Nate Hoffelder

The Kindle Unlimited revenue stats for August 2017 show a reversal of a year-long trend.

Amazon announced that the funding pool grew by $400,000 from July 2017, to $19.4 million. At the same time, data from Self-Publisher Bibel shows that the per-page rate increased to $0.004193 per page, up from $0.004035 in July 2017.

• US: $0.0042 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0029 (EUR)
• UK: £0.0032 (GBP)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0042 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.0041 (CAD)
• India: 0.0816 (INR)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0101 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5193 (JPY)
• Australia: $0.0036 (AUD)
• Mexico: $0.0698 (MXP)

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

Self-Publisher Bibel

image by ken2754@Yokohama

Bitcoin and blockchain are the hot new buzzwords in tech, so much so that it is easy to find a double dozen startup using blockchains for the most ridiculous reasons. (For example, Binded/Blockai claims that blockchain can protect creator’s copyrights, even though that’s simply not true.)

Now the blockchain hype has spread into the anti-piracy industry.

Someone has had the bright idea of using bitcoin to pay informants that turn in ebook pirates. From the press release:

Custos Media Technologies has announced its participation in a new blockchain-based anti-piracy solution for ebooks, following the recent news that content protection giant Digimarc and ebook publisher Erudition are joining forces.

This new collaboration debuts the combination of Digimarc Barcode for digital documents and Custos’ infringement detection technology. This provides a more effective, reader-friendly way to
combat ebook piracy.

Erudition and Custos have worked closely together over the past year. The Stellenbosch-based media protection company provides technology that adds Bitcoin deposits to ebooks. These digital bounties enable Custos to rapidly detect piracy after the first copy of a file is shared.

Just so we are on the same page, here is how the process is described:

• Imperceptible watermarks which do not affect honest users are embedded within eBook files
• The watermarks contain a bounty which is a Bitcoin private key
• Anyone with the freely-available extraction tool can decode the watermark and claim the bounty
• Bitcoin allows the hunter to claim the bounty instantly and anonymously, from anywhere in the world
• The publisher is immediately alerted the moment the bounty is claimed and the infringing customer (uploader) is uniquely identified

This is clearly one of those ideas that shows that no one really thought it through (see Verrit, Microsoft Tay, or O’Reilly closing its ebookstore for other examples).

The thing about bitcoin is that – in principle – bitcoin wallets are anonymous, and that means you don’t know who is actually getting the money. It could be that an actual informer collected the reward, or the reward could be going to the "pirate’s" buddy who is in on a scheme to get free money from Digimarc and the publisher.

The reward might even be going to the "pirate" who informed on themselves just to get the free money!

There is just no way this could be an effective anti-piracy tool; it is simply too easy for the "pirate" to create a phony identity to buy the ebook, and then collect the reward on themselves.

Not only will the publisher be out of money, they won’t even have anyone to blame.

Next!

image by zcopley

When the latest James Patterson-branded book came out last month, it got a lot of press attention for its choice of villain. The Store featured a thinly veiled Amazon as the world’s largest retailer dubbed The Store. It’s set in a time when The Store is the only book publisher and basically controls everything.

This take on Amazon intrigued me enough that I got on the waiting list at my local public library. My turn finally came this morning when I picked up a copy, and I’ve spent part of the day reading The Store.

I’m glad I didn’t spend any money on this book, because it’s not worth reading, much less buying.

The Store reads like a manifesto written by your conspiracy theory uncle after he had been handed a script for an episode from the late-1990s The Outer Limits. (In fact, I’m pretty sure this book has many similarities with a specific story from that series, but I can’t recall the title.)

This book focuses on a couple of Manhattan writers, Jacob and Megan Brandeis, who – for reasons never fully explained – are hired by The Store to work in a Nebraska warehouse. Oh, the writers are out to write a book-length expose on The Store, but it’s never explained why The Store would hire a couple of middle-aged writers for a physically demanding job like stock picker.

Very few of The Store’s  actions are explained in this book; instead they are merely conveyed in a tone intended to keep you afraid without explaining or informing (think the nightly news, only more so).

The company town, New Burg, is ominously uniform in a Stepford Wives sort of way, which I suppose counts as frightening to those who did not grow up in suburbia, but it’s never made clear why The Store would build the town or why the surveillance or company control was made so oppressively obvious.

