Nate Hoffelder

Woe is me, cried the publisher!

The Association of American Publishers announced on Wednesday that publisher revenue was down 9.4% for the month of July, and down 5.8% year to date. The decline is largely the result of steep declines in sales of educational materials for both college and K-12, while at the same time most other segments of the industry have shown surprising resilience in the face of serious supply issues. (Whether that will remain the case as the impact of paper shortages moves down the supply chain is another matter.)

One bright point is that ebook sales have increased by 25% for the month of July,

eBook revenues were up 25.0% for the month as compared to July 2019 for a total of $103.7 million. On a year-to-date basis, eBooks were up 14.2%, coming in at $652.9 million for the first seven months of 2020. Notably, eBook revenues in the Children’s and YA category saw a 76.4% jump during the month, coming in at $11.6 million. On a year-to-date basis, eBook revenues in the Children’s and YA category were up 63.3% for the first seven months of the year, coming in at $73.2 million.

This is good news for some publishers, just not for those who have spent the past eleven years (since 2009, yes) doing their best to avoid selling ebooks. Those publishers have steadfastly refused to adapt to the market, and will soon be hoist by their own petard.

As Kris Rusch pointed out in her weekly column yesterday, publishers are only just beginning to feel the pain caused by supply chain disruptions. The situation will only get worse as the pandemic drags on, and the publishers who resisted selling ebooks to either consumers or libraries will bear the brunt of financial impact.

image by Pasa la vida via Flickr

If you are looking for new things to do with your Remarkable tablet, I just heard that someone has developed a third-party firmware for it. It’s Parabola Linux, which opens up enormous possibilities for porting software, but at the same time it comes at a cost (Wifi is not supported).

From Hackaday:

Davis Remmel has been hard at work porting Parabola, a completely free and open source GNU/Linux distribution, to the reMarkable. Developers will appreciate the opportunity to audit and modify the OS, but even from an end-user perspective, Parabola greatly opens up what you can do on the device. Before you were limited to a tablet UI and a select number of applications, but with this replacement OS installed, you’ll have a full-blown Linux desktop to play with.

You still won’t be watching videos or gaming on the reMarkable (though technically, you would be able to), but you could certainly use it to read and edit documents the original OS didn’t support. You could even use it for light software development. Since USB serial adapters are supported, microcontroller work isn’t out of the question either. All while reaping the considerable benefits of electronic paper.

The only downside is that the WiFi hardware is not currently supported as it requires proprietary firmware to operate. No word on whether or not Davis is willing to make some concession there for users who aren’t quite so strict about their software freedoms.

The Remarkable tablet is a 10.3″ writing slate designed to replace a paper notebook. The first model launched several years ago, and a second model launched just last month. Retail is $337.

This Parabola port is being sold for $20. That is not unreasonable, although I do think that a paid firmware should include Wifi.

Are you familiar with Draft2Digital’s Universal Links feature, the tool which helps authors find and link to all the stores where their ebooks (and audiobooks) can be found?

I have some good news for you today: Mike Cane has tipped me to a competing service. Launched in May, Boook.link is a service that authors can use to find all of the websites that carry their books.

It’s not quite as comprehensive as its competitor yet, but the developer is adding more stores all the time. What’s more, as you can see on this page, Boook.link also includes links to WorldCat and GoodReads as well as sites that sell the print book (AbeBooks).

Clearly Boook.link was built with an entirely different purpose in mind than was Draft2Digital’s Universal Links feature. To put it simply, if you want to link to ebook retailers, use Draft2Digital’s Universal Links feature. But if you want to link to all types of sites where your book can be found, check out boook.link.

Romance has increasingly gone indie over the past decade as more authors discovered they can reach readers without having to go through a publisher. As a result, trade publishers such as Harlequin have seen steadily declining romance sales, but according to NPD that trend reversed itself this year.

NPD released data yesterday which showed that US sales of trad pub romance titles rose along with the rest of the market this spring, with the genre closing out May with sales at 0.1% onver the same period in 2019.

