Nate Hoffelder

An eagle-eyed reader over at MobileRead Forums reports that Kobo is testing a new way to show a book’s stats.

Yesterday GeoffR posted a screensnap which showed that Kobo is considering a more graphic way to show details about a book, including length, an estimated page count, and how long it will take to read.

Kobo is still quietly testing the new ebook description page in beta, so they’re not showing it to everyone. They also haven’t shared any info on when it will be rolled out to all users.

Luckily, the same cannot be said for the new reading stats email.

I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve heard a couple reports that Kobo is now sending active readers a precis of their reading stats every quarter.

According to my source at MobileRead, Kobo is only tracking data from the books they sell:

And thinking of stats, did anyone else get the reading activity email earlier in the month? I don’t remember it being mentioned. It shows the stats for my reading for the previous three months. But, it is only for "Kobo eBooks", so only books I purchased from Kobo. I like it, but as it only captures maybe half of my reading, it isn’t very accurate.

So what do you think of the new stats?

I find the new book stats more colorful and easier to scan, but not necessarily more useful. I’ve never used those details to plan my reading, have you?

Thanks, GoeffR, for the heads up!

image by andsleonardo

Amazon has taken many steps to clean up its review section, including suing sellers of fake reviews and forbidding any relationship between author and reviewer, but sometimes that’s just not enough.

Sometimes you can’t trust the mass of four and five star ratings, and that is where Fakespot comes in. This website (there’s also a Chrome extension) hoovers up the reviews for a given product, crunches some algorithms, and gives you an estimate of the number of questionable reviews.

All you have to do is copy and paste a link to learn that, for example, around one in four reviews for The Girl on the Train were suspect:

Fakespot is less than specific on what makes for a questionable review, but according to Cnet the reviews were flagged because the reviewers write only overwhelmingly positive reviews, reviewed products without purchasing them, or were determined to have written other reviews about the same company.

I’m not sure how good that criteria is when it comes to book reviews, given that the "company" for Kindle ebooks is the Kindle Store. (Fakespot is going to have to fix that.) But then again, this tool was built to find reviews in any part of Amazon, and not just the book section,

And there are Kindle ebooks with good ratings (The Martian scored 6.7%). But in any case this, Fakespot is not intended to replace your judgement; it’s up to you to decide which reviews can be trusted.

The Girl on the Train, for example, has over 27,000 reviews and it is highly unlikely that the publisher faked a quarter of the reviews.

Fakespot currently supports Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com.au.

Cnet

Thanks, Fbone, for the tip!

image by GotCredit

eBook gift cards have been tried a half-dozen times in the past ten years, including as a way to sell digital textbooks, Christian books (Zondervan), and novels (in US Target stores).

Aside from one effort in Canada and a quietly successful platform in Germany, the idea has not had much success.

And now Amazon is giving it a try.

There’s been no formal announcement from Amazon, but late last month the Seattle-area drug store chain Bartell Drugs revealed that it is carrying Kindle gift cards in its stores.

Amazon has confirmed the news on a help page on the Amazon website, writing "Kindle Cards are Amazon.com Gift Cards that depict popular Kindle books and Kindle Unlimited subscriptions in the form of a physical card, which can be gifted to friends or family members or applied to your own account. Included on each Kindle Card is a description of the Kindle book or Kindle Unlimited subscription, and instructions for redeeming the book or subscription to the desired account once the card has been activated at the store register."

Unlike regular gift cards, Kindle Cards are tied to specific titles, but Amazon isn’t going to hold you to the sale. If someone gives you a card for a book you don’t want, Amazon will let you trade it in for a regular Amazon.com credit. Similarly, if the price of the ebook drops below the price listed on the card, Amazon will give you a credit for the difference (less applicable taxes, of course).

You can find more information on Amazon.

Update: Amazon told me that the pilot is running in 61 Bartell Drug stores, and includes 20 Kindle titles and 4 Kindle Unlimited card designs. Bartell informed me that the pilot started in October 2015, and that Amazon selected the twenty titles in the pilot based on their best-selling titles for gifting.

