Nate Hoffelder

With Oyster walking away and Scribd scaling back, it would be easy to assume that the future of streaming ebook services is Kindle Unlimited, but Bonnier would disagree.

This publishing conglomerate has just started developing a subscription ebook and audiobook service in its native Sweden.

Bookbeat is not yet open to the public and is in fact still recruiting staff, so there’s not much to say at this time, but I can report that the website is describing it as a flat rate service like Scribd or KU which will let users read as much as they want. The site is promising audiobooks and ebooks, including both backlist and the latest titles.

The service is still only taking emails from interested readers, but it is promising that subscribers will be offered personal and personalized recommendations for what they should listen to or read next.

And here’s how the service is being pitched to potential employees:

Book Beat is a digital subscription service for audio and ebooks and a new and important strategic investment in Bonnier. The goal is to create and successfully operate the future digital consumer service for books, both nationally and internationally.

Judging by the number of job listings (which just started appearing last week) and the fact the site only went live this morning, Bookbeat is still in the early stages of development. We don’t know when it will launch, but I have been told that Bookbeat is planning a soft launch by the end of the year, and then going broader in the start of 2016.

When it does go live, Bookbeat will be competing with Bookmate (out of Russia), Mofibo (out of Denmark), and Fabula (out of Latvia). Two of the three already offer service in Sweden. That would give them the advantage – if not for the fact that Bonnier is backing Bookbeat as a "strategic investment".

This is one of the major publishers in Sweden, and it will be making its titles available to Bookbeat. That will give the service an advantage.

This is a bold wager on the part of Bonnier.

Given the terms promised to subscribers, Bookbeat is going to have to pay publishers based on shares of a pool of money for each book loaned to a subscriber, rather than pay publishers based on the retail price.

Many publishers have balked at that idea (see Steven Zacharius in yesterday’s post, to name one example) and yet Bonnier is forging ahead. And that makes sense; there’s simply no other viable option for offering an unlimited service at a flat costs.

IDBoox

image by ActuaLitté

With Kindle Unlimited funding continuing to grow month after month and Amazon maintaining its dominance of the ebook market, authors are faced with a quandary:

Do they give up in the rest of the market and go exclusive with Amazon, or do they go wide and sell their ebooks in as many bookstores as possible?

Lindsay Buroker published a post today that asks this very question:

When I uploaded my first book, The Emperor’s Edge, in December of 2010, it was a foregone conclusion that I would put it out there everywhere I could, in the hope that new readers would stumble across it and give it a try. Then, a couple of years later, Amazon introduced KDP Select, a program for self-publishers that requires exclusivity.

Right off the bat, Amazon introduced a couple of promotional tactics that are still available to those who are enrolled. Eventually, Kindle Unlimited and the ability to be paid for borrows also came along.

…

Obviously, if you’re exclusive with Amazon, you can’t receive ebook income from the other stores. Let me emphasize that we’re only talking about ebook income, as you can still have audiobooks in iTunes and paperbacks in Barnes & Noble and elsewhere. But, as you probably already know, ebook income is huge for self-published authors. Even though I’m working on getting more audiobooks out there, and I’ve done paperbacks for most of my novels, ebooks easily account for 95% of my income.

Are you wide or in Select?

Before I go further, I should disclose that I am not in KDP Select with any of the books under my name, but that my pen name is currently “all in” with KDP Select. I started the pen name books there, to take advantage of the sales ranking/visibility boost from Kindle Unlimited, and I returned them to KDP Select this August, after not gaining much headway in the other stores and after Amazon switched to Kindle Unlimited 2.0, a system that rewards novelists by paying based on total pages read.

I won’t take a position either way on this topic (I stopped railing against Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity requirement for the same reason I stopped yelling about authors signing their rights away to publishers), but I do have something to add.

Indie authors aren’t the only ones doing the maths and trying to decide whether going all-in on Kindle Unlimited is worth it. Publishers are also eyeing Amazon and asking whether they would earn more if they stopped selling elsewhere.

And some have found that the answer is yes.

And just to be clear, I’m not talking about publishers which are in Kindle Unlimited at Amazon’s whim and are being paid wholesale each time one of their books is loaned; there are also publishers who have decided to take Amazon up on the offer of being paid for each page read by a Kindle Unlimited subscriber (and all of the restrictions that entails).

There’s always been two classes of publishers in Kindle Unlimited (and before that, Kindle Owner’s Lending Library). Some were in Kindle Unlimited at the discretion of Amazon, while others joined the service under the same terms offered to indie authors.