That’s just in the first twenty or so pages, and that lack of explanation really makes it hard to suspend disbelief for more than a few pages.

What is also hard to believe is how The Store is portrayed both as all-knowing and all-powerful and yet also incompetent.

The Store can see and do anything it wants, including vanishing critics and ex-employees, suppressing evidence of a car accident, and more or less engaging in mid control, and yet The Store was also unable to catch the protagonist, Jacob Brandeis, when he was on the run. It also can’t stop him from publishing the book, holding a press conference, etc.

So this all-powerful The Store can’t hire a hitman, engage in a smear campaign, or fake up some committal documents?

There’s just so much here that doesn’t add up, including the conclusion.

In the end Brandeis publishes his book, and so he has won, but The Store still exists and it continues to operate. It hasn’t been vanquished or defeated.

How is that a victory, exactly?

O O O

Don’t read this book. Patterson’s book isn’t worth the bother because one, it’s just not that good, and two, the same concept has been done many times before, in depth, with nuance, by better writers.

Instead of The Store, you could read any of several nonfiction books about Amazon.

Or, if you want to read about out of control consumerism, Frederick Pohl wrote a couple books titled The Space Merchants (Amazon, Wikipedia) and The Merchant’s War (Amazon, Wikipedia). They are not available as ebooks but they are worth reading.

Or, if you want to read about companies taking away user rights, try Richard Stallman’s dystopian The Right to Read (it’s free).

Or if you want a chilling and plausible tale of a tech company gaining control through spying on everything you do, try Cory Doctorow’s Scroogled (also free). I can also recommend the about half of his nonfiction that touches on the same issues (Content would be a good place to start).

There is a long list of works that are more worth your time than this book (including, in my opinion, dinosaur erotica).

image by hnnbz

We’re just over two months out from the Kindle’s tenth anniversary, and while the mainstream media is saying that print is making a resurgence and everything is just dandy, Kris Rusch has just given us a snapshot of just how much the book market has changed in the past decade.

Poking around through old last week, I found some predictions I had forgotten about. I wrote, in 2013, both in unfinished and finished blogs that it would take years for traditionally published writers to realize the world they’d been writing in was long gone. I could see that moment coming, as contracts ended, and new contracts started up.

What I didn’t foresee, and should have, was that traditional publishers would cut so many major bestsellers from their lists. Writers who made lots of money for the company had sales declines, just like everyone else.

Rather than negotiate a new contract, their publishers (particularly Penguin Random House) would stall and no longer answer queries about a new deal. Often these writers got new editors (several) along the way, and the new editors wouldn’t return phone calls to writers or their agents.

It was rejection by silence, the most nasty product of the new marketplace. Some editors would have the guts to tell their writers that any deal wouldn’t be to their liking. And some editors, off the record, would say that no deal was forthcoming.

Not until the writer or the agent pressed did the writer find out that their bestselling career had come to an end.

Now, most of these writers were not major bestsellers. These writers were making consistent six-figure incomes every year, not seven-figure incomes. Their books were selling well, until the entire industry upended itself, and rather than invest in a known product, their publishers threw these writers under the bus.

On this day in 2007, the only way to make a lot of money from writing books was to get an agent and sell to major publishers in a process that bore a striking resemblance to a lottery – one with very few winners.

Then Amazon launched the Kindle Store, giving authors a way to bypass the gatekeepers and reach the market. As a result the market fragmented as many more books were released each year. Existing authors have seen their sales fall due to the increased competition, with mega best-sellers like John Grisham seeing their sales cut in half.

Indie authors sold more books while legacy publishers sold fewer books, and as a result the publishers have dropped under-performing authors.

Legacy publishers have been shedding mid-list authors for many years now, but now Rusch says that best-selling authors are also getting cut.

Remember this the next time you read somewhere in the mainstream media that ebooks are dead, because most of those sales lost by trad-pub authors are being made up elsewhere in the form of ebooks.

And yes, those sales are going digital; indie authors simply cannot access the print market nearly as well as they can sell ebooks. The main way for indie authors to reach print readers is POD, a process that results in expensive books (they’re printed one at a time).