Update: Working from my tip, Geekwire found the display in a store:

From Geekwire:

The top row of the kiosk features cards for three- and six-month Kindle Unlimited memberships, for $29.99 and $49.99 each. Below those are cards featuring the covers of 20 individual ebooks, best-sellers across both fiction and nonfiction, ranging from “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” to Dan Brown’s “Inferno” and “The Martian” by Andy Weir.

On the back of each ebook card is a quote from an Amazon customer review and a summary of the book, along with an area for writing a message to the recipient and instructions for redeeming the book by scratching off the claim code and going to a dedicated Amazon url to enter it.

Purchasing the card at the Bartell Drugs register automatically activates it for use, as with a standard gift card.

I also know considerably more about the competition.

Livrada, for example, launched a similar pilot in Target stores in 2012. That effort included only a half-dozen titles, and went nowhere.

But up in Canada, Enthrill is having more luck. This Calgary-based startup launched a similar product in Canadian Safeway stores in 2012, and over the past three years they have expanded ebook gift cards into over 3000 locations in Canada, including Sears, Toys R Us, Safeway, Shoppers Drug Mart, Giant Tiger, Home Outfitters, Home Hardware, and Longos.

Enthrill is also the vendor which supplies the Walmart-brand ebook gift cards in Canada and runs Walmart’s ebookstore. That program launched in November 2014.

I have no info on when Enthrill or Walmart plan to expand their programs into the US, but now that Amazon is interested I can guarantee that publishers and retailers will be taking notice.

An old story cropped up yesterday as "new" news when it may be anything but. According to one of my competitors:

Starting February 3, 2016 Amazon will begin showing customers a warning message on the Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. The warning message will be removed as soon as Amazon received an updated file from self-published authors or publishing companies.

Amazon has two stages of the warning system that will go live within a few short weeks. If an e-book only contains a few spelling mistakes, but is still readable, a simple warning message will appear on the details page of that specific title. It will make the average book buyer aware that there are some issues. If the book has bad formatting issues, and basically renders it unreadable Amazon will suppress it and the book listing will be removed.

At least half of this story is old news, and I am still waiting on confirmation of the other half.

Amazon has been pulling ebooks for egregious errors for over four years now, and replacing the listings with warning messages like the following:

I reported on this story in October 2012, and cited a discussion from 2011, so it’s not exactly a new story in 2016. In fact, it wasn’t exactly news in 2012; I had heard reports going back as early as 2010 that Amazon would pull ebooks for serious errors.

Amazon has continued to pull ebooks in response to reader complaints since then, so the only possible new news today is that Amazon might be adding a second error message.

But I am still waiting for confirmation.

I want that confirmation because because I don’t see it as very likely that Amazon would post a notice  over "a few spelling mistakes" when those mistakes could just as easily be valid alternate spellings or words which aren’t listed in the dictionary used by Amazon’s bot.

False positives are even more likely now that the Kindle Store stocks ebooks in several dozen languages, but it is still possible that Amazon will warn readers about minor issues.

Have you seen one of those warning messages? What did it say?

Update: And now I have confirmation. Over on KBoards an author has posted the email he received from Amazon:

Our shared goal is to provide the best digital reading experience for customers on Kindle. When customers contact us with quality issues in a book you published, we validate the issues and send them immediately to you to fix.

Starting February 3, 2016 we will begin showing customers a warning message on the Amazon.com Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. We will remove this message for a book as soon as we receive the fixed file from you and verify the corrections — typically within 2 business days.

We understand that even with the best quality controls, defects sometimes make it through. That’s why we’ve limited this messaging to books with several issues. Books with more serious quality issues will continue to be suppressed from sale.

So the new two-tier warning system is real.

image by JuditK

Glose has updated both its Android app and its app for iPad and iPhone today. The changelog for the Android app only mentions bug fixes, but according to the changelog in iTunes the iOS update is a major one.

Glose is all about sharing the reading experience socially, but for their 2.0 release Glose has decided to focus on improving the user’s experience and giving each user more options. The new app has more stats options, better library management, and additional formatting options for when they’re reading an ebook.

Like its spiritual predecessor Readmill, Glose is a social reading app, but it also is connected to an ebookstore with 500,000 titles. This should help Glose avoid the revenue trap Readmill fell into.

You can find the app in iTunes and in Google Play. Here’s the changelog for the iOS app:

What’s New in Version 2.0.1
Faster. Better. Stronger (Again ?!)