Speaking of which, a story’s been going around these past few weeks that Amazon has been pulling traditionally publishing ebooks from Kindle Unlimited.  All the versions of the story I’ve encountered led back to a comment Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius left on Mike Shatzkin’s blog.

I reached out to Zacharius by email, and he confirmed the comment. He said that Kensington titles had been removed from Kindle Unlimited by Amazon, and that he "can’t discuss terms but anything other than a full royalty for the authors was unacceptable for me and would also create an accounting nightmare".

I also have independent confirmation that Amazon is removing trad pub ebooks from Kindle Unlimited. For example, these titles from Skyhorse were some of the trad pub titles removed this year:

• A Hunter’s Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds, & Guns
• The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians
• Horses Never Lie: The Heart of Passive Leadership
• Ibn Saud: The Desert Warrior Who Created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

According to Skyhorse, Amazon both added and removed the ebooks at its discretion. “Amazon decides what to include in Kindle Unlimited. They pay us as the publisher per our agreement with them whether or not they sell the ebook or give it away," Bill Wolfsthal, the director of sales at Skyhorse, told me. "It’s their choice on what to charge their customers."

Amazon was paying Skyhorse under terms similar to the ones that Scholastic was being paid when Kindle Unlimited launched. The publishers get a full royalty each time one of their ebooks was read in Kindle Unlimited. The same goes for all the other ebooks Amazon has decided to add to Kindle Unlimited.

Speaking of adding trad pub titles, in the past 6 months Amazon has also added titles from traditional publishers to Kindle Unlimited. For example, I’ve got a long list of some five or six dozen titles from F+W Media which Amazon added to Kindle Unlimited some time this year.

I won’t list all the ebooks here, but I have checked and I can still find the ebooks in other stores. (I’ll explain how I know these ebooks were added to KU in a postscript.) So Amazon is removing titles, and they’re adding titles, but that’s not the most interesting story here.

While I was confirming that those Skyhorse titles and F+W Media titles were available elsewhere, I also identified several publishers that had titles in Kindle Unlimited which could not be found in other bookstores.

Two of the publishers, the UK-based Thistle Publishing and the US-based Limitless Publishing, did not respond to my queries but I am reasonably certain that these publishers have gone exclusive with Amazon in order to take advantage of Kindle Unlimited.

Edit: Just to be clear, I’m talking about an exclusive on digital titles. The publishers still distributed their print editions widely.

I spot-checked a half-dozen ebooks from each publisher (their catalogs number in the hundreds of titles), and cannot find their books in other ebookstores. The publishers also didn’t show up when I searched for them by name, but without explicit confirmation there’s a chance I could be wrong.

Fortunately, I am far more certain about the third publisher. Ed Renehan, the publisher at New Street Communications, confirmed that he’s gone exclusive with Amazon.

He’s told me that 56 of the 57 titles published by New Street are exclusive to Kindle Unlimited (the holdout is not exclusive at the request of the author). "For what it is worth, we at New Street have done VERY WELL thus far re: total compensation from per-page reads," Renehan said.

Renehan is seeing the benefit from exclusivity which Hugh Howey identified in August:

You can sometimes reach more readers by making your products available with fewer vendors. By concentrating sales in one location, sales rank gets a boost and more reader reviews are compiled in a single place. This means more visibility and more word-of-mouth sales. It can also mean more readers.

I know that runs counter to conventional wisdom (see John Scalzi for more on this), but Renehan had found that conventional methods just don’t work for him.

"We are not distributing anything on Kobo or Nook or any other platform. We’ve tried & it just does not pay," he told me. "Whereas KU has offered us results we’ve tracked and found to bring in increased ancillary revenue."

Obviously Renehan’s choice won’t be acceptable to all (see Zacharius, above) or even a workable option for some, but what does this says about the ebook market?

Here’s what I see:

For one thing, there are all sorts of assumptions about Kindle Unlimited which need to be discarded. It’s not as terrible for authors and publishers as its detractors say. Renehan has accepted the terms that DBW said treated some authors like second-class citizens, and he’s found that to be the more remunerative option that dealing with all the other bookstores.

What conclusions would you draw from this?

OOO

P.S. I know that some titles were removed or added to Kindle Unlimited because they were listed in the raw data for two or more Author Earnings Reports, and that status changed between one report and the next.

P.P.S. I would like to thank Data Guy, Steven Zacharius, Maria Schneider, Ed Renehan, and everyone else for helping with this post by answering my questions.

image by markus spiske

A judge in the Netherlands has ordered Google to hand over the account info for the ebook pirate behind the Flâmanca Hollanda account.