So those authors are going digital as a matter of necessity – it’s where they can make money – and readers are clearly following.

Doesn’t this almost make you question the surveys showing an alleged preference for print?

It makes me wonder, because this print-lovers clearly aren’t buying as many books as they used to.

Where have they gone?

image by Joelk75

The Association of American Publishers released their revenue report for the first third of the year, and it’s the same old news, only with a different numbers.

Overall revenues were up slightly, trade revenues were flat, and ebook revenues were down.

The AAP reported total revenues were up 4.2% for the first four months of 2017, to $3.10 billion. Buoyed by adult and religious presses, trade revenues increased by $6 million (0.3%), to $2.02 billion. The kids segment fell by 3.6%.

revenues form hardback sales rose 8.6%, to $679.1 million. Paperback sales dropped 6.8%, to $755 million. The strong growth of audiobook downloads continued, with, publisher revenue for this format jumping by 29.6%, to $100.6 million in in the first four months of 2017.

eBooks revenues, on the other hand, fell 4.6% to $374.9 million.

press release:

Revenues for book publishers were $3.10 billion for the first four months of 2017, a 4.2% increase over same timeframe in 2016, according to the StatShot Monthly report from Association of American Publishers (AAP). Much of the growth is attributed to increased revenue in higher education course materials, but Adult Books, Religious Presses and Professional Books all saw revenue increases as well.

The strong growth of downloaded audio continued in April (34.4%) and from Jan. to April (29.6%). During that time, publisher revenue for this format jumped from $77.6 million in 2016 to $100.6 million in 2017.

StatShot tracks publisher revenue on a monthly basis for about 1,200 publishers of trade (fiction/non-fiction/religious), PreK-12 instructional materials, higher education course materials, university presses and professional books.

Trade Books

Through April 2017, revenues for trade books were flat at $2.02 billion, up $6 million (0.3%) compared to the first four months of 2016. Adult Books and Religious Presses saw increased revenues and Children & Young Adult Books saw declines.

Total Trade Net Revenue by Category (in millions)*

Trade Book Formats

The greatest percentage growth of publisher revenue remains downloaded audio, up 29.6% through April 2017 vs. the same four months in 2016. Revenue for print books was flat, with strong growth in hardback books and declines in paperback and mass market.

Total Trade Net Revenue by Format (in millions)*

Education and Scholarly Publishing

Higher education publishers saw strong revenue growth the first four months of the year, up 28.5% compared to the first four months of 2016. While the growth was impressive, Jan. – April represents a small portion of annual revenue, as most revenue for HigherEd is captured in July and December, just ahead of the Fall and Spring semesters.

Revenues for PreK-12 instructional materials declined 1.3% from Jan. – April 2017 vs. the same time in 2016.

Professional Books saw a 4.2% increase and University Press revenues were down 0.7% compared to the first four months of 2016.

Note: * All figures represent publishers’ net revenue from all distribution channels (these are not retailer/consumer sales figures).

As I am sure many people know, The Guardian takes every opportunity – and sometimes invents those opportunities – to proclaim that ebooks are dying and print books are killing them off.

For example, back in April and May The Guardian misinterpreted UK Publisher Association annual revenue stats no less than four times in just over two weeks in order to proclaim that ebooks were over. (No, I’m not kidding.)

Now The Guardian is back again to once again beat the "ebooks are dead" drum. They are using those same revenue stats from April to claim that kids are choosing print books over ebooks.

One thing is certain: in troubled times the nation’s reading habits have become a lightning rod for parental pessimism about video games and the end of civilisation as we know it. There is, however, a silver lining to these clouds.

This week, as Britain’s schoolchildren creep like snails back to the classroom, fretful parents can take heart from statistics that demonstrate a mini-boom in juvenile reading. In 2016, for example, sales of children’s titles rose 16% to £365m, an increase attributable to the buying of printed books.

Forget the merchants of doom. According to The Bookseller: “Children are now reading more and want to read print.” This is confirmed by the Publishers Association, which recently reported that book sales for the previous year had jumped 7% to £4.8bn, and data suggests that this has been driven by that whopping 16% jump in revenues from children’s publishing.

