Nate Hoffelder

We’ve known since Wednesday that Amazon is planning to open a retail location in San Diego (and judging by the related job openings, that is only the beginning), and booksellers in the San Diego area aren’t happy.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on this story yesterday in an article rife with ant-Amazon propaganda, hostility, and errors (an early version of the piece referred to the Amazon Nook – no joke).

The piece is generally not worth reading, but there were a couple nuggets of useful info, including confirmation that Amazon is looking for retail space in the area. Reg Kobzi, senior vice president for commercial real-estate brokerage CBRE, confirmed the report but could not comment further due to a confidentiality agreement.

Amazon’s imminent arrival has some local booksellers responding with expected hostility. According to Mysterious Galaxy co-owner Mary Elizabeth Yturralde, Amazon should be investigated every time Jeff Bezos takes a deep breath, changes his pants, or has an extra cup of coffee at breakfast.

"Anything that Amazon does is something that needs to be viewed with concern because of their predatory business model," said Yturralde. "They operate in the Walmart mode where they don’t add any value to any community they move into.”

No value – except for the jobs, low prices, and tax revenue in local coffers. But none of that is worth anything to anyone.

Of course, not all of Amazon’s competitors are afraid, and some are downright unconcerned. Reached for comment, the co- founder of Powell’s Books in Portland Oregon was indifferent at best.

“We did check out the store in Seattle, and found their model not very compelling to us,” said co-founder Michael Powell, whose flagship store has an inventory of a million titles spread across 70,000 square feet. “I’m not in any panic mode. We’ve survived Barnes and Noble, I think we can survive Amazon.”

Adrian Newell, a book buyer at Warwicks in La Jolla, is described as not being happy about Amazon moving in either, but she was able to move beyond the initial reaction to make the astute suggestion that Amazon is interested in meet-the-author events. “That’s the one thing they haven’t been able to duplicate,” she said. “Otherwise, why would Amazon take on the additional costs of leasing space?”

That’s a novel idea, but so far as we know Amazon has been using its only retail bookstore less to engage with authors and more to gather data on how consumers browse for books. And what with traditionally published authors (and Big Five authors in particular) running the risk of being blacklisted if they held an event at Amazon Books, there won’t be a lot of demand for events.

Frankly we don’t know how Amazon will be using the space.

Edit: But that hasn’t stopped some from speculating.  Writing over on his blog "I love my Kindle", Bufo Calvin has thrown together a list of all of Amazon’s promotional and physical retail  activities and proposed that Amazon should do it all under one roof:

• Showcase books, like they are doing in Seattle
• Show off Amazon devices, which might include simulated rooms, like you can see in some electronic stores
• Amazon lockers, where you pick up some things you order online before you get there
• Have a Fed Ex store part of it, to handle returns, but whatever else you wanted to ship
• Maybe have a print-on-demand machine, to do print books
• Perhaps have a sort of test kitchen/coffee place, but I’m not sure about that. It would help them to have people try some of the things online
• Amazon’s “home of tomorrow”, showing off possible future things, including doing focus groups
• Author talks by Kindle Direct Publishing/Amazon imprint/Amazon independent paperbook authors

Some of these don’t make any sense to do under the same roof. For example, consumers tend to treat POD in a store more like a print shop then a bookstore, so there’s little reason to include a POD machine in a bookstore. And Amazon lockers don’t have to be co-located with a bookstore, so it would make more sense to place the lockers a couple miles away where rent is cheaper.

The test kitchen and "home of tomorrow" are kinda like what Amazon has done with pop up stores in the past, and they’re space intensive. But if you combine that area with the author event space, you might be able to kill two birds with one store.

And as for the FedEx store idea, that’s just another name for the unstores Amazon is installing on and near college campuses. It doesn’t really serve the same market (but it also doesn’t necessary require a lot of space so why not include it).

But no matter how Amazon uses their stores, the Union-Tribune’s Lori Weisberg opines that "Amazon’s brick-and-mortar business plans, then, are sure to make the company even less popular" with certain parts of the book industry.

I for one am looking forward to seeing what that would look like; I have trouble imagining how Amazon could be more hated than they are now. I mean, in the past six months we’ve seen a biased report on Amazon’s supposed negative impact on local tax revenues, a farcial letter to the DOJ, and (just last week) a recital where Amazon’s evilness was the main topic.

What could Amazon’s detractors do next to show they dislike Amazon, start making Amazon’s employees disappear under mysterious circumstances?

I really don’t see how Amazon could be more hated by their competitors (and suppliers), but that doesn’t extend to its customers. Amazon has always scored high with consumers, and based on the 4.2 star Yelp rating for the Amazon Books location in Seattle, consumers are pleased with Amazon’s first bookstore.