Glose 2.0 is here, with some big new features and enhancements

• For new users we made our onboarding process easier. In fact we removed our onboarding. You can now read any books (10 first %) without even creating an account! Download the app, boom, open any books you want to read or discover. Your progress and opened books will be transferred to your account once you’ll have created it.
• Stats: Ever wondered how much time you spent glued at your screen, reading, on Glose? Well, now you can. Swipe your profile picture and discover your stats! We also display a beautiful graph with your current week reading time! And we have a lot more to come on this part.
• Faster, Better, Stronger: Offline support? Better. Speed ? Faster. We’ve made some tweaks so everything loads a lot faster. Our bookstore, booklists, profile and so on.
• Edit your books: If you go in the “My Books” section, there is now an edit button in the top bar. It was one of our most requested features. You can now hide and delete books from your library. You want to read Fifty Shade of Gray but doesn’t want to let your friends now about it ? Just hide it, it’ll be visible only to you. You can also purely and simply delete any book you opened.
• Safari/App auto login: If you’re logged on Glose for iOS it’ll automatically log you on our website. If you visit https://glose.com on Safari after this update, you’ll be automatically logged in! And for our web mobile user, we also do it the other way. If you download the application and you are logged on Safari mobile you’ll automatically be logged within our Glose for iOS.
• More options in our reader: It was a part of our previous update, but our reader now features different font styles and sizes. An all new sepia theme. And you can also choose whether you prefer to scroll your books vertically or horizontally.
• We’ve made a ton of UI enhancements, from loading indicator to animations. We hope you’ll enjoy this enhanced and better experience.

Amazon is getting its spring cleaning started early this year. The retailer has quietly informed members of Shelfari that the social network is going to be shut down in March.

Acquired in 2008, Shelfari was Amazon’s first book-focused social network (Amazon bought ABEbooks and gained a 40% share in LibraryThing the same year). Shelfari has long since been eclipsed by Goodreads, but Amazon kept the smaller network around because its unique structure made it useful for building a certain Kindle feature (more on this later in the post).

According to the notice, Shelfari is going to be merged into Goodreads, the social network Amazon acquired in 2013. Amazon is framing this as a good thing, but not all users agree.

Writing over at The Reader’s Room blog, the blogger who scooped the news story last week said that she was pissed off and felt like she was losing a friend. The two sites were very different both in character and in membership rolls:

"I’m a member of both it and Goodreads, and they each offer different things that I like and use. What makes Shelfari special is its passionate and supportive community of serious readers. Goodreads is great but ,when it comes to book recommendations, I always turn to my Shelfari friends. Why? Because my Goodreads friend list is populated primarily by Facebook friends — many of whom read relatively little or and have vastly different tastes."

"Shelfari is superior to Goodreads when it comes to discussions. The Shelfari site had the ability to “nest” replies within discussion threads, thus allowing for more in-depth and active discussions. It has been my experience that Shelfari members are much more serious about their reading (on average) and also are more courteous and respectful. There’s a lot of shaming that occurs on Goodreads that doesn’t happen on Shelfari. For example, check out this article from Book Riot that came out last year."

She’s not wrong about the differences between the two sites, and in fact all Kindle users have benefited from Shelfari’s unique nature.

In addition to cataloging your book collection, Shelfari also let users fill out detailed listings for each book and write descriptions for the characters, places, references, and other parts of a book. Amazon used those listings to build the Kindle X-Ray feature which it launched in 2011 (Amazon also created a bot to write listings, but that is another story).

But Amazon hasn’t done much else with Shelfari in the past four years, and now it is being shut down.

Spain is giving its writers a painful and expensive lesson in estate management.

In 2013 Spain amended its pension laws, and among the changes they made were new restrictions and penalties on income. Any senior citizen who earned more than the minimum wage (around 9,000 euros) from their creative work could see their pension docked and get hit with fines.

Writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists are being penalized for works created long ago which are still selling, while others are being forced to choose between creating new works or receiving a pension.

La Vangaurdia and other sites report that Spain is now extracting punitive fines from senior citizens who are making too much money from writing. And far from simply being a solution to Spain’s budget woes, the fines are truly punitive in scope.