More significant still, as e-book sales fell by 3%, the Guardian noted that “Britons are abandoning the e-book at an alarming rate, as ‘screen fatigue’ helped fuel a five-year high in printed book sales.” Moreover, for the first time since records began, nearly £1 in every £4 spent on print titles is on a children’s book, a market share of 24%.

There are a couple important details that the Guardian conveniently left out of their story, and they paint a very different picture.

For starters, the sales stats cited by the Guardian do not reflect the entire UK book market. As I have previously reported, the PA is only tracking about 62% of ebook sales in 2016, and so to claim that "ebook sales fell by 3%" is misleading at best, and arguably a falsehood.

I have made that point so many times that I am getting tired of the sound of my own keyboard, so I will not reiterate the point here.

Edit: And as I have pointed out in another post, screen fatigue is a myth that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Instead, let us consider the fundamental flaw in this article. This piece is based on the premise that "kids are choosing print".

The problem with the idea that kids book sales reflect kids preferences is that most kids books aren’t bought by kids. They’re bought by adults for kids, so you can point to sales stats as evidence of a preference.

But wait, there’s more.

The Guardian was so desperate to report that ebooks were dead that not only did they use questionable logic, they also didn’t bother to spend 3 minutes on Google to find the survey data that might actually prove their point.

In January Scholastic and Yougov released a report that showed that kids do prefer prefer print over ebooks. It doesn’t indicate an increase in the preference, however, and it also includes a factoid that effectively demolishes the Guardian’s entire premise:

If you can’t read the above image, it says:

75% of parents with kids ages 6-17 agree: "I wish my child would do more things that did not involve screen time"

What types of books do you suppose those parents are buying for their kids? print? digital?

They’re buying print, obviously, and that, in a nut shell, is why you can’t trust sales stats to indicate kids preference for print versus digital.

Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced the umpteenth bad quarterly report, with revenues declining 6.6% overall and digital revenues falling 28%.

But don’t worry, because B&N has a plan to turn around the company, one that is bound to earn them a trip to Stockholm to collect a Nobel prize.

Barnes & Noble CEO Demos Parneros announced on the investor call yesterday afternoon that B&N is going to open more stores and sell more stuff.

As we look to reinvent our customer value proposition and growth sales, we’re focused on a number of initiatives to increase the value customers derive from shopping at Barnes & Noble. Our value proposition is comprised of membership, convenience, digital offerings and most importantly our stores where customers come to browse, discover, and interact with 26,000 knowledgeable booksellers.

Pricing is a key consideration and over the past few months, we’ve launched a number of price tests tied to our membership program to see which authors resonate best with customers and increase the overall value of the program. Our goals are to increase enrollment, conversion and visit frequency.

Beyond pricing, we’re also focused on growing sales by improving the overall shopping, browsing and discovery experience for better visual merchandizing and signage as well as personalized recommendations. This includes testing changes to existing store layouts and remerchandising certain businesses. We believe there are significant opportunities to manage our inventory better, increasing trends and reduce unproductive merchandize.

As part of our efforts to better understand customers and develop a robust data analytics program, we’ve recently installed customer counters in all our stores and reintroduced mystery shops. We plan to enhance customer engagement and personalization through improved customer insights. And recently we’ve established an analytics team building the foundation for better analytic rigor.

Stores are an integral component of our value proposition and recently we made a few critical hires to oversee our store growth initiatives. Carl Hauch has joined as Vice President of Stores and will oversee the entire retail store organization and profitable growth of the business. Jim Lampassi has also joined the leadership team as Vice President of Real Estate Development and is responsible for developing and executing our real estate strategy. I’m excited to have Carl and Jim join our team.

In addition to the two new test stores we have in the pipeline, we are reviewing our entire portfolio in identifying opportunities to open new stores in new markets as well as opportunities to relocate stores as their leases expire instead of simply vacating markets. Our goal is to position the company for net store expansion.

Barnes & Noble has hit upon the previously undiscovered secret to turning a retail business around. They’re going to sell more stuff.

… [clipped] 500 words of mocking B&N …

Folks, I may sneer at B&N but the simple fact is if they actually knew how to increase sales then their revenues last quarter would have held steady (at least).

If B&N actually knew how to do better then they would not have consistently reported declining sales over the past several years. So when they say that they will increase sales, they are less stating a goal than confirming that they are the underpants gnomes of retail.