That store carries around 5,000 titles (as well as Amazon’s gadgets) in a 7,500 square foot space, or about a tenth as many titles as the average indie bookstore would squeeze into the space, and most consumers don’t seem to mind the limited selection nearly as much as Amazon detractors. This includes John Mutter of Shelf Awareness, who said that "For the amount of space Amazon has, (the store’s selection) felt kind of skimpy".

Will Amazon future stores receive similar mixed reviews?

It’s hard to say, but one thing we can safely predict is that Amazon wants to open more retail locations. The latest rumor suggests that Amazon has plans for other types of stores besides bookstores, and that rumor is born out by the job listings mentioned in the first paragraph of this post.

According to Amazon’s site, Amazon Books (apparently the name for the broader brick and mortar program at Amazon) is looking for a data engineer, financial analyst,  senior program manager , and curators for literary fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books.

"Join the team that just launched the first-ever Amazon Books retail store. We’ve applied Amazon’s 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping," the listings say. "Our doors opened November 3rd and it is very much still Day One. We are looking for entrepreneurial, analytical, creative, flexible leaders to help us make Amazon Books the world’s most customer-centric bookstore and a place that customers love to shop."

Those positions are all head office jobs and will be based in Seattle, and that suggests that Amazon is going to have enough stores in operation to justify the overhead.

Amazon is rumored to be planning to open a dozen or so stores over the next couple years, and given the confirmed details we have now I’d say those rumors are all but confirmed.

images by SounderBruce

Apple’s news aggregator app has been called many things in the five months since it launched, including Flipboard killer, but one thing you can’t call it is well-made.

Or thorough.

Or competent.

My blog has been in Apple News for just under a week now, and in that time I have found numerous problems that frustrate me both as a publisher and as a news junkie.

As a publisher I am disappointed by the lack of publisher tools. I have no access to stats, or any way to add my own. There’s no way for me to fix a post, or even reset it, if Apple News is displaying it wrong. I also have no control over the topic tags, and no way to adjust the formatting.

Yes, Apple has touted the fancy formatting tools they’ve built into the platform, but the reality is those tools are only available to a handful of publishers (Wired, for example). According to the Apple bot I blocked on Twitter, only 350 publishers have the tools, out of millions of websites.

The vast majority of web publishers are in the same position as me, and can’t do anything about the formatting in Apple News.

Heck, I can’t even affect the formatting by changing the feed at the other end. There’s no best practices guide to tell me how to format the body of a post so it looks good in Apple News, and what little Apple does tell us includes false information (embedded video in RSS feeds is not supported, for example).

As a result it’s hit or miss whether articles in Apple News look good – assuming you can find the articles at all.

As a news junkie, I have been paying close attention to how the feeds I follow look in Apple News, and I am frustrated by the flaws I have found.

For one thing, the formatting often leaves a lot to be desired:

That looks bad (and neither the publisher nor the reader can do squat to fix it), but what’s even more important than the articles that look bad are the ones which are misclassified.

If you’ve used Apple News you may have noticed that you can follow all the posts on a topic, but what you might not have noticed is that the topic tags are applied at the whim of a drunken monk who lives in a wine barrel under Tim Cook’s house.

My recent story on Google’s Editions at Play, for example, was tagged as Google Maps. My morning link posts were tagged variously as ebook, beverages, ebook readers, and digital publishing. And my recent posts on Amazon were tagged US Media and e-commerce (there was also a third article, but it never appeared in Apple News).

I could go on, but I think you get my point. The topic tags don’t make any sense whatsoever, but I would suppose that poorly organized topic tags are better than articles not showing up at all.

Over the past three days, Apple News has mislaid three posts from my RSS feed. None of the missing posts were earth-shattering news, but they still should have been delivered to the reader. And no, Apple News support has no idea why the articles went missing.

Frankly this is not a good news reader app; it fails to deliver the news whether by publisher or topic. At this point Apple News makes Facebook look competent and impartial at delivering the news, and that’s saying something.

If you have an alternative, you should use it and wait for Apple to get their act together.

For a little over a year now Google has been working with London-based print book designers Visual Editions to develop new experimental concepts for the future of the book. Dubbed Editions at Play, the goal is to make books which "are actually digital. i.e. when the ‘book’ could not exist without the internet:"

What about stories where the ubiquity of digital information is not incidental but integral to the narrative? Books where, without the internet, there is no book.

The project has not succeeded in that goal off the bat, but it is early days yet.

