Nate Hoffelder

Barnes & Noble managed to find just the laziest but also the most tactless way to "celebrate" Black History Month. They have partnered with Penguin Random House in "a new initiative to champion diversity in literature", but rather than actually publishing the works of the works of diverse authors, B&N and PRH thought it would be a good idea to slap brown faces on novels by white authors.

They have selected twelve "classic" public domain works and gave each one "five culturally diverse custom covers designed to ensure the recognition, representation, and inclusion of various multi-ethnic backgrounds reflected across the country".

Update: B&N canceled the project Wednesday morning.

Edit: I am being faulted on Twitter for blaming B&N when this project was actually the brainchild of a famous ad agency. Okay, fine, it was B&N’s contractor, and B&N’s involvement was only the six or seven meetings at B&N corporate where this project was discussed and approved. (That’s not a huge difference in my mind.)

The books in question are:

• Alice in Wonderland
• Romeo and Juliet
• Three Musketeers
• Moby Dick
• The Secret Garden
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Emma
• The Wizard of Oz
• Peter Pan 
• Treasure Island
• Frankenstein

The astute reader will note that eight of the books are by British authors, and two are by Americans. And while the list includes two novels by a black author, I am sure this was an accident (they probably didn’t realize Dumas was a black Frenchman). You will also note that this list includes a work by Shakespeare, just not the one starring a black character.

There are also several titles on this list with problematic content, including Peter Pan and The Secret Garden, where the main character is explicitly racist. (This last issue could be dealt with  by bowdlerizing the book, but even so why would you bother to do so when you could just choose a work by a black author?) Edit: There’s also the hints of antisemitism in Jekyll & Hyde.

And then there are the covers. I don’t know which is worse, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cover where Hyde is depicted as Asian wearing a turban, or the cover of Frankenstein, where Frankenstein’s creation is portrayed as black (in the book, this creature is pursued by pitchfork-wielding and torch-bearing villagers).

I will let you decide which is worse, but I plan to hold back. There are sixty covers, so I am expecting that the worst is yet to come.

Barnes & Noble will be unveiling all 60 covers at an event Wednesday night in NYC (RSVP here). We are also supposed to be able to download the covers from B&N’s website, and I would go look for them, but I just can’t get past the banner on B&N’s home page touting B&N’s book club pick for February.

It is the racist, plagiarized Macmillan novel American Dirt.

Folks, what Barnes & Noble did here was no more and no less than literary blackface.  They republished  questionable works by white authors when it would have been so easy to find actually diverse authors to promote.

It took me less than 5 minutes of searching Wikipedia to find the lists of American authors (Mexican, African-American, Egyptian, etc), and about 5 seconds to figure out how to identify the ones with works in the public domain.

Barnes and Noble could not be bothered to do even that tiniest of work. Instead, they blindly grabbed whatever "classic" was handy, and slapped new covers on them without putting even the slightest thought into the message they were sending.

Update: According to the promotional materials, AI was used to select the titles.

We used artificial intelligence to analyze the text of 100 of the most famous titles, searching the text to see if it omitted ethnicity of primary characters. Using speech and linguistic patterns,or  natural language processors (NLP) accounted for the fact that when authors described a character, they rarely outright state their race, but often use more poetic and descriptive language.

I was originally going to simply mention this in an update, but I decided to pull it out and put it at the end after I realized what this said about the thinking behind this project. They blindly put their faith in tech to save them when they should have been aware of the principle of "garbage in, garbage out". AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and since this one wasn’t fed diverse books, there was no way that it could have picked up on problems like the racism in The Secret Garden, or the symbolism of the Frankenstein or Jekyll & Hyde covers.

And the worst part is that there were any number of people who could have pointed out the problems, had someone thought to ask.

* * *

B&N’s statement:

We acknowledge the voices who have expressed concerns about the Diverse Editions project at our Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue store and have decided to suspend the initiative.  Diverse Editions presented new covers of classic books through a series of limited-edition jackets, designed by artists hailing from different ethnicities and backgrounds.  The covers are not a substitute for black voices or writers of color, whose work and voices deserve to be heard.  The booksellers who championed this initiative did so convinced it would help drive engagement with these classic titles.  It was a project inspired by our work with schools and was created in part to raise awareness and discussion during Black History Month, in which Barnes & Noble stores nationally will continue to highlight a wide selection of books to celebrate black history and great literature from writers of color.