Like the underpants gnomes of South Park, Barnes & Noble knows what they want to accomplish but they have absolutely no clue on how to achieve that goal.

It doesn’t matter how many CEOs they hire and fire, nor how many new VPs play the game of musical chairs. As an institution, B&N is incapable of solving the most basic of problems: how not to go out of business.

Do you know all those articles David Gaughran has been writing about scammers gaming their way on to the Kindle best-seller lists?

Judging by David’s tweets, Amazon has not been successful in taking direct action in cleaning up the Kindle Store, but now they are pulling out the big guns.

Geekwire reports that Amazon has filed arbitration demands against a number of companies and authors:

Amazon has filed arbitration demands against several book authors, publishers and marketers, alleging that they abused the Kindle Direct Publishing system to artificially inflate their profits and sales rankings.

The five arbitration demands, filed Wednesday with the American Arbitration Association, make a variety of allegations, including fraudulent customer reviews, the creation of fake user accounts and other schemes to increase rankings and royalties on the company’s self-publishing platform for e-books.

One of the demands, for example, alleges that a man from the Philippines offered a service to authors to boost the number of pages read in their books using hundreds of fake Amazon customer accounts, in exchange for a 40 percent cut of their profits. Amazon pays authors who participate in the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program using a formula based on pages read.

…

The company is seeking injunctions preventing the authors and publishers from continuing the alleged activity, as well as attorney’s fees and financial damages to be determined through arbitration.

You can find the filings on Scribd:

• Hydra Arbitration Demand
• Glenn Arbitration Demand
• Terrance Arbitration Demand
• Dryan Arbitration Demand
• Rubio Arbitration Demand

The thing about arbitration is that it is as binding as a court ruling, only without the numerous rounds pre-trial motions and post-trial appeals, so Amazon will likely secure decisions against these parties fairly quickly. (Obviously, enforcing the decisions is another matter entirely.)

Various kinds of scams (as opposed to garden variety fraud and copyright infringement) have been plaguing the Kindle Store since shortly after the launch of Kindle Unlimited. Amazon fought the scammers by changing the best-seller algorithm and payment system for Kindle Unlimited several times, but the scammers were always one step ahead.

And now Amazon has triggered the nuclear option.

This is the first time Amazon has taken legal action against Kindle Store scammers, but in the past it has filed numerous lawsuits against sellers of fake reviews while at the same time removing whole swathes of reviews.

Let’s hope the rounds of arbitration is more successful than the fight against fake reviews (I’m still finding them.)

image by Joe Gratz

Following only days after someone said that B&N Nook and ebook sales are on the rise, Barnes & Noble has revealed that its digital revenues have declined for the umpteenth straight quarter.

Total company revenues fell 6.6% to $853 million, while Nook revenues fell 28.1%, to $29.5 million. That is literally the lowest Nook revenues ever recorded.

Nevertheless, there was some small good news: B&N also reported that the Nook division turned a small profit with an EBITA of $617 thousand. But it’s hard to tell if that is actual profit given that B&N also recorded an operating loss on Nook of $2.7 million.

Due to the accounting slight of hand, the only figure we can trust is the gross revenue.

Press release:

B&N today reported sales and earnings for its fiscal 2018 first quarter ended July 29, 2017.

Total sales for the first quarter were $853 million, declining 6.6% as compared to the prior year. Comparable store sales decreased 4.9%, as declines in non-book categories outpaced improved book trends during the quarter. The Company also experienced lower online and NOOK^® sales during the quarter, which were impacted by the prior year eBook settlement and lower promotional activity.

The consolidated first quarter net loss improved to $10.8 million, or $0.15 per share, compared to a loss of $14.4 million, or $0.20 per share, in the prior year.

The consolidated first quarter operating loss of $15.2 million improved $6.2 million versus the prior year. Retail incurred an operating loss of $12.5 million, while NOOK incurred an operating loss of $2.7 million.

Consolidated first quarter EBITDA was $11.2 million, as compared to $9.6 million a year ago. NOOK generated EBITDA of $0.6 million, an $8.6 million improvement over the prior year on expense reductions. Retail EBITDA of $10.6 million decreased $7.0 million primarily due to the comparable store sales decline, somewhat mitigated by expense reductions.