Much has been written about this elsewhere, so let me boil this idea down to the simplest form. Each "ebook" is actually a website (with a URL and everything) which has been artificially constrained by labeling it a book rather than a story, website, etc.

Here is what the "ebooks" may look like on your phone:

You can buy access to one of these websites through Google Play Books, where the ebooks cost $4.25 (or the equivalent in local currencies). The first two launched this week, with more to follow.

One book, The Truth about Cats and Dogs, is a simple short story told from two points of view. Oh, it gilds the lily with a few fripperies made possible by HTML5 and other web tech, but when stripped down to the core idea there’s nothing in this book which could not be done with Epub (and probably already has).

It hardly justifies the price tag, but the other book might.

Entrances and Exits is a short story that integrates clippings from Google Maps into the story. E&E tells the tale of a broken relationship and how a husband tries to avoid the pain of his wife leaving him by going on trips.

It starts at the main character’s home, before going to a train station, Bath, and then (after he finds a magic book) elsewhere in the world. The clips from Google Maps are used to convey location as well as the character’s bewilderment when he walks through the wrong door and ends up in a different city on the other side of the world.

It is an intriguing story idea, albeit one which has been done before (set piece videos in video games). Also, it doesn’t actually require the internet. All you would need is 3d video (and a lot of local storage). If you integrated chunks of text into Google Spotlight stories, for example, you could write a story similar to E&E.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t tried Spotlight stories, you should make the time. It’s a platform for interactive 3d video which enables new types of stories which are a lot of fun to view/read/experience. The platform is available on both iOS and Android and requires a lot of storage space, but it’s worth it.

And so is E&E – if you can get it to work on your device.

Google’s "future of the book" comes with a major caveat; it won’t work on all devices. I read E&E just fine on my iPad Air, but a friend says he had trouble reading it on his iPad 2, and I couldn’t read this "ebook" on my $50 Fire tablet or the generic RCA tablet I am using right now.

And that is a problem, because if this is the future of books then books have no future. Google has just doomed books to the scrapheap of history.

O O O

Jokes about technical issues aside, the first two releases suggest a fundamental flaw in the whole idea behind Editions at Play, one which will limit its success.

Rather than being viewed as a new way to tell stories, this project is described as a reinvention of the book. In addition to pissing off book people, the two "ebooks" we’ve seen so far suggest that that description has acted as a set of blinkers on the minds at Visual Editions.

The folks behind this project have artificially limited themselves to choosing to make new types of books (as opposed to inventing new ways to tell stories), and in doing so they’ve cut themselves off from radical story-telling ideas like Google Spotlight stories.

If they had instead started with the idea that Editions at Play wants to tell stories on websites then it opens up the conceptual possibilities. They don’t just have to focus on text and create a book; a story could incorporate elements from games, videos, and other story-telling mediums.

It’s regrettable that Visual Editions didn’t figure that out before spending a year on this project, but on the upside they can still expand their focus.

And maybe they already have. More books are coming, so we’ll have to wait and see.

The rumor that Amazon was opening 300 to 400 bookstores lasted less than 24 hours before being retracted by the original source, but that was more than enough time for the tech blogosphere to pen a double dozen stories on, around, and about the rumor.

Here are the several best stories I found this evening.

To start, Longform weighed in this morning with an oblique commentary on yesterday’s rumor. It published its own linkpost titled The Longform Guide to Journalism Hoaxes, Pranks and Lies which rounded up seven old stories on journalistic hoaxes, frauds, and outright fabrications.

Re/code also weighed in with a tangential post that is rather light on the details but also hints that Amazon that Amazon has b&m plans beyond bookstores.

PW has the one most interesting story of the bunch; they found Amazon job openings in San Diego for booksellers, suggesting that Amazon has at least one store in the works.

The Dallas Morning News sought out the opinion of Half-Priced Books, the third-largest bookstore chain in the US. VP Kathy Doyle Thomas felt vindicated by the rumor, saying that "We’ve known for 44 years that people like to browse and shop bookstores".

And last but not least Rich Bellis, formerly of DBW, writes over at Fast Company that "Amazon’s Rumored 'Bookstores' Probably Won’t Be What You Think".

P.S. Even though this rumor proved to be false, it did shake loose a few new leaks which said that Amazon might be planning to open a dozen stores in the next couple years. That detail came from independent reports by Shelf Awareness and the NYTimes, and is based on confidential sources, but it is still more plausible than yesterday’s rumor.

image by SounderBruce

Amazon has yet to officially comment on yesterday’s wild rumor that the retailer plans to open 300 to 400 hundred stores, but what they are saying off the record would fill pages.