There is a report of an author who lost his 30,000 euro pension and received a 100,000 euro fine because he had earned 15,000 euros for his writing. Some authors have filed suit, while others have quietly paid the penalty. According to one report, novelist Eduardo Mendoza paid a fine equivalent to four years of his pension.

Starting in November, the new measures have been roundly denounced by writers associations and creator’s rights groups in Spain, including la Asociación Colegial de Escritores. Some have called the measures "absurd, unjust, and destructive of culture", which is absolutely true.

The groups are pressuring Spain’s labor ministry, the Ministeri d' Ocupació i Seguretat Social, to immediately cease its campaign, but the past two months of public criticism has not deterred the bureaucrats from damaging Spanish culture or from their efforts to turn Spain’s senior citizens into paupers.

As a result, some creators are forced to retire rather than risk the fines. This includes poet Antonio Gamoneda, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2006, who called the rules nonsense and said that "I have to stop writing, because with what I earn with my writing, I can not live."

images by shordzi, Kasia, Silvia Viñuales

Earlier this year Deloitte surveyed 1,600 Russians over the age of 16 and found a marked shift away from physical media consumption and to digital over the past three years.

The survey found that consumption of offline media, including books, tv shows, and listening to the radio fell by 17%, while ebook and online media consumption rose.

An equal percentage of the survey group (44%) read ebooks as read print books. This reflects a 9% decline in print book consumption and a 31% increase in ebook consumption over the past three years, and it is in part influenced by ebook users aging in to the survey group.

eBook users tended to be younger, with 88% of the respondents between 16- and 19-years-old having tried ebooks. This last detail os born out by a 2013 survey showed that 48% of Russian teens read ebooks.

TV and radio use also dropped in Russia since 2012 (5% and 7%, respectively), although the two were still the most used media formats (94% and 61%, respectively). The drop in tv consumption mirrored the increase ebook consumption, with respondents in the 16- to 24-year-old age group showing the steepest decline. The survey also showed that 100% of respondents used the internet, but given that this was an online survey that detail is redundant (and with internet penetration around 60% in Russia, it is also a sign of a probable bias in the survey group).

There’s no available data on when or how many ebooks are being read, but we do know most respondents still got their news via tv more often than the internet. They watched a news story on the tv an average of 4.7 times per week, compared to reading a news story online an average of 4.3 times per week or reading a print magazine or newspaper (3.5 times per week).

If this data is accurate then it means that Russians are adopting, or at least trying, ebooks at a rate higher than Italy, Germany, or even the US.

Alas, the high adoption does not necessarily equate to a large or active ebook market. There have been several past reports that ebook piracy is rampant in Russia. On the other hand, those same reports came from a source which also claimed that 70% of Russians had adopted ebooks, so I’m not sure the numbers are valid so much as they are a reflection of the perceptions of that market.

kommersant.ru via digital-books.ru

image by archer10

Johannes Gutenberg is widely credited with making books easier to produce and thus changing society by making ideas easier to share, but as you will learn from the following videos Gutenberg merely industrialized one part of the complex and intricate process of making a book.

Over the past few months the good folks over at How to Make Everything have posted a series of videos that show how you can use modern tech to make each of the historical parts of a book.

Starting with pounding papyrus into a sheet, the videos show us how to make paper, hemp, cotton, and wood pulp; how to make a pencil, brush, quill pen, and ink; how to tan and cut a hide for the cover, and finally how to bind the book.

The result looks like this:

You can watch a montage of the steps involved in the first video (found via Sploid), but you should also watch all the other videos. They’ll give you insight into the historical aspects of writing and book making.

For example, the selection of writing implements available to scribes drove the development of written language in ways which aren’t obvious until you see the implements being made and used. Also, the segments on papermaking helped me understand why we’ve standardized on wood pulp as the source for paper, and the videos have given me an appreciation for just how much time is saved when a modern book binder/printer uses prepared materials rather than making it all from scratch (industrialization is a wonderful thing).

Montage

Intro

Papermaking: Papyrus, Parchment, and Wood Pulp

Papermaking: Hemp and Cotton

Pencil and Brush

Quill Pen

Printing Press

Bookbinding & Conclusion

Amazon has gained another foothold in their bid to conquer the college retail market, and this time they’re setting up shop just down the road from a B&N College store.

