Nate Hoffelder

I haven’t gotten the announcement email yet, but CNBC has reported, and I have confirmed on Amazon’s affiliate site, that Amazon is cutting the fees it is paying for referrals from websites in Amazon’s affiliate program.

The rates will change on 21 April, and the affected product categories are:

You can find the old rates here.

Here’s what reportedly what Amazon said in the email.

Hello Associate,

We hope you are staying well during this time. We are writing to inform you of upcoming changes to the Amazon Associates Program Operating Agreement, which governs your participation in the Amazon Associates Program. All changes are effective as of April 21, 2020.

Visit the What’s Changed page to see a summary of these changes. You can also find the Operating Agreement, Program Policies, and the Fee Statement if you would like to refer to the current, pre-change versions.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Program

image by Kurayba via Flickr

Offices are shutting down due to the pandemic , and that is throwing a wrench into previously  orderly operations. Messages are going unanswered, and now Barnes & Noble has warned that its royalty payments could be delayed as a result of shifting its staff to work at home.

Draft2Digital sent out an email today, warning that B&N royalties could be delayed.

As the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak continue to impact the industry, some of our retailers are having to adjust to new ways of operating certain aspects of their business.

As a result, Barnes & Noble has informed us that they are experiencing some delays in processing payments for February sales, due to having to shift to remote operation.

We will continue to monitor and make any updates to royalty reports as those come in. At this time, we are hopeful the payment will be received from B&N before the April 15th royalty payments are applied. However, if they come later, we will make a second payment of royalties immediately after we receive the funds.

The pandemic has also disrupted supply chains. While Amazon has not announced a delay to payments, it is delaying shipments of non-essential products. (I’ve been waiting 3 weeks for an order that would usually arrive within a couple days.)

Thanks, Brian!

image by MikeKalasnik via Flickr

A story broke this past week that reminded me about a post I had been wanting to write.

The Atlantic and ProPublica partnered on a deep dive into the Kindle Store’s problem with white supremacists, but they didn’t quite get to the root of the story.

Give me, a white man, a reason to live,” a user posted to the anonymous message board 4chan in the summer of 2017. “Should I get a hobby. What interests can I pursue to save myself from total despair. How do you go on living.”

A fellow user had a suggestion: “Please write a concise book of only factual indisputable information exposing the Jews,” focusing on “their selling of our high tech secrets to China/Russia” and “their long track record of pedophilia and perversion etc.”

The man seeking advice was intrigued. “And who would publish it and who would put it in their bookstores that would make it worth the trouble,” he asked.

The answer came a few minutes later. “Self-publish to Amazon,” his interlocutor replied.

“Kindle will publish anything,” a third user chimed in.

The thing about this story is that it is a slight variation on the same tale we’ve heard on an annual basis for the past decade. The current situation involves white supremacists, but in the past Amazon has been plagued by scammers, spammers, more scammers, content farmers (aka catfishing), book stuffers, yet more scammers, and even more spammers.

We’ve read this type of story so often that you can’t write them off as being the work of an Amazon hater like David Streitfeld of the NYTimes. You also can’t ignore them on the basis that Amazon is only getting coverage because of their high profile. Apple’s brand has similar value as clickbait, and yet we don’t see these stories about Apple Books (and that’s because Apple Books doesn’t have nearly the same volume of problems as the Kindle Store has).

No, as I explained to Ben Collins of CNBC last month when the Coronavirus spam books were first getting attention, the problem is unique to Amazon. "Most of Amazon’s e-book competitors have a content approval process in place that keeps the worst content out," I told him.

When I was talking to Collins last month, I checked Kobo and Play Books and could not find any Coronavirus spam books. Amazon, on the other hand, was filled with them.

"I don’t know if it’s a case of can’t or won’t," I told Collins. "What I do know is that Amazon is the only retailer with this problem. They have the lion’s share of the e-book market revenue, and could easily afford to use the same quality assurance processes as their competitors, and yet they still have this problem."

As Google has demonstrated, it’s not impossible to build a system to keep out evil-doers. Back in 2015 Google had an epic piracy problem in Play Books which was on the same scale as any one of Amazon’s problems in the Kindle Store. Google responded by shutting down new registrations in their publisher portal, and leaving it shut down until they had a process in place to prevent pirates from registering.

As a result, Google reduced their piracy problem from a disaster to a nuisance.