In addition to an off-the-record denial last night, word is now leaking out that Amazon is thinking about opening a much more plausible dozen or so stores in the next year or two, not hundreds.

The "dozen or so stores" figures comes via Shelf Awareness, the newsletter that originally broke the news on Amazon Books last fall, and the NYTimes has a similar and independent report which says:

The Internet retailer plans to open more brick-and-mortar bookstores following the unveiling last year of one such location here in its hometown, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans.

But the company’s plans for physical stores are modest, this person said, especially in comparison with reports of an expansion suggested by an unusual source, the chief of a large shopping mall operator.

The NYTimes did not share specifics or have any additional detail, however.

At this point we have three anonymous sources contradicting the word of one mall operator CEO who blabbed Amazon’s secrets during an earnings call.

Which do you believe?

Edit: Don’t believe the CEO; he’s retracted his remarks and said that his remarks were "not intended to represent the company’s plans."

I am still waiting for convincing evidence that the original source knew what he was talking about, but others aren’t so cautious.

Writing over at Vox, Matt Yglesias concluded that because Amazon is "driven by a relentless desire to conquer everything in its path, and brick-and-mortar retail is a thing", the retailer must be planning to open more stores.

The Vox piece is good for an eye roll or two. After first waving his hands at an explanation for the initial focus on bookstores, Yglesias then goes on to misunderstand what the mall bookstores could be used for:

A store can be a same-day delivery hub

The bigger, less irony-laden thing that Amazon is working on right now is same-day delivery for Amazon Prime members. Currently, same-day delivery is sporadically available — for some products, in some cities, some of the time. It feels kind of like magic when it works, but it’s not nearly predictable enough right now to be a real driver of business rather than an impressive occasional delight for custom.

Yeah, Amazon doesn’t need a chain of stores to serve as delivery hubs; warehouses would fill the need better than retail stores, and even in urban areas they would be cheaper, too.

Furthermore, you couldn’t carry enough stock in a store the size of Amazon Books to offer a diverse selection for delivery; at 5,500 sq ft, it just isn’t big enough.

Yglesias disagrees, writing:

The geography of same-day delivery depots, in other words, looks a lot like the geography of classic big-box stores. You wouldn’t have just one Borders serve an entire region. Instead, a given metro area would feature one or more downtown locations plus a bunch of mall spots in the surrounding suburbs. The goal was to ensure that nobody who bought books regularly was ever all that far from a Borders.

The problem with this is that in the DC metro area Amazon is serving same-day delivery from their existing warehouses. I live in suburbia about 40 miles outside of DC, and I can get thousands of products besides books delivered the same day (and so can the Maryland side of the DC metro area).

So no, stores aren’t required. Looking at how Amazon currently operates, retail stores would almost be redundant for that purpose.

The Wall Street Journal got into the gossip game today with a new report that Amazon is planning to additional bookstores:

The Seattle company plans as many as 400 bookstores, Sandeep Mathrani, chief executive of large mall operator General Growth Properties Inc., said on an earnings call with analysts Tuesday.

“You’ve got Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400,” said Mr. Mathrani in response to a question about mall traffic.

That compares to the 640 stores Barnes & Noble Inc. operates and the 255 locations Books-A-Million Inc. said it had as of last summer. Both companies spent years building out their retail operations.

Amazon has not officially commented on this, but one source told me off the record something that I can’t repeat, but which inspired me to call this story gossip and an unsubstantiated rumor. (Take that for what you will.)

Even without the info from Amazon, I had trouble believing this rumor. That CEO would have violated multiple NDAs to make that claim in the earnings call. Yes, people are that stupid sometimes, but I have trouble believing it in this case.

The mall operator in question has interests in 120 malls, and exposing Amazon’s plans risks Amazon choosing to sign leases elsewhere. That is millions of annual revenue walking away due to this one slip.

Plus, why would Amazon have told this one CEO their entire plan?

I mean, Jeff Bezos may be a Bond villain (he has rockets, robots, and an empire that spans the news and book industries) but he’s not the type to ruin things by monologuing his plans to an outsider.

Yes, Amazon has a single bookstore in Seattle, as well as a double handful of kiosks in malls around the world, and they could well be planning to open more. But 300 stores, when the first store has only been opened for a few months?

It would take years to accomplish, and would involve scouting locations, signing leases, and hiring staff. And that is why this story doesn’t pass my sniff test.

What do you think?

Amazon is rolling out a major software update for its ereaders this week.

The  v5.7.2 update is available for all current models, including the basic Kindle, the Voyage, and all the latter two Paperwhites. The update adds a new optional home screen layout, a new Open Dyslexic font, improved book recommendations, a tweaked sharing menu, and a new quick actions menu.