On Tuesday the retailer announced a new partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. Later this year, Amazon will open a 3,600 square foot package pickup point, or unstore, on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The unstore will be located at 1920 Commons building, where it will share space with the dining hall and a Starbucks.

The facility will feature a staffed pickup and drop off location as well as "communal work spaces with interactive media pods" where students can study privately or collaborate, and it will be located about three blocks away from the B&N-operated college bookstore (shown at right).

“We’re thrilled to bring a new experience to Penn that makes it more convenient for students to get everything they need for university life,” said Ripley MacDonald, Director of Amazon Student Programs. “We look forward to bringing this experience to even more college communities soon.”

The unstore at the University of Pennsylvania is Amazon’s first location on an Ivy League campus, and it is at least the fifth such store to open in the past year. Since 2015, Amazon has opened on-campus staffed pickup locations (Amazon@Purdue, Amazon@UMass) and they’ve also opened a couple off-campus locations near the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Cincinnati (Amazon@IslaVista, Amazon@Cincinnati).

Amazon has also said in the press release that they have agreements to open two more locations in 2016 with the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley. (UC Davis, as you might recall, was Amazon’s first college retail partner.)

But never mind Amazon’s future plans; did you notice what today’s announcement implies about Amazon’s strategy?

Amazon has been pursuing the college retail market since at least 2013, and they’ve shifted their strategy twice now. Amazon’s first strategy was to launch an affiliate partnership with UC Davis, and that was followed by unstores which replaced a college’s bookstore with a staffed pickup locations (Amazon@Purdue, Amazon@UMass).

Now Amazon has moved past replacing bookstores and is instead directly competing with them. Both Amazon@IslaVista and Amazon@Cincinnati are located just off of campuses where Follett operates the college bookstore.

Correction: Follett operates the bookstore at Cinncinnati, but not Santa Barbara. That school has an independent bookstore (a Google search lead me in the wrong direction).

And now Amazon has an unstore in the works at the University of Pennsylvania which is only one block down and two blocks to the west of the college bookstore run by Barnes & Noble College.

Amazon is not the biggest player in the virtual college bookstore industry (that title would go to eCampus, with over 150 virtual bookstores) but Amazon is the boldest player. As the leading online retailer, Amazon is the main reason why so many schools are reporting a drop in bookstore revenues, and now Amazon is moving into direct competition with college bookstores.

This does not bode well for college bookstores like B&N College, many of which are struggling to cope with other pressures like high textbook prices and not enough rich students.

B&N spun off its college bookstore division last year into a separate company. Some have foreseen a rosy future for B&N College, but can this company survive fierce competition in a contracting market?

I don’t think so. Do you?

Apple has just announced all of the features it is adding to the next version of its mobile OS, and once again Apple is playing catch up,

In addition to a more Flipboard-esque "For You" section in the Apple News app, Apple is adding a new security option for the Apple Notes app, and a slew of classroom features.

But the headline would have to be the blue light filter. Apple is calling it "Night Shift", after Amazon’s Blue Shade and Google’s Night Light.

Edit: And there’s also an unannounced feature called iCloud for iBooks which apparently syncs your ebooks across devices (I’m looking for more info).

Like the feature that Amazon added to Fire tablets last month, Night Shade is a system-wide setting that should work in all apps (Apple is less than clear on this point).

Night Shift works by using your iOS device’s clock and location to determine when the sun sets in your location. It then automatically shifts the colors in your display to the red/yellow end of the spectrum, and in the morning, it returns the display to its regular settings.

As I have previously reported, there’s tons of research to show that exposure to bright light in the evening can make it harder to fall asleep. To be more exact, the wavelengths of blue light shining in your face affects your circadian rhythms, keeping you awake.

That’s why a lot of third party app developers have released blue light filter apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Last month Amazon followed suit, and now Apple is jumping on the bandwagon.

Here are the other new features (you can find more details on the update on the Apple website).

Notes

• Now you can secure the notes that contain your most personal data — such as financial details, medical info, or website logins — with a password or fingerprint. You can also sort notes by date created, date modified, or alphabetically.