"Our first quarter earnings results improved over the prior year, as we were able to mitigate the sales decline through expense reductions," said Demos Parneros, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble, Inc. "We expect to improve our performance in the back-half of the year, which coupled with our focus on expense reduction, will enable us to achieve EBITDA of $180 million."

Outlook

For fiscal year 2018, the Company continues to expect comparable bookstore sales to decline in the low single digits and full year consolidated EBITDA to be approximately $180 million.

image by paurian

Several years ago I speculated Kobo would one day carry audiobooks, and now, through sheer chance and completely unrelated business decisions, it has come to pass.

Kobo is now selling audiobooks alongside ebooks. You can either buy single titles or subscribe for a flat monthly fee and get one title a month.

Rakuten Kobo today uncovers another dimension of storytelling, adding audiobooks to the Kobo experience and offering booklovers the opportunity to experience the joy of being told a story.

Readers can choose audiobooks from across all genres, including bestsellers such as Into the Water by Paula Hawkins, Truly Madly Guilty by Lianne Moriarty, and the Harry Potter series; with new titles added weekly.

At just $12.99/month and with a 30-day free trial period, Kobo offers the best value on a subscription plan in the category. Customers can redeem their monthly credit for any audiobook at Kobo.com, even if its list price is higher; those with a subscription also have the option to purchase a three-pack of credits for $38.99 (up to 24 credits per account). Audiobooks can also be purchased à la carte. In addition, readers earn Kobo Super Points on their monthly subscription fees or audiobook purchases, and can shop with confidence with the backing of Kobo’s Price Match Guarantee. The Kobo audiobooks service is available in the US ($9.99/mo), the UK (£6.99/mo), Australia ($12.99/mo), and New Zealand ($13.99/mo).

The audiobooks are supplied by OverDrive, and can be listened to in the Kobo apps for iOS and Android. Those apps were updated today.

Kobo is pricing their subscription for less than Audible, which costs £( in the UK and $15 in the US. That’s going to make the plan very appealing to the cost conscious – if they can get it.

A question for readers: can you get that subscription outside of the five markets mentioned?

There’s a story going around this week that the Amazon VP of Kindle Content, David Naggar, advised publishers to slash their ebook prices to boost sales.

The story, as originally reported in the Daily Mail and The Bookseller, centers around statements and quotes like this:

The US giant uses a complex computer algorithm to recommend books to customers, taking account of how many people have looked at a title before, how many have bought it, its price and what sort of reviews it has received.

…

Mr Naggar, Amazon’s publishing chief, said: "I look at price as a tool for visibility. You can either spend a lot of money on marketing or you can invest it in a super-low price until they get the flywheel going of the recommendation engines – and this is just for Amazon.

"What self-published authors will do is they will publish a book and sell it for 99p right out of the gate… Publishers [with new authors] could much more afford to do that than self-published authors."

I followed up with Amazon, and they disputed the story in a couple significant ways.

For one thing, I was told that price is not a factor in Amazon’s search algorithm. That was an assertion of the Daily Mail’s story writer, not something Amazon told her.

Amazon also told me that Naggar’s statements were very much taken out of context by the Daily Mail. The rag twisted Naggar’s words to imply that Naggar was speaking about all publishers and all authors, when in fact Amazon said that Naggar was specifically talking  about how to maximize sales for unknown authors.

He didn’t say that all publishers should slash ebook prices; I’m told that Naggar was saying that publishers could boost the sales of new and unknown authors by pricing ebooks low so that readers would be more inclined to take a risk on someone they don’t know.

That advice came out of a discussion of the tactics indie authors in KDP use to drive discovery, specifically how some indie authors initially lower a book’s price to build awareness, and then gradually increase price until they find the point on the demand curve that maximizes book revenue.

Nothing I have heard from Amazon is all that shocking; in fact, there’s absolutely nothing new or controversial here.

I have heard any number of authors and pundits say that publishers are sabotaging the careers of new authors by pricing ebooks at $14.99. The high price discourages readers from taking a chance on an author they don’t know, and as a result kill trad pub careers before they can even get started.