The update is going to be rolled out to Kindle owners over the next month, but you can also go download it manually. I did, and I have a few screenshots to share.

First up is the home screen. You now have the option of a more stylized home screen with book recommendation on the bottom, your most recently opened books in the upper left, and a list of reading lists on the right.  The reading lists draws on your Amazon wishlist, as well as any list you may have created on Goodreads.

Here’s the new home screen option, along with the other two options:

As you can see, the menu bar across the top has changed. It now features a quick action menu icon third from the left, and a search bar.

That quick action menu lets you adjust the frontlight, enable airplane mode, sync your Kindle, or open the settings menu:

And last but not least, Amazon has also added a new dyslexic font as your 8th font choice.

This font is intended to help those with reading disabilities by emphasizing parts of each character and so make the characters easier to recognize. There is some dispute among experts whether this helps or not, but as you can see the font does look distinctive.

The menu inside the book looks a little different from before, and it also offers a new browse option I haven’t seen before. (Is it new? Edit: No.)

OverDrive offers a similar font in its reading app, and you can also download a open dyslexic font for free and use it with your preferred reading app.

The update can be found on the software update pages on the Amazon website.

image by gminguzzi

Ever since July 2015 Amazon has been paying authors and publishers with works in Kindle Unlimited by the page, and on 1 February 2016 Amazon adjusted how it calculated the page size.

Amazon quietly announced on the KDP support forums on Monday that it had developed a new algorithm for calculating the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count, or KENPC.

The retailer said that the new method, which has been dubbed KENPC v2.0, "makes a number of improvements to how we standardize font, line height, and spacing used to normalize the length of each book relative to one another. This change will impact the KENPC of some titles while others will remain unchanged. The average KENPC will change less than 5%, although individual books’ changes may be larger or smaller. The new KENPC approach will be applied uniformly to all KDP Select books and all versions of those books."

In related news, Amazon has also added a cap on the maximum number of pages an author can earn from a single reader  in a single title (3,000 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages).

Amazon says that only the very longest books will be affected, and given that authors have reported that, say, a 300 page paperback has a KENPC of around 500 to 600 and that a box set ran to around 2,000, I would bet Amazon is correct in that regard.

However, early reports suggest that the new  KENPC v2.0 algorithm will not have a similar mild impact. Several authors are reporting a sharp decline. One said that "I had one of my 15 books drop 12.5% in KENP".

Another reported "Mine dropped by exactly 13% which would amount to about 26 cents per book based on a half cent per page payout. The format and fonts are pretty normal and everything is straight text with no gaps."

And a third said that "I went over all my books and didn’t find any significant changes – maybe a dozen pages here or there, out of 300-600. So no problems here."

So clearly results are mixed.

images by pjmorse, wonderferret, marco_1186

We knew that the $50 Fire tablet was popular this past holiday season when it largely went out of stock on Amazon’s website, and according to the latest estimates from IDC the tablet was more successful than even Amazon’s wildest dreams.

Amazon shipped 5.2 million tablets in the fourth quarter (up from 1.9 million the previous year), boosting Amazon into third place in the global tablet market behind Apple, Samsung.

With 16.1 million and 9 million tablets shipped, Apple and Samsung continued to outsell Amazon, in spite of the Fire tablet’s low price and popularity. And even though both tech companies saw a drop in tablet sales last quarter, they will likely continue to outsell Amazon.

IDC cautioned in the press release this morning that Amazon isn’t likely to keep its position. “Amazon’s success in the tablet market has thus far been purely based on price,” the research firm says in a news release about the numbers. “While this bodes well during the holiday season, it’s unlikely the Kindle’s success will continue in the remainder of the year.”

I would say the success of the Fire tablet is due as much to marketing as price (also, decent hardware). At $50, the Fire tablet has a value which is hard to beat, and Amazon made sure everyone knew about it.

Also, Amazon’s hot tablet last year was the 6″ Fire HD6, which IDC doesn’t classify as a tablet. In short, Amazon’s success this year over last year is due almost as much to launching a device that IDC is willing to count a tablet as it is to actual sales.

But if we look at the annual figures, we can see that IDC is mostly right about Amazon’s success being a one off in the 4th quarter, but also a fluke that won’t be repeated in the other three quarters.

Overall tablet sales dipped 13% last quarter, to an estimated 65.9 million. Total annual sales dipped 10.1%, to 206.8 million. And of that 20o odd million, the top five tablet makers were Apple, Samsung, Asus, Lenovo, and Hauwei.