In 2019, authors and indie publishers earned more than $300 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select Global Fund, Amazon announced last week. In total, Amazon has paid out more than $1.1 billion since the launch of Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, in late 2012. (KOLL was the precursor and beta test for Kindle Unlimited, which launched in July 2014.)

Millions of independent authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since the earliest iteration of the service launched in 2007 (it wasn’t called KDP until a couple years later, and in fact most indie ebooks in the Kindle Store on launch day were drawn from Mobipocket’s catalog).

Additionally, thousands of independent authors earned more than $50,000 in royalties last year, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties in 2019 through KDP.

Amazon did not share any other book sales states or publishing figures last week, when it reported total revenue of $280.5 billion for the 2019 fiscal year. This represented an increase of 20% over 2018. Net income also increased 15%, to $11.6 billion.

I wonder how much was paid through Audible? Amazon Publishing?

image by protohiro via Flickr

Who wants to help me chase down a rumor and see if there’s nay truth to it?

For the last 8 months or so everyone in publishing (except for me) has been saying that Amazon was going around and telling publishers that library loans are hurting their sales. I didn’t beleive that was true, and in fact I am still not convinced, but to be perfectly honest I do not have evidence one way or the other.

I had planned to wait and let the evidence present itself, but what with Jon Sargent telling librarians at ALA Midwinter last Saturday that Amazon told him library ebooks were hurting retail ebook sales, I can’t let this wait any more.

I have to find out if this is true, and for that I need your help.

I have two questions for you. I would really like to have you tell me the answers, but I can appreciate that you might be under an NDA and thus unable to say anything. So at the very least I would like you to ask these questions of yourself and of your colleagues.

1. Did Amazon tell you directly that library ebook loans hurts sales? (Did they show you data? What did they say, exactly?)
2. Do you know someone who says Amazon gave them this info directly?

Here’s why these questions matter:

• If you can answer yes to the first question, then you are a primary source. You know for a fact this happened, and everyone else who says it happened is taking your word for it.
• If you can answer yes to the second question but not the first, you are a secondary source.
• And if you cannot answer yes to either question, you are just repeating gossip.

The thing is, folks, all I have to go on right now is gossip. I don’t have any primary or secondary sources, so I don’t have any direct confirmation that this is going on. I want to change that, hence this post.

So why does this matter?

Just because everyone says something is true doesn’t mean it is. For example, at one point everyone was convinced that Amazon was killing indie bookstores, and that turned out to be not true. And for a while there the major publishers were saying that screen fatigue was the reason their ebook sales were down, but they stopped after I pointed out how it wasn’t affecting any other industry.

Will this Amazon rumor have the same fate as those other myths, or will it be proven true?

If you can answer yes to either of the questions, I want to hear from you. I don’t need a quote, and I do not need you to go on the record. I just want to know the answer.

So tell me, what have you heard?

image by alexanderdrachmann via Flickr

I am sure you know that Amazon tracks what you do on the Kindle and in the Kindle app – after all, Amazon can’t store your notes and highlights without first recording them.

But what you might not know is that Amazon logs your every keypress, and they keep that log literally forever (and, unless you live someplace with privacy laws to protect you, there’s no way to delete the log).

I learned that from Adrianne Jeffries, who tweeted a screenshot yesterday showing that Amazon still had Kindle reading data on her from 2018. Amazon is literally logging every time she turns the page:

https://twitter.com/adrjeffries/status/1222277544730337280

What’s not shown in the screenshot is that Amazon also tracks the titles of the books you’re reading.

While Amazon won’t delete this data in the absence of a privacy regulation like the GDPR, you can request the data they have logged about you by visiting the Request My Data page on Amazon.com.

I have asked for the Kindle logs from my account, as well as any logs from my Kindle Fire and Audible. Amazon said it could take up to a month for the request to be processed, which is when I will get to see .