“With brick-and-mortar retail bookstores closed in the U.S. this past spring, e-book sales, which have always been stronger for romance than in other categories, really took off,” said Kristen McLean, books industry analyst for NPD. “Print romance books also rose slightly, as newly housebound readers looked for fun and immersive germ-free reads while waiting out the pandemic.”

Romance book sales, which had fallen 11% in January 2020 over the previous year, began trending upward in March. As you can see in the chart above, this was largely the result of a very pleasing increase in ebook sales. Unit sales for trad pub romance ebooks increased 17% from January through May 2020.

In all, 16.2 million romance ebooks and print books were sold during that period, with ebooks making up 60% of trad pub sales in the genre.

Historical romance was the top growth subject in the romance category on a unit basis, in both print and e-book formats, but top-selling e-book titles differed from print book sales leaders. “Golden in Death” (Macmillan) led e-book sales in the overall romance category, followed by “Hideaway” (Macmillan), and “Chasing Cassandra” (Harper Collins). Print book sales were led by “Window on the Bay” (Random House), followed by “Every Breath” (Hachette Book Group), and “Country Strong” (Harlequin).

Originally launched under the name Amazon Prime eBooks in late 2011, the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library was Amazon’s first foray into ebook subscriptions. It was only available to Amazon Prime members in the US, but it was popular enough that it convinced Amazon to launch Kindle Unlimited not quite three years later.

And now the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library has been shut down. eBook Friendly initially reported, and I can confirm, that the KOLL has been discontinued.

The relevant page on Amazon has been replaced with one that promotes Kindle Unlimited, the service is no longer mentioned in Amazon’s FAQ, and you can no longer access the KOLL menus on either the Kindle or the Kindle Fire. The Kindle no longer even mentions KOLL, while my Fire still lists it in the menu but sends you to a KU menu when you click the link.

While there has been no formal announcement from Amazon, it’s pretty clear that the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library is deader than Jeff Bezos’s conscience.

That is not a huge loss, but it is deserving of a footnote.

We would not have Kindle Unlimited with KOLL, and KU has been a boon to both readers and authors. KU has launched multiple author careers while at the same time delivering great value for readers. It paid out over $300 million last year, making it one of the larger ebook markets all on its own.

It’s a worthy successor to the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, which will not be missed.

It’s hard to beleive that it’s been, what, 5 years since we last played this game, but the US book publishing industry is back to its favorite pastime: complaining about how the biggest book retailer is violating antitrust law.

Twenty years ago their target was Barnes & Noble, but for the past decade the honor has gone to Amazon. Every few years the usual industry players come out with a screed about how this or that activity of Amazon was a violation of antitrust law.

This time around the ABA, AAP, and The Authors Guild sent a letter (PDF) to US  Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, chair of the House Antitrust subcommittee, accusing Amazon of the usual malfeasance.

Together, our organizations—the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, and the American Booksellers Association—represent thousands of authors, publishers, and booksellers in the United States who serve the democratic exchange of ideas by creating, publishing, and selling books. Our members rely upon a level playing field in the marketplace of ideas to reach, inform, and transact with customers for the delivery of books, whether in physical or digital form. Regrettably, as the Subcommittee’s hearings have laid bare, the competitive framework of the publishing industry has been fundamentally altered in recent years—and remains at serious risk of further diminishment—because of the concentrated power and influence of one company in particular: Amazon.

Amazon’s scale of operation and share of the market for book distribution has reached the point that no publisher can afford to be absent from its online store. A year ago, the New York Times reported that Amazon controlled 50% of all book distribution, but for some industry suppliers, the actual figure may be much higher, with Amazon accounting for more than 70 or 80 percent of sales. Whether it is the negative impact on booksellers of Amazon forcing publishers to predominantly use its platform, the hostile environment for booksellers on Amazon who see no choice but to sell there, or Amazon’s predatory pricing, the point is that Amazon’s concomitant market dominance allows it to engage in systematic below-cost pricing of books to squash competition in the book selling industry as a whole. Remarkably, what this means is that even booksellers that avoid selling on Amazon cannot avoid suffering the consequences of Amazon’s market dominance. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating the problem: it continues to threaten the financial well-being of authors, publishers, and booksellers, some of whom will not survive the year. Amazon, by contrast, with its ever-extensive operation and data network, has grown only more dominant, enjoying its largest-ever quarterly profits during April, May and June.