There is literally nothing here I have not heard before, so really, any controversy in this story arose from the Daily Mail framing their story using things Naggar never said.

Publishing chief David Naggar says traditional shops should slash their prices

…

Amazon is involved in a new row with publishers after one of its most senior bosses told them that they should simply drop their prices if they want to sell more books.

Of course, that is SOP for the Daily Mail; when they don’t invent a story out of whole cloth, they twist statements and leave out facts to such a degree that they are publishing fiction.

Next!

image by Tomasz Stasiuk

There’s an old quip about asking the last person to leave a place to please shut off the lights, but apparently Barnes & Noble isn’t going to wait.

They have posted a notice on the front page of the Nook support forums with the news that the forums will be shutting down next Thursday.

If you can’t see the above image, it says:

Hi Everyone,

As some of you have noted, today we are writing to you all and sharing the news that the NOOK Support Forum will be shutting down on September 7, 2017. We would like to thank you for being such active users and for your contributions to this forum over the years.

Though the forums will no longer be around, we’ll still be here to answer all your support questions at https://help.barnesandnoble.com/ and on social media at the following links:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barnesandnoble/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BN_care

• Instagram: https://Instagram.com/barnesandnoble

Thank you again for your time in the NOOK Support Forum and we hope you continue to visit us on these other channels.

Feel free to comment below and/or PM me with any questions or concerns. It’s been a fun time hanging out with you all here.

The Nook support forums have been defunct for quite some time now, so this shutdown was to be expected.

The five forums averaged about a half-dozen new topics each month (combined). For a company that used to be a major player in ebooks, that is the next best thing to dead, and it makes a lot of sense for B&N to cut its cost by shuttering a venue that simply isn’t being used any more.

That’s the same reasoning B&N has used to justify outsourcing or shutting down most nook operations, in fact. The Nook ereader hardware was outsourced to Netronix, the Android tablet is now the purview of a Chinese OEM, the international Nook stores have been closed, and core Nook functions have been outsourced to an Indian tech firm.

Do you suppose that B&N ever gets tired of shouting "Retreat!"?

image by karen horton

In an age where authors and artists like VC Andrews and Tupac go on producing for their corporate masters long after they have died, Terry Pratchett has pulled off the impossible.

The Guardian reports that his unpublished books have been destroyed:

The unfinished books of Sir Terry Pratchett have been destroyed by a steamroller, following the late fantasy novelist’s wishes.

Pratchett’s hard drive was crushed by a vintage John Fowler & Co steamroller named Lord Jericho at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, ahead of the opening of a new exhibition about the author’s life and work.

Pratchett, famous for his colourful and satirical Discworld series, died in March 2015 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

After his death, fellow fantasy author Neil Gaiman, Pratchett’s close friend and collaborator , told the Times that Pratchett had wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all”.

On Friday the manager of Pratchett’s estate carried out his wishes, using an antique steam roller to destroy a hard disk that reportedly contained the only copies of Pratchett’s final books.

Considering that even Isaac Asimov and Robert Ludlum have been zombified and continue to produce new works, Pratchett has pulled off the nigh impossible.

And no, I am not exaggerating. According to EW, there’s a long list of authors whose works have been exhumed or whose names have been turned into brands:

V.C. Andrews, who died in 1986, still cranks out about two books a year (most are by Andrew Neiderman). Eric Van Lustbader has churned out five Jason Bourne thrillers under the name Robert Ludlum™ since the original author’s 2001 death. This fall, we’ve seen estate-authorized sequels of everything from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (David Benedictus’ Return to the Hundred Acre Wood) to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing…) to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (Brandon Sanderson’s The Gathering Storm). At least Colfer and Sebastian Faulks, who published the James Bond sequel Devil May Care last year, are writers of some repute. But some of these brand extensions seem not much better than authorized fan fiction. (Anyone remember Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett?)

I’m not even counting the exhumation of every unfinished (or nearly finished) manuscript or previously unpublished PostIt note by a noted author. This fall brings Michael Cricthon’s Pirate Latitudes, an adventure story set in 17th-century Jamaica apparently completed before his death, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s story collection Look at the Birdie, William Styron’s The Suicide Run, and Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished final novel The Original of Laura.