In the meantime, I will be looking at refreshing my post on Amazon security settings you can change for more privacy. What I would like to do is add sections on the additional control you get under the GDPR. I can’t see any of that myself, so if you are familiar with these privacy controls I would like to hear from you.

image by simonov via Flickr

Every author is asked by new writers for advice. There is, however, no all-encompassing, single answer that also happens to be correct. Quite a lot of commonly offered suggestions (“write every day”) don’t work for everyone and must be approached with caution.

A few years ago, I set out to create a list that will benefit all new writers. I put ten commandments through the wringer of my peers, who suggested modifications and noted that this list applies not just to new writers but to writers at every stage of their career. Indeed, I’ve needed reminding of more than one myself.

Here, then, are the 10½ commandments of writing – with an extra one for free.

1. Read widely

To succeed as a writer, you must occasionally read. Yet there are wannabe-novelists who haven’t picked up a book in years. There are also, more tragically, writers too busy to engage with the end-product of our craft. If the only thing you’re reading is yourself you are bound to miss out on valuable lessons.

The same applies to reading only within a favourite genre. A varied diet will strengthen your literary muscles.

2. Write

No need to thrash out 1,000 words a day or pen a perfect poem before breakfast, but you do have to write. The fundamental qualification for being a writer is putting words on the page.

If you aren’t doing that now, it’s possible you never will.

3. Follow your heart

When you really want to write literary fiction, but the market wants paranormal romance, write literary fiction. Chasing paranormal romance will be futile. Writing well is hard enough without cynicism getting in the way.

Passion doesn’t always pay, but it increases the odds of your work finding a home.

4. Be strategic

But the choice is never between just literary fiction and paranormal romance. You might have poetry and narrative non-fiction passion projects as well, and it’s possible narrative non-fiction will appeal to the widest audience. If a wider audience is what you want, narrative non-fiction is the one to choose.

If, however, you don’t give two hoots about your audience, write what you like.

There are lots of different kinds of writers and lots of different paths to becoming the writer you want to be.

5. Be brave

Writing is hard, intellectually and physically. It also takes emotional work, dealing with exposure, rejection, fear and impostor syndrome. It’s better you know this upfront, in order to fortify yourself.

These crises, however, are surmountable. We know this because there are writers out there, leading somewhat normal lives, even healthy and happy ones. You can too, if you don’t give up.

The ones who persist are the ones who prevail.

6. Be visible

Many writers would prefer they remain hidden in a dark cave for all eternity. But stories demand to be communicated, which means leaving that cave. Whether it’s you or your written word, or both, broaching the bubble of self-isolation is important.

This doesn’t mean assaulting every social platform and attending every festival and convention. Find the kind of engagement that suits you and embrace it, and don’t overdo it. Remember: you still have to write.

7. Be professional

Don’t lie. Don’t belittle your peers and don’t steal from them. Keep your promises. Communicate. Try to behave like someone people will want to work with – because we all have to do that, at some point.

8. Listen

Heed what people you’re working with are saying, because you never know what gems of knowledge you might glean – about craft, about the market, about something you’re working on – among the knowledge you (think you) already possess.

9. Don’t settle

Every story requires different skills. You’ll never, therefore, stop learning how to write. The day you think you’ve worked it out is the day the ground beneath you begins to erode, dropping you headlong into a metaphorical sinkhole – and nobody wants that. Least of all your readers.

Readers can tell when you’re getting lazy, just like they can tell when you’re faking. You’re one of them. Deep down, you’ll be the first to know.

10. Work hard

Put in the hours and you’re likely to get some return on your investment. How many hours, though?

There’s a wonderful saying: “Even a thief takes ten years to learn her trade.” Writing is no different to any other career. Hope for overnight success; plan for being like everyone else.

The bonus commandments

When I put this list to my friends, several raised the importance of finding your people. Although I agree this is an important principle, I would argue it is implicit in commandments 6-8: these have no meaning without engaging. I decided to encapsulate this as 10.5. Embrace community

After I’d been teaching and giving talks on this topic for several years, someone suggested another commandment that lies beneath the rest. It is so fundamental none will work unless you have this in spades. It is 0. Really want it, which sounds so obvious that it barely needs stating – except it does.