The thing is, folks, Amazon could nip these problems in the bud by building the same systems used by their competitors.  And while the retailer will insist that they have built these systems, Amazon keeps having problems, and Amazon’s competitors do not.

At some point we’re just going to have to conclude that the real problem is actually Amazon and its corporate culture. Until Amazon is willing to make fundamental changes, these stories are never going to stop.

image by SounderBruce via Flickr

I still don’t have any evidence that this ereader is actually available, but it now appears that at least two color ereaders have been announced in China.

The iFlytek eBook is a 6″ ereader with an unknown price tag and an unspecified ship date. According to coverage from China, it uses E-ink’s new 4,096 color Just Print screen.

Details are rather scare on the iFlytek eBook (which is why I seriously suspect it’s vaporware). Everyone is reporting that it has a 24-LED frontlight, support for TTS and music via a built-in speaker, but other details like RAM, CPU, Wifi, and touchscreen tech are still unknown.

What I do find interesting is that several sites mention that the screen has two modes, one for black and white and another for color. Here’s the fun part: the color mode is 212 PPI, while the black and white mode is 300 PPI.

Edit: Color screen resolution is unknown. Some sources say this screen tech can display color at 212 PPI, while Pocketbook says the screens going into their device have a color resolution of 100 PPI. (I trust Pocketbook.)

I asked E-ink for more info on why there’s a difference, but given the current crisis it might take them a while to get back to me.

CnTechPost

Microsoft’s new co-editing tool takes on Grammarly where it is the weakest, in the web browser.

Last week Microsoft rebranded Office 365 as MS 365. They added a bunch of new features, including a new editing tool called Microsoft Editor.

This AI-powered editor reportedly expands on 365’s existing features in several ways:

• Provides suggestions to improve sentence clarity
• Estimates time to read or speak your document
• Suggests alternate vocabulary or punctuation, and gender-neutral and inclusive terms
• Reminds you when to use formal language
• Helps identify plagiarism in your work, or lets you quickly provide citations if you’re the one writing

A number of those features already exist in most writing apps.  Others are paid features through services like Grammarly (which is pretty awful). And now Microsoft is going to make them available to paying 365 users.

Microsoft Editor started rolling out last week and should be available to all "by the end of April." It’s going to be available in Outlook, 354, and in both Chrome and Edge web browsers.

I can’t see it in the Chrome Web Store at the time I wrote this post, but I assume that will change at some point.

Microsoft via TNW

The Library of Congress published a post this past week highlighting their growing collection of open access ebooks.

We are excited to share that anyone anywhere can now access a growing online collection of contemporary open access eBooks from the Library of Congress website. For example, you can now directly access books such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and Youjeong Oh’s Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place from the Library of Congress website. All of these books have been made broadly available online in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, which chose to publish these works under open access licenses.

A key objective of the Library of Congress digital collecting plan is the development and implementation of an acquisitions program for openly available content. We have previously discussed a number of open access book projects, including open access Latin American books, and open access children’s books. Significantly, the Library of Congress has long been receiving print copies of open access books through multiple routine acquisition streams. These openly licensed works can be made much more broadly accessible in their digital form.

In addition to the LOC’s collection, there are numerous free ebook sites such as Project Gutenberg, the major ebook retailers all have free ebook sections, and a lot of creators have released some of their works for free. This includes textbooks and other curricula that have been released for free as Open Educational Resources.

image by Pierre Blaché via Flickr

Authors have discovered that the Internet Archive has converted its lending library site into an out and out pirate site, and they are not happy,

For the past few years the Internet Archive has been operating a site called The Open Library. This site fills some of the role of a public library by lending scanned copies of print books.

The site existed in a quasi-legal state, protected by a legal opinion that kept it from being explicitly labeled a pirate site, but that legal fig leaf was stripped away this past week when The Open Library director Chris Freeland announced that the Internet Archive would now start "lending" ebooks without limits.

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.

During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.

What they are calling the National Emergency Library is really just The Open Library with a new name, and new legal issues.

The problem with this is that The Open Library’s only protection was an untested legal opinion called Controlled Digital Lending. Go read it and you will see that it says said that a library could lend one scanned copy of a print book for each copy they had in their archive. This is great – in principle – because it means libraries can preserve their copies of old and rare print books and instead lend digital copies.