Of course, just because Pratchett isn’t joining The Undead Authors Guild today is no guarantee that he won’t join said embalmed ranks in the future.

Throw enough money at his heirs twenty years down the line and they might change their minds.

If you are one of the millions who blog on WordPress, your world is about to change.

Due out next year, WordPress 5.0 is going to feature a new framework called Gutenberg. It hasn’t been discussed much outside the WP developer community, but Gutenberg represents a radical departure from everything we know about WordPress.

In the current setup,  you write a post or publish a page, but under Gutenberg each paragraph, image, or in-text widget is treated as its own block of content. A post or a page is made of blocks which are then assembled into a whole when the post or page is published.

According to Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, Gutenberg will have a whole host of benefits.  He wrote last week that it is "about a lot more than just blocks. Our Gutenberg moves every part of the WordPress ecosystem forward:"

• Developers and agencies will be able to create interactive templates that clients can easily update without breaking things or dealing with custom post types.
• Plugin developers will be able to completely integrate into every part of WordPress, including posts, pages, custom post types, and sidebars without having to hack TinyMCE or squeeze their entire feature behind a toolbar button. Today, every plugin that extends WordPress does it in a different way; Gutenberg’s blocks provide a single, easy-to-learn entry point for an incredible variety of extensions.
• Theme developers won’t need to bundle tons of plugins or create their own page builders. There’ll will be a standard, portable way to create rich layouts for posts and guide people setup right in the interface, no 20-step tutorials or long videos needed.
• Users will finally be able to build the sites they see in their imaginations.

All this great new functionality and versatility comes at a cost, of course.

Designers can’t build those new rich sites with the current WordPress interface, which is why the most of the menus we know and use today are going to be replaced.

Right now Gutenberg is available as a plugin, and it gives us a peek at what is coming. The current version of the plugin is limited to a content editor menu that closely resembles Medium (while at the same time encouraging users to craft rich media posts).

The gallery below shows screenshots of the old interface, the new Gutenberg interface, and the demo post that came with the Gutenberg plugin.

An author commented on Twitter that Gutenberg sounds like MailChimp-style blogging, and that is honestly a very good description. I have been using that mailing list service for about a year now, and I can see a lot of similarity between the Gutenberg and MailChimp interfaces.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a good thing. MailChimp is not exactly easy to use to either set up or compose a newsletter, and Gutenberg is going to have similar problems.

When I tried Gutenberg last night, I had trouble figuring out how to repeat the demo. It looked great, but the demo offered no real instruction – instead it gave one-line suggestions like "Press the really wide button on the image toolbar." when the button was nowhere to be seen.

Fortunately Gutenberg is still in beta, so there’s still time to fix the confusing interface.

If you would like to help, or simply get an early look at what is coming next, you can install the Gutenberg plugin from the plugin menu on your site. But beware: This is a beta release, and it could crash your site. Caveat emptor.

So tell me, have you tried the Gutenberg plugin yet? What did you think?

image by Sean MacEntee

When textbook publishers filed copyright infringement suits against third-party sellers (and Follett, even), the motivation was obvious. Just ask anyone: non-fiction sales are down (like O’Reilly said) so the publishers are trying to remove low-priced and sub-par competition from the market.

New survey data shows that college students are spending less on textbooks than ever before. The Student Watch report from the National Association of College Stores showed that students spent an average of $579 on their required course materials, down $122 from $701 in 2007.

That’s a drop of 17% in a decade where textbook prices increased faster than the cost of healthcare.

The complete report is behind a paywall. You can read a regurgitation of the highlights at PW, or the highlights themselves at the NACS website.

Two details that caught my eye were the increase in the use of free and paid digital course materials:

• nearly a quarter (23%) of students who purchased at least one course material bought a digital version, an increase of 8% from fall 2015.
• In spring 2016, 25% of students surveyed reported using a free method to obtain what they needed for class, up from 19% the previous year.

Surprisingly, student are still more likely to use the college bookstore than even Amazon when buying textbooks.

I strongly suspect that is misleading, though; while I used the college bookstore when I was a student a decade ago I spent most of my money elsewhere. The current trend of B&N Edu replacing its college bookstores with gift shops, and colleges outsourcing bookstore operations would also suggest that actual spending at college bookstores has declined.

NACS