About three weeks ago Google was sued by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit Brein. Brein was seeking the contact info for one of the many ebook pirates that had set up shop in Google Play Books earlier this year. This particular pirate had been uploading Dutch-language titles to GPB under the author name Flâmanca Hollanda, and was only stopped when Dutch publishers protested loudly and sicced Brein on the problem.

Brein pressured Google into closing the pirate’s account in May, and they also asked for the account info so that Brein could pursue legal action against the pirate.

Google refused, so Brein filed a lawsuit and won. Google has three weeks to give Brein the IP address, mailing address, bank account number and first and last name belonging to the Google account that uploaded the pirated ebooks. Even if the person is outside the EU, Google must hand over the data.

That three-week period includes a fortnight where the account holder can lodge a protest and try to prevent their info from being released. The protest would be anonymously handled through Google and forwarded to the judge, but stands little chance of success.

There’s no word yet on how Google pans to proceed, and whether they plan to continue to fight the case in court. Google was contacted for this piece, but has not responded.

Tweakers

image by pasukaru76

Amazon’s Fire tablets have many things going for it, but they also have at least one shortcoming: they don’t come with Google Play.

While the Amazon Appstore does have most of the apps one might want, there are some apps (like reading apps that compete with the Kindle app) that Amazon won’t let us install on a Fire tablet.

Luckily there are several workarounds. The more complicated solutions involve installing Google Play on your Fire tablet (this is also the most efficient and effective) but there is also a trick that requires a lot less work.

A friend recently asked about this trick (he’s a new Fire owner), so I thought it would be worth sharing with everyone.

Here’s the short version.

TL;DR

After identifying the free app in Google Play you want to download, go to a site like Evozi’s APK Downloader and use its download tool to get the app. Transfer it to your Fire tablet, and install it.

And here’s the longer version.

How To

First things first: Turn on your Fire tablet, and go to the Amazon Appstore. Search for and install a file manager like "ES File Explorer".

Next, go to the Settings menu on your Fire tablet. Open the Security submenu, and check the option to allow installation of apps from unknown sources:

Nowurn back to your computer. You probably have a web browser open right now, so go ahead and open two more tabs.

• In the first tab, navigate to the Apps section of Google Play.
• Open Evozi’s APK downloader in the second tab.

The trick for getting free apps is to search for the app, copy the URL for the app listing, and then paste the URL into the Evozi APK downloader and clicking the button.

Evozi will get the app for you, and let you download it to your computer. (Or at least that is how it is supposed to work; sometimes the service is overloaded.)

Once you’ve downloaded the apps you want, you can transfer them to your Fire tablet over a USB cable. Copy the apps to a folder on your Fire tablet, and then unplug the tablet from your computer.

Installing the apps is as simple as using the file manager to open the folder with the apps, select an app, and then select the option to install the app.

Addendum

• This trick won’t work with paid apps or with apps that depend on in-app purchases (those additional sales depend on Google tech) but it’s good for like 90% of the apps I have needed.
• This won’t work with all apps; some just aren’t compatible and sometimes the process simply won’t work. But this is the trick I use when I want to assemble a suite of apps so I can test compatibility.
• Do let me know in the comments if this doesn’t work for you or if parts are unclear.
• And if you want to go the hard route, you can install Google Play on the Fire tablet. It’s a lot more work, but it can be done.

image by trophygeek

Japan’s Kinokuniya bookstore chain surprised many when it announced a month and a half ago that it was buying almost the entire print run of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel.

Kinokuniya bought 90,000 out of the 100,000 copy print run in order to get an advantage over Amazon and other online booksellers, and it is so pleased with the success of the stunt that it plans to repeat it. Asia One reports that the bookseller has gotten offers from other publishers:

Kinokuniya’s action is aimed at striking back competitively against online retailers, which have increased their presence in the publishing market.

"We’ll rely more on the direct purchase system so that local bookstores will be revitalised," Takai said.

…

Kinokuniya can also secure higher profit margins because no intermediary party was involved in the deal. There are also some benefits for the publisher in Kinokuniya’s direct purchase approach, as no unsold copies will be returned from the retailer.

As a result, Kinokuniya has received offers of similar deals from other publishers, Takai said.

Japan’s bookstores have been following the same trend as in the US, UK, and elsewhere. While book sales at brick-and-mortar bookstores are declining, the total sales of online retailers have increased to 160 billion yen (S$1.9 billion) in fiscal 2013, up about 70% from fiscal 2007. That pales in comparison to Amazon’s growth rate, but there’s a certain similarity between the US and Japanese book markets.

And Kinokuniya is hoping that strategic purchases of popular titles could turn the trend around, or at least stem the tide.