News

• The articles in For You are now better tailored to your particular interests. And to help you discover new Favorites, For You suggests trending topics and Editors’ Picks. When a story contains video, you can play it right from your feed.

Health

• It’s simpler than ever to find third-party apps to track your health and wellness. Categories such as Weight, Workouts, and Sleep have a new slider menu that reveals great apps you can easily add to your Health dashboard.

CarPlay

• New and For You from Apple Music — with songs, artists, and albums handpicked by experts, plus selections based on your preferences— are right at hand on your screen. And the Nearby feature in Maps lets you find gas, parking, restaurants, coffee, and more with a tap.

Education

• Shared iPads: Students can log in to any iPad in any classroom and make it their own.
• New Classroom App: Teachers can guide students through a lesson, see their progress, and keep them on track.
• Apple School Manager: Now admins have one portal where they can do everything from create Apple IDs to purchase apps to prepare devices for MDM.
• Managed Apple IDs: A new kind of ID for education, Managed Apple IDs are created and assigned by the school.

To web publishers, knowing what people are reading is almost as important knowing the latest news because it helps you focus your energy on the stories that get the most attention.

And sadly Apple is falling down on that point. The WSJ reports that Apple’s wonderful new Apple News app isn’t living up to all its promises.

Since it launched last September, Apple Inc.’s News app has attracted more than 100 publishing partners world-wide hoping to capitalize on the growing consumption of news on mobile devices.

There is one major problem: Neither media companies nor Apple know how many people are reading.

The company mistakenly has been underestimating the number of readers using the News app since its launch, and passing that inaccurate information on to publishers.

When it comes to Apple News, analytics doesn’t just tell publishers what was being read; it also tells them how many adverts were displayed next to their articles.

Apple makes web publishers use its iAds platform of they want to show adverts next to their articles. This platform launched with the Apple News app. A limited number of web publishers have the option of selling ads in Apple News (the same is true for Facebook Instant Articles), and if publishers aren’t getting accurate reports of reading activity then it raises questions as to whether the ads are being tracked correctly.

Edit: And now there are reports that Apple is stepping back from its iAds unit.

And with a reported 40 million people having used the Apple News app since it launched last fall, that could add up to a pretty penny. However, Apple isn’t saying how many people use the app on a regular basis or and how much traffic publishers are getting, so we could be making a mountain out of a molehill.

Some web publishers are still excited about the possibilities of Apple news. but it’s worth remembering that Apple previously launched a news product before letting it wither. Apple Newsstand was supposed to boost publishers' subscription and revenue, but it ultimately proved to be the purgatory where news apps went, never to be opened again.

Apple’s response was to ignore that app for years before retiring it late in 2015.

Let’s hope they don’t take that passive approach to Apple News, or at least if they do then let’s hope publishers catch on sooner.

image by desbyrnephotos

Amazon has added many new features to its in-home digital concierge in the year plus since it launched, including smart home integration, Spotify, IFTTT, and support for playing Audible audiobooks.

Now Amazon has added the one feature I’ve been asking after since the Alexa launched last year.

AFTVnews reports that you can have your Echo read Kindle ebooks to you. The new feature integrates with you existing Kindle account and uses Amazon’s text-to-speech tech to read ebooks aloud with Alexa’s regular voice. It works with most prose books sold in the Kindle Store (but probably only in English).

To read an ebook, just tell Alexa "Read my book", followed by the title. You can pause and resume the recitation, skip ahead or jump back one paragraph at a time.

Curiously, you can’t skip to the next chapter of said Kindle ebook, which is strange given that Echo does have this option for Audible audiobooks. Perhaps it will be added in a later update.

For more details, check out the relevant help page on the Amazon website.

The Amazon Echo is currently out of stock on the Amazon website, where it is listed for $180.

Earlier this week two author groups sent an open letter to publishers, begging them to increase digital royalties from the standard 25% to 50% of net.

What we ask is simple: publishers need to revise many of their standard contract terms to make them more equitable. Authors should get at least 50% of ebook revenue, not a mere 25%. Authors should not have their hands tied with contracts which cannot be terminated when a book is no longer being exploited or be subject to non-compete and option clauses that make it even more difficult for them to write and publish new books. Indemnity clauses should spread risk fairly between the publisher and the author. Royalty statements should be transparent and comprehensive. And we ask publishers not to discriminate against authors who don?t have powerful agents. When negotiating with agents publishers often start from previously negotiated forms that remove, or at least soften the blow of, some of the more draconian provisions offered to unagented authors. Why not do the right thing by all authors and eliminate those provisions for everyone?