Update:  The university library consortium HathiTrust just adopted CDL on a limited basis as a response to the current emergency. (It sounds like they’re not sure it’s legal.)

CDL is a great idea, in my opinion, because it helps solve the orphan works problem. I do not however agree with how the Internet Archive has latched on to it as a justification for lending books that are widely available in stores and libraries.

But that does not matter today. In removing waitlists, the Internet Archive is discarding CDL as a defense, and is lending far more copies of each book than they have the rights for.

Update: While the IA has not put forth a fair use argument, they have lined up a lot of librarians as supporters. (The fair use arguments cited at that link are nonspecific, or not relevant.)

No matter your opinion of CDL, this is piracy plain and simple, and authors aren’t having any part of it:

https://twitter.com/ChuckWendig/status/1244011591395356672

This is piracy, plain and simple. And your local library can get you ebooks—ones they have paid for.

— Mark Wunderlich (@MarkCWunderlich) March 28, 2020

Joining the chorus of authors saying not to promote this. They have my books, scanned, without any kind of permission or license — it's just piracy.

Author's Guild: https://t.co/K0WcGzzEal

— Django Wexler (@DjangoWexler) March 28, 2020

https://twitter.com/KVJohansen/status/1244013661636775936

Ugh. This is one of those well-meaning but misguided efforts that ends up harming those who need help.

— Priscilla Gilman (@priscillagilman) March 28, 2020

https://twitter.com/Lori_Ella/status/1244006313371348992

Please stop promoting piracy. If you don't know why this site is wrong, please see the author's guild statement.

— Isabel Bandeira (@Emberchyld) March 28, 2020

Hey, NPR, authors never agreed to this–and actual lending libraries that PAID for e-books exist. Promote those instead!

— Shveta ?????? ? (@ShvetaThakrar) March 28, 2020

https://twitter.com/Bibliogato/status/1243975292391247873

Via @lilithsaintcrow
Doing a search on this site has led me to find books by Jack McDevitt, James S A Corey, Joe Haldeman, the late Jay Lake, Kameron Hurley and lots more.
This is piracy.

I am not happy about NPR giving Internet Archive a free pass here in glowing coverage. https://t.co/M3uwvwjjNT

— Paul "Princejvstin" Weimer (@PrinceJvstin) March 28, 2020

image by blmurch via Flickr

For the longest time now Amazon has provided authors and publishers who distributed their audiobooks though ACX with promo codes that could be given to reviewers, shared with friends, and otherwise used to promote an audiobook.

It had been SOP for Amazon to pay a royalty when a promo code was redeemed, but that policy ended today. Kirsten Oliphant Posted this in her FB group earlier today:

To summarize, Amazon will still give you the promo codes, but they will no longer be paying when the codes are redeemed. Which, TBH, is only fair; I can’t think of a good argument in favor of paying creators to promote their own works.

A friend just tipped me to the news that Amazon has retired its Author Rank feature. (Thanks, Morris!) I’m still getting a couple reports that people are still seeing Author Rank in the Kindle Store, but Amazon has an EOL notice in the Author Central admin pages, and has disabled the relevant page in Author Central.

Also, the Author Rank page on Amazon.com now redirects to the Amazon Charts page.

Originally launched in 2012, Author Rank has proven useful for little more than giving a few authors an ego boost, and many more authors crushing self-doubt. It will be missed by only the more obsessed authors  and their fans.

With news breaking that new color ereaders ( the first in nearly seven years) may be shipping later this week in China, now seemed like a good time to start thinking about when those screens might show up on other ereaders such as the Amazon Kindle.

The answer is most likely not going to be as simple as you would expect.

For starters, it is fairly safe to conclude that the screen on the iReader C6 shown above will not also grace the Kindle.

The thing is, Amazon has money, and if Amazon liked this screen tech then they would have paid for an exclusive so they could be first, and they would keep their exclusive very, very quiet until they were good and ready.

If the Kindle were going to get this screen then the first you would have heard about it would be when Amazon wanted you to know it was coming. They would either leak the info or announce it, and there’s no way they would let themselves be upstaged by Chinese companies.

No, it is much more likely that Amazon is either working on a competing screen tech that they think is better than the screen on the C6. There’s also a good chance that Amazon just doesn’t think any of the color epaper screen tech is viable. (Remember, E-ink’s older color screens, the Triton and Triton 2, were dreck.)

