable equilibrium than ripe for another wave of disruption. All it will take is one really good reason, and people will switch to digital and not look back.

image by MartialArtsNomad.com

An article in Wired last month asked whether Amazon could use its Kindle platform to reinvent books. I thought that was a ridiculous question in and of itself, but the ensuing debate over on The Passive Voice has made me realize that there is also a fundamental flaw in the viewpoint that lead to the question being asked.

It is a flaw exhibited by many articles about ebooks, books, and digital publishing, and it is such a fundamental assumption shared by so many that it is hard to explain.

I think one way to define it is that – even in this digital age – our culture assumes that books matter more than other type of content.

We’ve put books on a pedestal so much so that many articles and commentaries about reading assume that, even though there are many ways to tell a story and many places to read a story, the only reading that matters is reading a book.

We can see this both in the news coverage that "new types of books" get as well as the developers who are trying to invent those new art forms. The coverage is usually framed in terms of "a new type of book" rather than "a new way to tell stories" because books are the only thing that matters.

This is why Visual Editions mislabeled the stories they crafted on websites (Editions at Play) by calling them ebooks; if the works were accurately labeled then no one in the mainstream press would write about them. This is also why so many developers have tried to "reinvent the book" by making it more like a game, app, or what have you.

It is almost as if new creations have to be labeled as books or ebooks or they will simply be disregarded (this is, again, a result of the flaw I mentioned).

I was reminded of this in a discussion over on The Passive Voice. One commenter insisted (falsely) that non-fiction hasn’t seen the same disruption as the Kindle platform has wrought on the trade fiction market.

I am excerpting a couple different comments here, but I swear I am not trying to take what he says out of context.

Agree about the narrative book. We have seen real disruption there. Technology was applied to make a product many consider superior to paper.

But, we haven’t seen the same kind of disruption outside the narrative form. I’d say application of existing technology could offer much more to the non-narrative form that it did to the narrative. (Non-narrative is any form containing something other than narrative.)

…

Digital readers are still primitive. Fortunately, novels are very well suited to the primitive. Like screw drivers or hammers, it’s just very difficult to improve on some things. An uninterrupted flow of words is hard to beat.

What his comment made me realize was that the real threat to non-fiction was already here, and that some don’t see it because it didn’t come in the form of the exalted book.

The non-fiction market is being disrupted by a tech that has been around for 24 years.

It’s the web browser, only many have overlooked it because it is in no way, shape, or form a book.

Everyone keeps looking for a "Kindle for non-fiction" because they assume that books are the only thing that matter. What they missed was that the Kindle doesn’t deliver books so much as it delivers stories.

A story is a narrative in its most basic form, and one of the more amazing parts of the Kindle platform was that stories were no longer limited to commercial lengths imposed by print runs. Creators can sell anything from a short story to a novella to epic fantasy without worrying about optimal page counts.

But many don’t see that because they are mistakenly focusing on books.

In the same way that the Kindle reduced books to their simplest form (a story), the web browser has broken down non-fiction content to its most basic form: a collection of facts. Freed from the commercial restrictions imposed by print runs, those facts have then been atomized into individual web pages, videos, graphics, and other web content.

But that progression doesn’t matter because those aren’t books.

The simple fact is, folks, that all the amazing new "book" features that pundits love and consumers ignore, all of the "new" ideas, can already be done with existing web technologies. In fact, some of the enhanced ebooks projects consisted of little more than taking existing web tech and then bundling it into an ebook.

The new form of book some are asking about already exists. You can make them in the web browser today (and people are), only pundits overlook this fact because they think only books matter and the new content doesn’t meet their definition of a book.

And that includes Wired, which ended its piece with:

 In 2008, Bezos wrote in a note to shareholders that modern technologies have "shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans." Kindle, however, "is purpose-built for long-form reading," he wrote. "We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools."

Bezos also wrote in that letter that he was "convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon," and that there was no guarantee Amazon would be the one to lead that charge. A decade later, books haven’t changed much at all. And only Amazon has the clout to really drive what could and should come next. Not by making pixels just like paper, but by embracing the difference.

Amazon doesn’t have to drive anything; the tools are here, and waiting to be used.

All that remains is to drop the assumption that only books are important.

Once you do that you will see that people are already making those new stories you wanted.

image by pedrosimoes7

The New York Times took notice of the recent bankruptcy of the bookstore chain Book World and used the opportunity to repeat the myth that Amazon is the fifth largest bookstore chain in the US (or the 4th now that Book World is gone).

That myth was invented by PW back in June, and it is just as false today as it was then.

This fall, at a moment when retailers traditionally look forward to reaping holiday profits, the owner of the fourth-largest bookstore chain in the country surrendered to the forces of e-commerce.