One day, I may no longer want to write. If that happens, I will take every mention of writing from this list and substitute the name of a new vocation – because this list applies to everything.

reposted under a CC license from The Conversation

Amazon announced on Wednesday that the Kindle Unlimited funding pool increased by one hundred thousand dollars in December 2019, to $26.3 million, from $261. million in November 2019.

At the same time the per-page rate royalty fell to from $0.004664, from $0.004925 in November. That is less than Amazon was paying this fall, but more than the rate over the summer.

• December 2019: $0.004664
• November 2019: $0.004925
• October 2019: $0.0046763
• September 2019: $0.0046799
• August 2019:  $0.004387
• July 2019 –  $0.004394
• June 2019 – $0.004642
• May 2019 – $0.0046598
• April 2019 – $0.0046602
• March 2019 – $0.0045124
• February 2019 – $0.0047801
• January 2019 – $0.0044227
• December 2018 – $0.0048778
• November 2018 – $0.0052056
• October 2018 – $0.0048414
• September 2008 – $0.004885
• August 2018 – $0.0044914
• July 2018 – $0.0044936

P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million
• March 2017: $17.7 million
• April 2017: $17.8 million
• May 2017 :$17.9 million
• June 2017: $18 million
• July 2017: $19 million
• August 2017: $19.4 million
• September 2017: $19.5 million
• October 2017: $19.7 million
• November 2017: $19.8 million
• December 2017: $19.9 million
• January 2018: $20.9 million
• February 2018: $20 million
• March 2018: $21 million
• April 2018: $21.2 million
• May 2018: $22.5 million
• June 2018: $22.6 million
• July 2018: $23.1 million
• August 2018: $23.3 million
• September 2018: $23.4 million
• October 2018: $23.5 million
• November 2018: $23.6 million
• December 2018: $23.7 million
• January 2019: $24.7 million
• February 2019: $23.5 million
• March 2019: $24 million
• April 2019: $24.1 million
• May 2019: $24.6 million
• June 2019: $24.9 million
• July 2019: $25.6 million
• August 2019: $25.8 million
• September 2019: $25.9 million
• October 2019: $26 million
• November 2019: $26.1 million
• December 2019: $26.2 million

Remember that lawsuit from last August over Audible’s new captioning feature, the feature that everyone is publishing was soooo absolutely certain was infringing on copyright?

Well, the publishers didn’t win the injunction they wanted, or the summary judgement that many assumed would occur, but it has come to a close – in a settlement.

PW has published a letter (PDF) that Amazon’s law firm sent to the judge overseeing the case.  The letter does not reveal any juicy details, but it does say that the parties had reached a settlement. The letter asked the judge to give the parties until 21 January to submit settlement documents to the court for its consideration and approval.

This was a curious case. I was just about the only one following the case that wasn’t convinced it was a slamdunk for the seven publisher plaintiffs. Instead, I thought this case had an excellent chance of following in the footsteps of Google Books and expanding fair use. Like Google Books, Audible Captions was a transformative use that did not replace any existing format, so it seemed to me that Audible could win this case on its merits.

As the case dragged on for months with no ruling or injunction, it seemed I was right. And they way the judge pressured both sites to work out a compromise suggested that this was not nearly as clear cut as some would think.

We will have to wait for the settlement to be announced before we know more, obviously.

Audible did not answer my emails asking for details on the details of the settlement or how it would affect Audible Captions, and PW reports that the AAP had no comment at this time.

There’s an old joke in tech circles that the only reason that AOL was still profitable at the end was that the company was still receiving auto-payments from bank accounts belong to the deceased and the mentally infirm.

I can’t say if there’s any truth to that joke, but I can say that I know at least one company that has adopted the practice as one of their core business practices.

That company is Scribd.

As you may know, Scribd charges $8.99 per month for a limited Netflix-style ebook subscription service. It’s not a bad deal so long as you don’t mind that they will cut you off if you read too much.

What’s less well-known is that Scribd has built its revenue stream on tricking former subscribers into continuing to pay for a subscription that they thought they had canceled.  Scribd does this via a cancellation process that uses what is known in the design industry as "dark patterns", which is really just a term for designing an interface for tricking customers into doing things they did not intend. (Bait-and-switch marketing is another example.)