There’s no way to say with absolute certainty which is more likely, but I do know there are a couple possible screen techs Amazon might plan to use.

For starters, there’s ClearInk. This company has been about to release a screen to market Real Soon Now for the past 3 years. Their screens looked great 3 years ago, but we still don’t know if they can be produced on the assembly line. (Remember, one of the problems with Qualcomm’s Mirasol screen tech is that most of the screens failed QA  in the factory, and had to be trashed.)

For all we know, ClearInk could secretly have Amazon as a partner, and its screens could show up on the next Kindle model.

Another possibility is Liquavista, the screen tech company Amazon bought from Samsung in 2013.

Yes, I did tell you in late 2018 that Amazon shut down Liquavista, but as I noted at the time, Amazon was "unable to tell me whether Amazon still be pursuing this tech, if Liquavista’s R&D work been shifted to another unit, or the state of their screen production".

A lot of Liquavista people still worked for Amazon at that time, so it’s entirely possible they were still working on new screen tech that is based on Liquavista’s tech.

Liquavista’s screens did look pretty back in 2013, though they never did start mass production:

BTW, Amazon does employ a lot of screen tech people, so there’s a good chance that they are working on something new that Amazon is developing in secret, but there’s really no way for us to know for sure until Amazon decides it wants us to know.

In any case, this is going to be an interesting year for screen tech!

I am still waiting to hear from contacts in China whether this device have actually been released to market, but it would appear that E-ink’s next-gen color epaper screens have arrived on consumer ereaders.

CNTechPost reported earlier this week that the Chinese firm iReader has announced the C6, a 6″ ereader capable of displaying 4096 colors. They don’t mention the price or release date, but Chinese language sources say the device will be released on 25 March, at a retail of 1499 yuan (about $211 USD).

The iReader C6 is powered by a quad-core CPU with 1GB RAM and 15GB internal storage. It also has integrated speakers, a front-lit display, and a capacitive touchscreen.

The product listing says it weighs in at 170 grams and measures 6.9 millimeters thin. This makes it about the same size as most 6″ ereaders, but unlike its competition the C6 has a white shell rather than a black one. That was a wise choice because the white will probably make the color screen look better. (Similarly, most older E-ink ereaders have a black shell instead of a white one because a white shell would make the grayscale screen look grayer, while a black shell makes it look blacker.)

The C6 is not the first color ereader on the market, but it is the first that uses E-ink’s latest color epaper screens. There were several ereaders that used E-ink’s Triton and Triton 2 screens, but that tech was never widely adopted. Triton screens depended on a color filter placed on top of a graysclae E-ink screen and as a result its screen resolution was low and its base color was a dull gray. (It was also slow to refresh.)

We still don’t really know anything about the C6’s performance or screen quality, but I can assure you that I am doing my best to get one.

Edit: Color screen resolution is unknown. Some sources say this screen tech can display color at 212 PPI, while Pocketbook says the screens going into their device have a color resolution of 100 PPI. (I trust Pocketbook.)

Stay tuned.

P.S. If you are wondering what this new screen tech means for the Amazon Kindle, I have a few thoughts.

After a decade of lobbying bu authors and book publishers, the UK government announced this week that the Value Added Tax collected on the sale of ebooks would be reduced to zero starting on 1 December 2020.

The UK Publishers Association is overjoyed, but I see this as a glass half full.

“We are delighted that the Government has decided to zero-rate VAT on digital books and journals in the Budget," Stephen Lotinga, CEO of the Publishers Association, said in a statement. "It’s fantastic that the Chancellor has acknowledged the value of reading. The decision to axe the reading tax will bring an end to the illogical and unfair tax on those who need or prefer to read digitally and should contribute to an increase in literacy in the UK. We want to thank all the parliamentarians, organisations and individuals who have supported this campaign and helped make the case for change – we look forward to continuing the important work of making reading accessible for all.”

Under the old rules no VAT was collected on print books sold in the UK, while 20% of the price of an ebook was paid to the UK government. (Yes, the UK has the equivalent of what in the USA would be a 25% national sales tax.) Print books had a 0% VAT rate due to an elitist and archaic belief that books were unique cultural objects. At the same time, ebooks were classified as software.