You can find the letters (as PDFs) here and here, as well as commentary over on The Passive Voice.

The Telegraph and The Guardian have covered the story, and the latter has been dissected over at The Passive Voice.  And a post by Robert J. Sawyer just crossed my desk today which discussed this issue.

As a general rule, I support the letters, although I do wince at the Society of Authors' Histrionics and at the misleading claims made about author incomes.

The SoA claimed that "without serious contract reform the
professional author will become an endangered species", which is sorta true in a "the sky is falling" kind of way. (Even though it makes me roll my eyes, I will admit that writers earning more would be a good thing.)

But the misleading claims that authors are earning less than before don’t get the same grudging agreement.

The claims are not supported by facts. Each author group is basing their claim on recently conducted surveys into author income, and I have a couple problems with the surveys and the conclusions.

There is of course the Author Earnings reports, which show that authors are earning more from the Amazon.com Kindle Store and the UK Kindle Store (source) than ever before. Authors are significantly boosting their income by cutting out publishers, thus casting doubt on the claims that authors are earning less.

But more importantly, a careful reading of the survey reports tells us that it would be more accurate to say that the reports show that the members of the two author groups are earning less (rather than writers in general).

One often overlooked detail is that the survey groups were drawn from the membership rolls of the two organization, and so the surveys say less about writer incomes in general than they do about the incomes of writers who belong to the two groups. (And there are other issues with TAG’s survey, too, including a tiny survey group.)

BTW, you can find the SoA’s survey here (PDF), in case you should want to confirm my statement. It too is based on a small survey group.

images by @sahxic, itsmeritesh

When Pottermore was launched in early 2012, it was hailed as the first of many publisher-owned ebookstores that would lead to the vanquishment of Amazon.

Pottermore was the sole source of Harry Potter ebooks and audiobooks, and many saw that as a club that could be used against Amazon. As I predicted, that proved to be far more hype than substance, but now it turns out that Pottermore was not nearly as strong as everyone assumed.

I’ve just discovered that Amazon is selling Harry Potter ebooks in the Kindle Store. The ebooks were quietly listed in early December 2015, and have been collecting reviews since at least the 15th.

You can also find the ebooks in the Nook Store, as well as Kobo, where they are selling for $9 each.

Yes, Pottermore has completely given up on retail control of its ebooks, and I can tell you why.

The Bookseller published an article yesterday which looks at Pottermore’s company filings and offers a revealing explanation for Pottermore’s recent decisions to distribute enhanced ebooks to iBooks and to let Audible, B&N, and other retailers sell its audiobooks.

The answer, my dears, is money.

When Pottermore launched, one of its earliest partners was Sony. The electronics giant was in it for the branding, and they released Harry Potter games, a Harry Potter themed section of Playstation Home, and included a free Harry Potter ebook with the Sony Reader.

Sony was paying nicely for the privilege, but eventually that deal ran out:

The site, which gives Harry Potter fans an enhanced experience of J K Rowling’s wizarding world, along with new short stories, insights and games, relaunched in September with a new mobile-first search-friendly format. Before this, in the year ending 31st March 2015, sales dropped by £24.8m – or 352% – to £7m (from £31.8m a year earlier), while profit at Pottermore also decreased significantly, from £14.9m in 2014 to a loss of £6m in 2015.

So apparently over 70% of Pottermore’s revenue came from this one deal with Sony, and not from sales or other channels.

Ouch.

Now I think we understand Pottermore’s decision to give up control of its content. It is putting its ebooks in other ebookstores because it is going to where the customers are, rather than making the customers come to it.

As DBW has previously reported, the vast majority of readers buy ebooks from a single retailer, so if Pottermore wants their money then Pottermore will have to go to them.

That is a detail everyone should bear in mind as they talk about the latest Amazon killer du jour, crowd-sourced retailing.

If even Pottermore, with its highly desirable Harry Potter ebooks, can’t draw customers away from Amazon then what chance does everone else have?