One of Scribd’s victims contacted me this morning to complain about Scribd’s trickery.

I cancelled I think back in September and just realized I have been being charged for the past 4 months. I know for a fact it said my account was cancelled when I did it originally, but when I logged in today of course it shows everything as active.

I assume maybe there was a glitch because maybe I cancelled in the app itself on my ipad and not on their website. I re-cancelled today and it is crazy how they hide that confirm cancellation link way down the bottom of the page, even though it says at the top you have cancelled. I also noticed it’s all over their terms of service that they won’t give refunds for anything passed 30 days. This is definitely by design.

The thing is, folks, this didn’t just happen to one person. It is exactly the same experience I had four years ago, and this experience is shared by at least a dozen people who commented on that post from 2015.

When I first wrote about this  practice, I blamed myself for falling for it, but now that I see that Scribd has been doing the exact same thing for over four years now, and now that I have reports from Scribd’s other victims, I have to agree that this is intentional.

Scribd has built its business on stealing from former customers. This is one of their core practices, and it casts a dark cloud over everything the company has claimed to accomplish. While Scribd claims to have a million subscribers, we don’t actually know what percentage are voluntarily giving Scribd their money, and what percentage are being robbed month after month.

What’s the over-under, do you think?

20%?

40%?

A reader has tipped me to a Chrome extension which lets users browse Amazon.com and see if a book or ebook is available at their local library. It’s called Library Extension, and you can find it in the Chrome Web Store and in the Firefox Add-Ons.

Library Extension has been around since at least January 2013, but it just got discovered again in 2020. I think it’s a great way to reuse one of the better designed bookstore sites, but I do wish it weren’t still so limited.

It works with OverDrive, CloudLibrary, Axis360, and Hoopla. The developer also told me that support for RBDigital and BorrowBox should be added by the end of January 2020.

Once installed (and configured), simply browse book or ebook listings on Amazon.com, and Library Extension will insert an extra widget above the buy button with info on whether your library has the title in its catalog. For some libraries, you will also see results from the library’s audiobook, movie, music, and print book catalogs.

LibEx works with a lot of libraries in the US, Canada, and Australia, but not all. It can check a library’s ebook catalog with OverDrive and Hoopla, and in many cases it can also check a library’s print catalog (which is a lot harder than it sounds).

If it finds a match it will offer the option of checking out the ebook or placing a hold

I just tested it with a Harry Potter book, and LibEx found the audiobooks, ebook, and print books offered by my local library. (Only the print books were available, of course).

Do you use this plugin?

Thanks, Tom!

Fujitsu has joined the ranks of companies that have licensed hardware from the Taiwan-based OEM, Netronix.

Late last year Fujitsu  launched a pair of writing slates in Japan called the Quaderno A5 and A4. These devices sport 10.3″ and 13.3″ screens, run Android, and are only available in Japan.

Aside from the software, they are virtually identical to the Sony Digital paper.

The Quaderno A4 features a 10.3″ E-ink Carta screen with a resolution of 1872 x 1404 (223 PPI), while the Quaderno A5 has a 13.3″ screen with a resolution of 2200 x 1650 (207 PPI).  Neither device has a frontlight, but they do have have both a stylus and a capacitive touchscreen.

Both devices are powered by a Marvell IAP140 quad-core chip with 1GB RAM and 16GB internal storage. They also have Wifi and Bluetooth. Battery life is promised at 3 weeks, so long as you are only "browsing a PDF document for 60 minutes / 30 pages a day with the Wife and Bluetooth turned off, and writing with a pen for a total of 1 minute during browsing".

It is unclear how long the stylus lasts between charges, but according to one retailer it does have its own battery which cannot be charged from the device.

Like Sony’s devices, the Quaderno run Android and only support PDFs. The software is slightly different, though, and includes better integration for transferring files off of PCs and for sending docs to be printed on Fujitsu printers.

And yes, these devices do bear a striking resemblance to the Sony Digital Paper, which is why I beleive that they were also sourced from Netronix. That OEM filed the FCC paperwork for the Sony CP1, and almost certainly built all 4 models.

Netronix also makes ereaders for Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and other companies.