While this change would appear to be good news, the RNIB reminds us that the glass is only half full. Only ebooks will be getting the zero VAT under the new rule, but audiobooks will not. Speaking in their role as advocates for the visually impaired, the RNIB has a problem with this development:

While we welcome the announcement of a VAT exemption on e-publications, we are disappointed that it appears this won’t be extended to audiobooks. Printed books, magazines and newspapers have been VAT exempt since the 1970s, because it was recognised that there shouldn’t be a tax on reading.

The change recognises the unfairness of taxing some alternative formats and will help widen access for blind and partially sighted people who use e-Readers. However, for many people living with sight loss, audiobooks are their preferred format and allow them to enjoy their favourite titles in the same way as everyone else. It’s not right that they will continue to be charged 20 per cent more for books, and we urge the Government to make sure that audiobooks are included in the exemption.

I don’t know what is more ridiculous, that the UK made this change twenty years after it was obviously a good idea, or that they still managed to screw it up.

Talk about being a day late and a dollar short.

image by Raymond Snijders via Flickr

It looks like the Big Five is about to become the Not-So-Big-Four.

Variety reports that ViacomCBS (or whatever they are calling themselves today) is considering a sale of its book publishing unit.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish told investors Wednesday that the company is taking a hard look at all operations. Simon & Schuster has generated inquiries from prospective buyers in the past, Bakish said during a Q&A held as part of Morgan Stanley’s annual investor conference in San Francisco.

Simon & Schuster “is not a core asset. It is not video-based. It does not have significant connection for our broader business,” Bakish said. “We have had multiple unsolicited inbound calls about that asset, and so as the market stabilizes, we are going to engage in a process” to examine strategic alternatives. ViacomCBS said publishing revenue in 2019 came to $814 million, down 1.3% from $825 million in the prior year.

PW reports that S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy confirmed the potential sale in a letter to staff. The letter did not include much in the way of addition detail, however.

This does not come as a surprise. Simon and Schuster is not technically the smallest of the "Big Five" US trade publishers, but it is the most vulnerable. The other four are either significantly larger in their own right or part of larger international publishing conglomerates (Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrink, Hachette is owned by Legardere Publishing, HarperCollins is twice the size of S&S, and PRH is PRH).

In fact, I would have described S&S as the most likely candidate to be bought by Amazon when it looked like the retailer wanted to take a bite out of the industry, and for years now the only thing stopping Legardere, PRH, or Holtzbrink from buying S&S was that CBS didn’t want to sell.

That has apparently changed, and soon so could the ownership of S&S.

Who do you think is going to buy them?

It’s hard to guess who will, but I would bet that I can name the one company that will not.

Amazon.

I know that most will assume that Amazon is the leading candidate, but as I see it Amazon already gets enough shit from the publishing industry, and it doesn’t need even more regulatory oversight. S&S doesn’t have enough revenue to make the headaches worth it, so Amazon is probably going to pass.

Do you think Bezos might buy it?

image by ActuaLitté via Flickr

Things are about to get interesting again for Kindle owners.

Amazon just rolled out a new firmware update for the Kindle. The official notice for the update doesn’t give much in the way of details, but a hacker combed through the code and found a few clues that hinted at new features.

Here’s what Amazon told us:

Here’s what’s new:

Aa Menu: Over the next couple of weeks, you will see an updated Aa menu that makes it easier to access all font, layout and reading options without leaving your book.

Performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general enhancements.

That’s not even close to being worth writing about, but the stuff Amazon left out, now that is another story.

JHowell posted over at MobileRead earlier today that he has already taken apart the firmware update, and found references to a couple new features:

• Options to control features like "Popular Highlights", "Word Wise", and "PinYin" moved to the Aa menu.
• Contrast setting with 5 choices: -2, -1, 0, 1, 2
• "Set the cover of the title you are reading to appear on your lock screen"

Using your book cover as a screensaver will be fun, but I think the contrast setting could be the most useful. If understand it correctly, Amazon is going to give users the option of adjusting the contrast between the white, black, and shades of gray displayed by the Kindle.

We’ll be able to make the whites "whiter" or "grayer", depending on the setting chosen. The lighter shades of gray will also be affected, but black will not be affected at all.

This won’t help much with text, but it should prove useful with images in an ebook.  Adjusting the contrast should bring out additional detail in images that would otherwise be indistinguishable.

Now that is going to be useful, IMO.