The hell of it is, they’re right. While it would be easy to simply dismiss this as the usual crying wolf, for once there is an actual wolf. Amazon really does control most of the book market in the US, and I might dislike two of the groups mentioned above (and the third – the AAP – hates my guts) but even I can see that concentrating so much economic power into one company is bad for the public.

Antitrust law originally came about for the express purpose of breaking up large companies such as Amazon because the concentration of wealth and power is harmful to the public. And while the latest thinking is that monopolies are okay so long as consumers aren’t harmed, that is really just one of those Reaganomics myths that were invented to justify gathering more wealth and power into fewer hands.

It’s about time we discarded that myth, and started busting up trusts again.

Alas, I don’t think that will occur.

image by joe.ross via Flickr

Onyx has just managed to upstage themselves on their launch day.

Mike Cane has tipped me to the news that Onyx has sent an official letter informing the FCC that they are going to use the same internal electronics in multiple ereader models.

The ereader in question is the 7.8″ Boox Nova2, and one of the intended models has a color screen.

Launched earlier this year, the Boox Nova2 runs Android 9.0 on a 2GHz octa-core CPU with 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. It has both Wifi and BT, speakers, and a microphone. The current model weighs  265 grams, measures 7.7mm thin, and packs in a 3.15Ah battery.

Its 7.8″ Carta E-ink screen has a screen resolution of 1872×1404 (300 PPI). It has a color-changing frontlight, and both a capacitive and stylus touchscreen.

Onyx has told the FCC that the The Boox Nova2 Color will have the same guts, which means it will have the same general specs. The one exception with be the screen; if it ships, the new device will have a Kaleido E-ink screen which is capable of displaying color at 100 PPI.

The Boox Nova2 costs $339. Assuming the Kaleido screen adds $150 to the price, the Boox Nova2 Color could cost around $500.

That is ridiculously expensive (you could buy a much more capable iPad for less) but damned if I am not tempted. A 7.8″ Kaleido screen backed by these specs would make an amazing Android ePaper tablet.

The Chinese ereader maker Onyx has just put its first color ereader on sale.

The Boox Poke2 Color is a variant of the $189 ereader that Onyx launched in April. It has similar great specs, only with the addition of a Kaleido E-ink screen.

The Onyx Boox Poke2 Color runs Android 9.0 on a 2GHz octa-core CPU with 2GB RAM. It also has 32 GB storage, Wifi, and Bluetooth,. Battery capacity is 1.5Ah, which can be recharged through the micro-USB port.

This ereader’s 6″ E-ink screen comes with both a capacitive touchscreen and a frontlight (but not a color-changing frontlight).  Its most notable feature is the 6″ Kaleido E-ink display, which is capable of displaying grayscale at 1072 x 1448 (PPI), or displaying color at 100 PPI.

Retail is $299.

EDIT: And it’s sold out.

I had been hoping to get a review unit from Onyx, but I haven’t gotten a response yet. So I went out and bought one.

I am hoping it will arrive next week.

If you are on Twitter for long enough, you are going to run afoul of one of their rules, resulting in your account either being locked or suspended. It doesn’t matter how it happened; what matters is how you respond.

Here is some advice I had to learn the hard way. Do whatever Twitter demands. Don’t try to appeal, argue, or do anything other than follow their commands.

My recent experiences with Twitter have taught me that:

1. Twitter enforces its rules unevenly.
2. It does not follow its own internal processes.
3. There are no humans involved in enforcing the rules.

I have had to throw in the towel on my @ThDigitalReader Twitter account. That is a brand I have had for a decade, and it’s just gone because Twitter simply does not follow its own internal processes.

Please learn from my mistake, and do whatever Twitter demands. It does not matter whether they are right or wrong; what matters is they have all the power, and that power is being wielded by bots in a capricious and arbitrary manner.

Here’s what happened to me.