Amazon didn’t even make the top five for the year, and that is true for most years. Amazon’s single best quarter for tablet sales is the 4th quarter, after which sales drop until the next model is launched.

Geekwire

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the week since I first reported on Fakespot’s system for analyzing Amazon reviews, it’s that Fakespot's algorithms completely miffed on book reviews.

Numerous authors have complained both in the comments here and over on The Passive Voice that their books were being given erroneous ratings. They’ve been responding with damning critiques like "I tested one of my books & it came back 73% fake, which is ridiculous" and "I tried it on books that I know have 100% authentic reviews, and it was wrong every time".

Clearly this system doesn’t work for book reviews, and that is something that even Fakespot will concede. I have exchanged a few emails with the Fakespot team over the past week, and they told me that they are aware of the issue with book reviews.

"Fakespot initially was not designed or intended for book reviews. Book reviews by their nature are an extremely different case when compared to other categories of products, which consist of the majority of what Fakespot users would input (electronics, groceries, etc)," the spokesperson told me by email, before adding "However, our analysis system is currently undergoing a revamp and accurate measurements of book reviews will be available."

My contact informed me that Fakespot has released a beta version of its algorithms which is intended to fix the issue with erroneous book review ratings.

And I think I can confirm that announcement. The books I am checking for the first time are showing a much lower score. The books are now being identified as books rather than products of a company, and Fakespot is identifying fewer reviews as potentially fake.

Looking for Alaska, for example, scored 0%, and so did Will Grayson Will Grayson and The Beginning of Everything.

It’s hard to say whether that is going to fix the problem, because the existing ratings aren’t being replaced. To name one example, Girl on the Train scored 28% and %50 for the Kindle edition and hardback, respectively, and with tens of thousands of reviews for each edition that is clearly inaccurate.

I’m told that authors can request a reanalysis/investigation on any of the books rated, but it won’t happen automatically. So if you’ve already checked your book in Fakespot and think it got a bum rap, contact Fakespot and ask them to fix it.

image by Ionics

Bloomberg enlightened us on Friday that Amazon’s audiobook service continues to expand beyond the book world and into audio production and distribution.

Amazon.com Inc. is ramping up its investment in podcasts and other radio-style shows to expand the types of programming it offers via Audible, the audio book company it acquired in 2008.

Audible has recruited well-known comedians, along with radio and podcast producers for the initiative, and job postings suggest a significant global push. Maria Bamford and Jonathan Katz are taping episodes of “Bedtime Stories,” a show in which comedians rewrite fairy tales, according to their manager Bruce Smith.

Entertainment plays a crucial role in Amazon’s effort to push beyond its core business of selling books, laundry detergent and televisions online.

Yep.

Our first clue that Amazon was looking into opportunities beyond audiobooks was in 2014, when Audible acquired Rooftop Media. Rooftop recorded comedians at clubs and distributes the video and audio to online retailers (like Audible).

That was Amazon’s first big step to doing more with audio than simply recording the recitation of books, and Amazon didn’t stop there. The retailer hired Eric Nuzum away from NPR in May 2015 to run Audible’s existing nascent original production platform, and he recruited a team of public radio talent to join him in the endeavor.

Together they oversee a program that produces original audio works. Where Netflix adapted Daredevil from the comic book and Hulu adapted Stephen King’s 11.22.63, Audible has works like an adaptation of the famous novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses which features the extracted letters from the book and a radio show quality production of the graphic novel Locke & Key starring award winning actors and authors.

Audible sees original production as the key to expanding its slaes. “Our original content is more like Netflix or Amazon for audio,” said Beth Anderson, the executive vice president of Audible, and its publisher. “We are hoping to expand our audience with people who might not be as interested in books, but in drama that we can capture on audio.”

Others in the industry have also noticed the new focus. "Amazon is doing to Audible what it’s done to Prime Video — investing in original programming,” said Nick Quah, an executive at the Graham Holdings Co.’s Panoply podcast network who also writes a newsletter about the industry. “Amazon is hiring a ton of really good producers and managers out of public radio to acquire podcasts and develop shows of their own.”

Time will tell whether original productions will prove successful, but it’s also worth remembering that the original works are only a fraction of the titles available. We shouldn’t overlook the fact that Audible also distributes recordings of live events, old radio productions, and interviews.

The original works may get all the buzz but odds are the other works generate the majority of Audible’s revenue. And that is the more important detail.

lead image by basykes

The arms race between ad-dependent publishers and ad blocking has a new front: The Telegraph. Earlier this month this publisher started blocking access to the site to some users of ad-blocking software.