Have you read the ten-year retrospective on the ebook revolution that Vox published a few weeks back? Go read it, and then come back here so I can point out what they missed.

The thing about that piece is that it said that the ebook revolution didn’t happen, which both is and isn’t true.

Vox reached this conclusion based on a glaring but quite common error: They looked at industry-wide stats, and drew conclusions based on the assumption that any change would affect all parts of the book publishing industry equally.  This was a mistake first because the industry is not a homogeneous whole, and also because focusing on sales stats keeps you from seeing the more radical changes.

The thing is, ebooks did revolutionize parts of the industry: Non-fiction in particular has been changed radically, but you might not be able to see that from sales stats.

For example, textbook sales are not going digital so much as they are being nibbled away by OER (open educational resources). This is the name for curricula that can be downloaded for free, edited, remixed, and shared.

OER has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize education, so much so that textbook publishers are pursuing ways to force students and schools to license their textbooks (another change you will not see reflected in simple sales stats).

And that’s not the only category of non-fiction that has changed radically over the past ten years.

One of the major oversights of the Vox piece was that they missed how the internet is killing non-fiction. People aren’t buying books to learn new things any more; instead they get their info from Youtube, on how-to sites, and direct from experts in online forums. (One common refrain I hear is that there is no Kindle for non-fiction, but there is: it’s your web browser. )

And consumers are also getting content via subscription access rather than buying one ebook at a time. Remember what O’Reilly said when they shut down their ebookstore in 2017?

They stopped selling ebooks because they earned more by making the ebooks available through Safari, the subscription service that O’Reilly launched in partnership with Pearson in 2000. (O’Reilly bought out Pearson’s stake in 2014.)

Speaking of subscription, let’s not forget Kindle Unlimited, which pays out over $240 million a year. We do not know how much revenue it is generating for Amazon, but its royalty payments make it one of the top five ebookstores all by itself.

That money is mostly going to indie authors, who have stepped into the void left by the Big Five when those publishers decided to kill their ebook sales with agency pricing.

Indie authors dominate a number of genres, including SF, thriller, romance, and fantasy. You won’t be able to see it from the industry-wide revenue stats, but these four genres went primarily digital as far back as 2015. While I do not have current stats, there is no reason to expect that a reversal of the trends that lead to a digital majority in those genres.

And that, folks, is where the revolution happened.

P.S. When I started working on this post, I was reminded of something that William Gibson said back in the 1990s

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed".

That is certainly an accurate description of the impact of ebooks.

The legacy book publishing industry is fond of telling itself comforting myths.

For example, one myth that just crossed my desk was the idea that younger readers preferred print books over ebooks. This is comforting to the legacy industry because it reassures them that their bad business decisions (high ebook prices, to be exact) will not continue to haunt them.

Alas, like many myths, there is little to back it up.

I was reading that Vox retrospective on the ebook revolution (the one that Teleread commented on, and Good e-Reader plagiarized) when I came to this quote from Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly.

And in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. “They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. “They don’t have to go to the bookstore. They can make the font bigger. It’s convenient.”

Yeah, that claim is not true at all.

Update: Author Tom Wood sent me a couple screenshots, and I now understand why people think there’s no reason to market ebooks to Gen Y. This conclusion is based on data from a Library Journal survey. When looked at it in isolation, it appears to shows a preference for print. The problem with that conclusion is that survey data on the millennial-aged cohort show a preference for print that is almost as high.

Younger age cohorts are not only more likely to have read an ebook, they are also buying more ebooks – and I have the data to back that up.

For starters, the most recent reading survey from Pew Research Center showed that the 18-29 age cohort, which includes the tail end of the millennial generation, was the most likely to have read an ebook in the past 12 months.

And not only are youngins more likely to have read an ebook, they are also buying more ebooks.

eBooks.com has revealed that their best customers are still in college. and that "62% of ebook purchases are made by people aged between 18 and 45".

eBooks.com was cautiously optimistic about market growth. They spoke in terms of generations, but when I look at this data I see a market that is going to be growing for the next decade.