O O O

In late June 2020 one of the memes going around was to drink a glass of water one-handed. For example:

One hand pic.twitter.com/nrCOW27Yuk

— Henry Winkler (@hwinkler4real) June 22, 2020

You may need to read the responses to understand that this video makes fun of Donald Trump and his supposed disabilities, but it’s clear to me that everyone who saw it at the time understood that Winkler was making fun of Trump’s disabilities.

That is certainly what I thought he meant, which is why I responded by criticizing Winkler for making an Ablest joke.

This brings me to my first point:

1. Twitter enforces its rules unevenly.

Winkler’s tweet is still up, and yet my tweet where I rebuke him got my account locked by Twitter. (I did not think to save the tweet, sorry.) Clearly Twitter could not tell the difference between a tweet that broke the rules and one that complained about the earlier tweet.

I don’t know how locks usually happen, but I had to find out my account was locked by actually visiting Twitter. I was blocked from doing anything on the account, and offered two options. I could either file an appeal, or I could unlock my account by deleting the tweet.

Since I knew I hadn’t broken any rules, I filed an appeal. That was a terrible mistake, and I beg you not to follow in my footsteps.

This brings me to my second point:

2. Twitter does not follow its own internal processes.

While I was waiting for a response on my appeal, and while Twitter was still telling me I could unlock my account by deleting the tweet in question, Twitter suspended my account.

Again, I had to learn of this development by visiting the account. (For a company that facilitates communication, Twitter cannot communicate worth a damn.) One I saw the account had been suspended, I immediately deleted the tweet. After all, Twitter was still telling me that this would fix everything.

It did not.

After I learned my account had been suspended, I filed an additional appeal, and I reached out to Twitter several times. A month has passed and I still have not received a response. I have essentially given up on trying to get this fixed, and I have resolved myself to the fact that I will never get my account back.

I have also come to the conclusion that:

3. There are no humans involved in enforcing Twitter’s rules.

The next person at Twitter I interact with in this saga will be the first.

O O O

Folks, I got off relatively easy. I had a back up account I could switch to with little effort, so this whole incident is merely incredibly annoying.

You might not be so lucky. If Twitter takes down your business or professional account, it could be a fucking catastrophe. You cannot let that happen.

That is why I am warning you to just go along with Twitter’s demands. They have all the power, their bots behave erratically, and there’s no way for you to talk to a person.

When you find yourself in a situation similar to mine, your only option is to acquiesce. (Well, we could leave Twitter, but I for one need to be there for my job, which makes Twitter kinda like that abusive boss I can’t escape because I need the paycheck.)

Blurb has been acquired by Reischling Press:

Reischling Press, Inc. (RPI), a pioneer in the personalized print services market, has acquired Blurb, an industry-leading e-commerce platform of print-on-demand books, magazines, wall décor, and digital services for self-publishers and creative professionals, the company announced today.

The acquisition extends RPI’s overall strategy to offer a full suite of services and e-commerce platform solutions to businesses around the world, said Rick Bellamy, CEO of RPI.

“This is a strategic acquisition for us and culminates the long-term partnership between our two companies,” Bellamy said. “Blurb’s primary audiences are creative professionals and self-publishers, and this acquisition leverages the strengths of each organization to deliver a comprehensive e-commerce print solution for professionals, businesses, and consumer brands.”

It’s been some time since Blurb got a lot of press, but what they were chiefly known for was developing what I am told was a really awesome print layout platform. (I favor ebooks, so I never really noticed.) It would make a lot of sense for a printer to buy them for their tech.

BTW, there is one important detail not mentioned in the press release. This acquisition came out of the blue for my source; he told me that he didn’t even get to see a prospectus before the deal was announced.

If we put that detail together with the fact that Reischling is Blurb’s back-end print partner, we end up with a high probability that Blurb was in debt to Reischling, and was acquired as a way of settling the debt.

That is my guess, anyway.

Thanks, Steve!

My competitor is reporting that Sony has thrown in the towel on its writing slate division, and he is very likely correct.

The main landing page for the Digital Paper devices has been removed from Sony’s website, and neither the 10.3″ Sony DPT-CP1 or the 13.3″ DPT-RP1 are available from Sony’s authorized retailers such as Amazon or B&H. In fact B&H lists both models as discontinued.