The first hint of the new policy was a tweet dated 13 January (and an AdBlock Plus support thread from a week later), but it has gone largely under the radar until I visited the site today and was blocked from reading the article:

I was not shown this pop-up when I visited the site on Android or iOS, only when visiting from Chrome on Windows.

After disabling Ad Block Plus, I was shown a page with a relatively low number of adverts (mostly Google and Amazon, surprisingly, with one large OutBrain sponsored link ad unit on the page). It was a far nicer experience than Forbes, which is engaging in a similar war on ad block users while also promising an "ad-light" experience (but actually delivering malware).

The Telegraph’s less obnoxious ads could explain why the response on Twitter has been milder than the hostile response Forbes and Yahoo got when they

https://twitter.com/ManosOnView/status/688146885048061952

https://twitter.com/spavedave/status/687269064801148928

The launch of iOS 9 with its integrated content-blocking features last year brought ad-blocking to the forefront, and publishers have been responding with various degrees of subterfuge, social engineering, and hostility. Some, like Forbes, Yahoo, and Telegraph, are fighting users by blocking anyone caught running ad block software.

Others like BookRiot are crafting ad units that get around ad block software, or are partnering with ad tech companies that promise to outwit the ad block software.

And then there are the web publishers who have either taken no action, or have adopted the mild approach of a nag screen pop-up which asks that users stop blocking ads.

The soft approach has not proven to be very successful, and that’s a shame because Forbes' hostile approach appears to be working. A few weeks back Forbes reported that about 40% of the visitors who were asked to turn off their ad blockers did so.

If other publishers have similar luck then the war between users and publishers will expand as more publishers choose to fight rather than fix the problems caused by ads like malvertising and visitors getting hit with hidden CPU and bandwidth costs.

Edit: And that fight will simply lead to another round of escalation in the arms race between ad block developers and web publishers. As readers have pointed out in the comments, are already a couple scripts that bypass the ad block blocks used by Forbes, Telegraph, and other sites.

In other words, the web publishers have lost this round, and will have to go back to the keyboard and come up with a way to block the anti-block blockers. It is no more or less an arms race, which is way I am glad I chose to sit out this war and use soft propaganda instead of getting into a fight.

image by Javier Gutierrez Acedo

Apple’s new cloud-syncing option for iBooks is one of the more highly  anticipated features in iOS 9.3, but there is a surprising lack of technical info online.

I was googling for info earlier today so I could set up the feature and use it myself, but all I found were old queries from 2012 and 2013. And so I thought a post with current info might be helpful.

It turns out it’s pretty simple to set up  iCloud for iBooks (or iBooks for iCloud) and have it sync all of your ebook library to to the iCloud server.

1. Update to iOS 9.3,
2. Enable Cloud Drive (in Settings), and
3. Update and open iBooks.

That first step is a killer, especially if your older iDevice can’t run iOS 9 (luckily you do have other options), but once you are past that point you should have no trouble at all.

Based on what I have seen, and on similar reports over at MobileRead, iCloud for iBooks is automatic. It will back up your entire iBooks ebook library to iCloud, including the ebooks you have downloaded from free ebook sites (as well as the annotations for those ebooks).

In fact, I don’t know of a way to disable the sync feature, other than disabling iCloud. Help?

Once those ebooks are backed up, they can be downloaded from other iDevices that are tied to the same Apple account, and that is a problem if you want to keep your ebooks secure. If, for example, you are reading a PDF with sensitive or proprietary info, you don’t want it getting into your iCloud account (Apple’s servers have been hacked before).

But if you have security concerns, I’m sure you thought of that issue.

P.S. If you cannot update to iOS 9.3, you might want to consider using either Google Play Books or the Kindle app. Both Amazon and Google offer similar sync features as iCloud for iBooks, only they don’t quite work the same.

Google requires that you upload ebooks before you download them to the Play Books app (here’s more info), and Amazon requires that you either email or upload your docs before downloading them to the app (but only if you want to use the Kindle cloud sync option).

image by krossbow

There’s a story going around today that Microsoft’s research division is being retasked from cutting edge research towards more product development work.

Citing Bloomberg, the WM Power User blog reports that Microsoft Research is busy working on secondary E-ink screens:

Instead of leaving most of research work in patents and papers, Microsoft Research’s MSR Next group is working with product teams in improving Microsoft products significantly using their research work. Microsoft Research is working on a technology to include secondary display on the inside of the Flip Covers. There are several use cases for this idea, the secondary low power display can act as a touch keyboard when you want to type something, it can display Cortana and its contextual info always-on when you open the cover and more. Microsoft Research is aware of the fact that startup like Yotaphone is exploring similar idea by including e-ink display on the back of the device, but Microsoft thinks there are usability issues when you have the display on the back.