Book World, founded in 1976, sold hardcovers, paperbacks and sometimes tobacco in malls, downtowns and vacation areas across the Upper Midwest. It had endured recessions, the expansion of superstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, and then the rise of Amazon. But the 45-store chain could not survive the shifting nature of shopping itself, and so announced its liquidation.

“Sales in our mall stores are down this year from 30 to 60 percent,” said Bill Streur, Book World’s owner. “The internet is killing retail. Bookstores are just the first to go.”

As e-commerce becomes more deeply embedded in the fabric of daily life, including for the first time in rural areas, bookstores are undergoing a final shakeout. Family Christian Stores, which had 240 stores that sold books and other religious merchandise, closed this year, not long after Hastings Entertainment, a retailer of books, music and video games with 123 stores, declared bankruptcy and then shut down.

“Books aren’t going away, but bookstores are,” said Matthew Duket, a Book World sales associate waiting for customers in the West Bend, Wis., store.

Here is one way to measure the upheaval in bookselling: Replacing Book World as the fourth-largest chain, Publishers Weekly says, will be a company that had no physical presence a few years ago. That would be Amazon, which having conquered the virtual world has opened or announced 15 bookshops, including at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan.

There are a bunch of problems with this story. The first is that according to Amazon’s count, it has 16 stores, not 15.

The other problem is that there are several chains with more bookstores than Amazon.

As I reported back in June, Deseret Books has 33 stores, Lifeways has a chain of 174 stores, and Hudson Booksellers has some dozens of bookstores in airports (as well as hundreds of newsstands). And there’s also Seagull Books and Tape, which has 25 stores.

That means Amazon is not the fourth largest bookstore chain after B&N, Books-a-Million, and Halfprice Books; it is the eighth (or possibly even the tenth largest if you count Follett and B&N Edu, which operate college bookstores).

Everyone is so eager to proclaim the clickbait about Amazon that they overlook a few inconvenient facts like the actual state of the bookstore industry.

Furthermore, it is also the least interesting detail about the industry. Book sales have largely moved online, and frankly the remaining chains do not sell a lot of books. (Fun fact: the US Census Bureau stats on bookstore sales include all merchandise sales, not just books, and have dropped by a third in the past decade.)

At this point obsessing over the exact number of chain bookstore locationss is like obsessing over the number of livery stables left in the US. It is pointless in that neither chain bookstores nor stables have a huge impact on their respective industries.

Me, I am more interested in the businesses that are moving into the cultural niche that the chain bookstores vacated long ago.

Brick-and-mortar bookselling is for all intents and purposes dead; chain bookstores killed off local bookstores by being better at selling books, and were in turn killed by Amazon.

A bookstore cannot survive on retail alone, which is why many booksellers are holding off the inevitable by finding new reasons to get people in the door. They’re community spaces, or hybrid bars or coffee shops, or they have some other draw.

This is not a new trend, obviously; some bookstores had worked out this idea decades ago, and even the media noticed four or five years ago.

The Kindle has long since fallen from Amazon’s holiday best-seller list, but books are still a perennial favorite.

Earlier this week Amazon revealed a few factoids about its holiday sales, including:

• The most-read Kindle book in Amazon First Reads in 2017 was, Beneath A Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan.
• The best-selling and most-listened-to audiobook of 2017 was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson, narrated by Roger Wayne.
• The most-listened-to fiction audiobook of 2017 was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling, narrated by Jim Dale.
• The most-commented-on audiobook of 2017 was Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, narrated by the author.
• According to Amazon Charts, the most read and most gifted Kindle book in the U.S. this holiday season was Origin: A Novel by Dan Brown.
• According to Amazon Charts, the top book Kindle readers in the U.S. found ‘Unputdownable’ this holiday season was Year One: Chronicles of the One, Book 1 by Nora Roberts, reading it cover-to-cover faster than other books.
• According to Amazon Charts, the Most Wished For books of 2017 in the U.S. were: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
• Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was the most borrowed book from Prime Reading, worldwide, in 2017.
• Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook by Laurel Randolph, independently published through Kindle Direct Publishing, has been topping Amazon Charts throughout the holiday season – reaching #1 on the most sold non-fiction list the week of Cyber Monday.

And from Amazon’s bookstores, we learn:

• The Echo Dot was the top-selling device in Amazon Books’ 13 stores, and the Kindle Paperwhite was the best-selling Kindle.
• The top selling non-fiction book was Obama: An Intimate Portrait by Pete Souza; the top selling fiction book was Origin by Dan Brown; the top selling kids book was Diary of a Wimpy Kid #12, The Getaway by Jeff Kinney; and, the top selling poetry book was the sun and her flowers by Rumi Kaur.
• One out of seven customers who purchased a book also donated a children’s book to local charities supporting children in need. The top selling book given to local charities was the classic, Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman; it was also the top selling book across all 13 stores.