The first model in this product line was announced in 2013, and shipped in 2014 with a retail price of $1,100. The last two models, both of which used hardware developed by Netronix, were released two years ago and three years ago.

The models came in two different screen sizes, but they generally had the same software. They only supported PDFs, but made up for that limitation by offering first-class annotation features as well as cloud backups for the files and annotations.

It is unknown whether those cloud services will survive the shutdown.

BTW, if you like the hardware, you can still buy it as the Fujitsu Quaderno A4 or A5, or as the MooInk Pro. All 3 devices feature the same hardware that Sony licensed from Netronix.

I am still working on my review of Pocketbook’s new ereader, but I thought you might be interested in a follow up post on the screen tech.

The post I published last week sparked a number of requests both here and on MobileRead forums concerning the screen tech. The thing is, E-ink isn’t answering questions about the Kalreido screens, so we knew almost nothing about how it works or what it can do. So when everyone learned that I had a Pocketbook Color, they asked me to test it.

I still don’t really understand how the screenworks, but I was able to confirm that it can display black and grayscale at 300 ppi while simultaneously displaying color at 100 ppi.

I know that sounds improbable, but it’s really what we saw in the photos.

I am going to post the photos below, but first I want to link to the original photos in Google Drive (one, two). My website optimized image files, and that can affect quality. My photos are not of the best quality but I still want you to see the original.

Here’s Pocketbook Color displaying color text:

And here it is displaying shades of gray.

If you zoom in on the images to around 400%, you will notice that the black text and the gray text is displayed using considerably more pixels than the color text. It is quite clear that one is being shown at 300 ppi, and the other is not.

And what is especially interesting is that both the black and the color text are being displayed on the same screen at the same time, only at different resolutions.

I wish I could tell you more about how that was done, but I can’t.

It is cool tech, though, isn’t it?

When it comes to reading habits across generations, there are similarities—but also surprising differences.

The 5 generations—Gen Z, adults under 40, Gen X, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation—have different life experiences and expectations for everything from marriage to work to entertainment.

But what about their reading habits?

As the following infographic shows, reading habits vary wildly between generations.

via

Everyone has heard that the UK reduced the tax collected on the sale of books earlier this year, but did you know they were not the only ones?

I was just browsing the KDP community when I noticed that, starting in January, Amazon has reported that multiple EU member states have taken advantage of changes to EU rules on ebook VAT status, and lowered the tax rate for ebooks.

• Austria – 20% to 10%
• Netherlands – 21% to 9%
• Slovenia – 22% to 5%
• Spain – 21% to 4%
• UK –  20% to 0%
• Germany – 7% to 5%
• Austria – 10% to 5%
• Bulgaria – 20% to 9%

Before you ask, yes, Austria is on their twice, and no, that was not a mistake. The second change is reportedly a temporary change, and it ends on 31 December 2020. (Bulgaria’s change in VAT also reportedly expires at the end of the year.)

Update: Germany’s VAT change is also temporary. The VAT rate for ebooks was reduced to 7% in December 2019, and then reduced again in response to the pandemic. The 5% rate is set to expire at the end of 2020. Thanks, Ingo!

Have you changed your prices?

image by dailyinvention via Flickr

Pocketbook’s long-awaited second color ereader has arrived.

On Monday Pocketbook announced the Pocketbook Color, or PB 633. This ereader sports a 6″ color E-ink screen capable of displaying either grayscale (at 300 ppi) or color (at 100 ppi).

The Pocketbook Color uses one of E-ink’s new Kaleido screens to display up to 4096 colors while preserving all the unique properties of E-ink tech.

And thanks to the frontlight, you will be able to see all those colors while reading in the dark. Moreover, users can adjust color settings of each specific book, easily changing parameters such as contrast, brightness, gamma correction, and saturation.

Equipped with both Wifi and Bluetooth, the Pocketbook Color supports six popular audio formats  as well as 23 other files formats, including Mobi and Epub. It has 16GB to fill with ebooks before you’ll need to add a microSD card (up to 32GB supported).

Weighing in at 160 grams, the Pocketbook Color measures only 8mm thin.

It ships at the end of the month, with a retail of 199 euros. (My unit is arriving on Thursday.)