As Gen Z gets older, the younger age bracket will be replaced with more digital-first buyers. Each year will bring us more ebook buyers, and that means more sales. Most of those sales will be made at Amazon and go to indie authors, so the legacy industry will continue to pretend they’re not happening (I for one am looking forward to the next myth), but they are still going to happen.

Are you ready for the coming ebook boom?

As I am sure you know, Amazon requires competitive prices for ebooks sold through its site. The ToS for KDP specify that authors can’t price their ebooks at lower prices on other sites, and if Amazon finds a lower price, it reserves the right to price match.

This policy has caused all sorts of problems when Amazon has mistakenly identified a lower-priced ebook, and it causes even bigger headaches when Amazon applies to print books.

Author Rosanne Bowman forwarded an email she got from Amazon yesterday. It seems Amazon is upset that Walmart is taking a loss on a couple of Bowman’s books, so Amazon has decided to take it out on Bowman.

Amazon is committed to providing customers with a great shopping experience. We measure this in a number of ways, including high-quality content, accurate listing information, and competitive prices. We reserve the right not to offer books that don’t meet these customer expectations.

We have recently observed that the print list price you provided Amazon for the book(s) identified below is not competitive with the list price(s) of other print edition(s) of the book(s) on another sales channel:

Hook’s Daughter: The Untold Tale of a Pirate Princess (The Pirate Princess Chronicles) (ASIN: 578412454) is listed on Amazon.com at $ 9.99 and at $ 4.92 on https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hook-s-Daughter-The-Untold-Tale-of-a-Pirate-Princess/951175999

In order to maintain a great customer experience for Amazon shoppers, we ask that you please reduce the KDP list price for the above titles and review your KDP catalog within the next 5 business days to ensure your book(s) are competitively priced.  As always, we reserve the right to stop selling titles that are uncompetitive with offerings at other stores, and we may remove the book(s) from sale on Amazon if we cannot provide a competitive customer experience.

BTW, Amazon may not have noticed yet but Walmart also marked down another of Bowman’s books.

Walmart gets the books through Ingram, and therein lies the problem. While Bowman can set the list price at Ingram, she can’t control the price set by Walmart or any other retailer any more than she can control the price through the resale market.

When Bowman pointed this out to Amazon, she was told that she should tell Walmart to change the price.

To adjust your book’s digital list price on Walmart we suggest you contact them directly.

Yes, Bowman should contact as $500 billion per year corporation and demand that it raise its price. One could sooner stop the moon, but don’t tell Amazon that because they might add that to their list of demands.

I do not have a solution, so I am sharing this in the hopes that Amazon can be shamed into being reasonable.

P.S. And to answer your next question, no, lowering the print price is not a reasonable suggestion. Amazon’s solution requires Bowman to take a hit on the sale of a book just because Walmart decided to. That is unreasonable, and the same is true ion general for Amazon’s price-matching policy for both ebooks and print books. Why should an author or publisher take a hit to the pocketbook just because one of Amazon’s competitors decides to run a sale?

I do not know why they chose to announce this on Christmas eve, but yesterday Rakuten announced that it was selling Overdrive to KKR.

KKR, a leading global investment firm, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire OverDrive, Inc. ("OverDrive" or the "Company"), the leading digital reading platform for libraries and schools, from Rakuten USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rakuten, Inc. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

"At a time of accelerating digital adoption throughout libraries and schools, OverDrive offers its growing user base a best-in-class technology platform and reading experience – something we’re excited to be a part of"

Serving a growing network of 43,000 libraries and schools in more than 75 countries, OverDrive delivers the industry’s largest catalog of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and other digital media to millions of readers around the world. With its proprietary platform, the Company securely allows these institutions to acquire and manage premium and differentiated digital content from a strong publisher network OverDrive has built over more than 25 years.

Rakuten acquired Overdrive in March 2015, paying a reported $410 million for the company. The sale price has not been disclosed, although Marketwatch did report that Rakuten said it would recognize about $365.6 million in profit from the sale when it is finalized next quarter.

FYI: KKR also owns  RB Digital, aka Recorded Books, the audiobook and ebook distributor.

It is difficult to say what this means, given that we know neither the motivation nor the price. But I for one plan to keep an eye on goings on at Kobo, just in case it is the next to go.

image by StarsApart via Flickr