The good news is that Microsoft Research is already in deep talks with Lumia devices team in Finland to explore the possibilities of including this technology in Lumia devices. How about a Surface Phone with TypeCover DisplayCover?

The funny thing about that story is that Bloomberg doesn’t say anything about Flip Covers or secondary E-ink screens. I also can’t find any independent corroboration of this story.

Sure, WM Power User did share this graphic, but that’s the only confirmation we have so far:

As nifty as this news may sound, I think we should hold off on the excitement until we get a statement from Microsoft Research, or until someone posts a real photo of the  covers.

Better yet, let’s wait for a video. As past E-ink smartphone cases have shown us, the software is tougher to pull off than the hardware. The Inkcase from Oaxis, for example, never lived up to its potential. And the competing Popslate only started getting good several months after it was released.

So even if Microsoft’s screens are released, chances are they will only be as good as the software running on them.

The AAP released its monthly Statshot report on Wednesday, and reported that the collected revenues of the 1,200 odd publishers in the survey group had declined 2% in the first nine months of 2015.

The adult category was up, while both religious presses and YA/kids categories were down. In terms of formats, audiobooks continued to grow at a double digit rate, and paperbacks showed a surprising resurgence while both hardback and ebook revenues declined (6.4% and 11.1%, respectively).

The AAP reports that the total trade revenues remained flat at $5 billion, which means that the fluctuations reflect a shift, and not a growth or decline.

Here’s the press release:

Publishers’ book sales for the first three quarters of the year (Jan. –  Sept. 2015) were down 2.0% at $11.9 billion compared to $12.1 billion for the first nine months in 2014. These numbers include sales for all tracked categories (Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, K-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses). Revenue for trade books was flat. Publishers net revenue is tracked monthly by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and includes sales data from more than 1,200 publishers (#AAPStats).

Some of the trends noted during the three quarters of 2015:

• While sales for trade books overall were flat, the categories within had different growth trajectories from Jan. – Sept.:  Adult Books were up 2.9%, Children/YA were down 7.4%, and Religious Presses were down 1.5%.
• Paperbacks and downloaded audiobooks within the trade category grew in double digits.
• Sales declined for Higher Educational Course Materials and PreK-12 Instructional Materials.

Trade:

Year-to-date, Trade Book revenues were flat at $5.0 billion.

• Adult Books: The largest of the categories grew to $3.5 billion through Sept. 2015 compared to 3.4 billion in the same timeframe in 2014. Within that, paperback books (16.0%) and downloaded audio (41.5%) were the formats with the greatest growth. This category has shown growth every month in 2015, with the exception of Feb.
• Children/YA: Revenue within the category declined to $1.1 billion through Sept. 2015 from $1.2 billion for the same timeframe in 2014.  eBooks (44.8%) and hardback books (14.5%) led the overall 7.4% decline in the category.  We’re still seeing the impact of tough competition against 2014 blockbuster titles, including the Divergent series.
• Religious Presses were down 1.5%, with $390.1 million in revenue to date in 2015 compared to $395.9 million in 2014.

“Adult books are leading the way so far this year for growth in the trade category. This is a stark contrast to the tremendous growth last year in Children and Young Adult books,” said Tina Jordan, Vice President at the Association of American Publishers.

Total Trade Net Revenue by Category (in millions)*

Trade Formats:

• Downloaded audio remained the fastest-growing format, with 37.7% growth compared to the same period in 2014.
• eBooks were down 11.1%, with most of the decline coming from Children/YA books (44.8%).
• Paperbacks continued their good performance this year with 13.3% growth.
• Hardback books were down 6.4%.

The chart below depicts publisher revenue for different Trade formats from Jan. – Sept. from 2011 to 2015.

The chart below depicts the growth in net sales from Downloaded Audio from Jan. – Sept. in each year. The format doubled in popularity from 2012 to 2015.

Educational Materials:

Revenues for PreK-12 instructional materials were down by 5.0% in the first three quarters of the year. Higher Education course materials were down 4.4%.

Professional and Scholarly Publishing:

Sales for Professional Publishing, which includes business, medical, law, scientific and technical books and journals, are up 13.0% through Sept. 2015 compared to the same timeframe in 2014.  University Presses declined slightly at 1.8%.

* NOTE: Figures represent publishers’ net revenue for the U.S. (i.e. what publishers sell to bookstores, direct to consumer, online venues, etc.), and are not retailer/consumer sales figures.