That is a bold gamble on the bookseller’s part, and to be clear this is a gamble.

According to the Japanese Book Publisher Association (PDF), Japanese booksellers operate under much the same terms as in the US. Retailers are allowed to return unsold books to publishers for a full refund, but when it comes to these special deals Kinokuniya doesn’t have that luxury.

The bookseller is betting that it can sell or distribute most of the copies quickly and thus recoup its cost. That is a level of financial risk that bookstores aren’t used to in Japan, or in the US for that matter.

It’s the almost the type of calculated risk that Amazon would take in order to out-compete its opponents.

Speaking of which, how long do you think it will be before Amazon decides that two can play at this game?

image by Abdulla Al Muhairi

We’ve all encountered badly made ebooks, but with only Amazon offering a reasonable return policy there wasn’t much that we could do about it. But today that situation changed for readers in the UK.

The UK has enacted a new law which extends existing consumer protection laws to include digital content. The Consumer Rights Act guarantees that anyone who buys digital content such as DVDs, online films and games, music downloads, or  ebooks in the UK will have the opportunity to return the content and get a refund should it prove defective.

The refund period is limited to only 30 days, but the law also gives UK consumers an addition five months to request that the retailer repair or replace the faulty digital content. If the repair or replacement is unsuccessful, the consumer can then claim a refund or a price reduction if they wish to keep the product.

The new law also includes provisions giving consumers the option to challenge terms and conditions which are not fair, or are hidden in the fine print of a website’s ToS. There’s no guarantee that a consumer will win the challenge, but they do have the chance to get a third party to mediate the dispute rather than having to take the retailer to court.

With UK consumers having spent an estimated £2.8 billion on downloaded music, games, and videos last year, the new regulations are long overdue.

The new rules will probably have a greater impact on game downloads than ebooks, but readers will still come out ahead. Fiascos like the screwed up Sim City launch will prove an expensive and even more public error for developers under the new law, but the law will also give readers a recourse for DRM making their ebooks disappear.

That recourse is only good for six months after purchase, which doesn’t strike me as fair at all, but it is better than nothing.

Mashable

image by lurker4hire

With the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 Nook behind us and the Nook Glowlight Plus expected to appear in the next few weeks, it looked like B&N had all its hardware out in the open. But no, B&N has surprised us again.

Barnes & Noble has quietly alerted Nook app developers to start getting ready for a new tablet. The retailer hasn’t named the tablet, but they do mention the model number, screen resolution, and that this is a Samsung tablet.

B&N’s next Nook tablet will carry the model number SM-T560NU (see the screenshot at the end of the post).

Assuming that the model number matches up with Samsung’s existing devices, we’re talking about the Samsung Galaxy Tab E 9.6.

Edit: And now I feel stupid. The page  on the B&N website is named "samsung-TabE". So yes, it’s the same device.

Announced in June, the Tab E 9.6 is larger and much cheaper than the Tab S2 8.0. B&N has revealed that the Tab E 9.6 sports a screen resolution of 1,200 x 800 (just like on the Fire HD 10), and the rest of the specs are similarly unimpressive.

To be clear, we don’t know for sure that the model numbers line up, but if they do then this is going to be more of a budget Nook tablet.

The Tab E 9.6 runs Android 5.1.1 on a 1.3 GHz quad-core Spreadtrum SC7730SE CPU with 1.5GB of RAM, 8GB of storage (plus 128GB microSD card support),  and two cameras (2MP and 5MP).

This tablet has Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, and an accelerometer. It measures 8.5mm thin, weighs 490 grams, and comes with a 5Ah battery which specced to give it a battery life of 7.5 hours.

The Tab E 9.6 launched in June, shipped in a few select markets in July, but has only just become available in the US. It’s not on the retail market yet, but Verizon carries a 4G model that costs $329 and comes with 16GB of storage and a 7.1Ah battery.

B&N’s version will likely have Wifi and not 4G, so it will probably cost in the range of $249 to $279.

Of course, this is pure speculation. All we have are a few details, including a screen resolution which does not match up with the Tab E 9.6 specs.

But I am reasonably confident that I have identified the correct device.

So what do you think of the tablet?

Teleread has brought a week-old story to my attention this morning which I think hasn’t gotten the commentary and discussion it deserves.

PW reported last week that Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy gave a keynote at BISG’s annual meeting. Reidy is described as first saying that buyers of lit fiction "just as much as readers of commercial fiction", and then went on to discuss ebook prices:

Despite predictions that e-books might reach 50% of all book sales, Reidy said e-books sales have slowed and are likely to settle at about “25% to 30%” of total book sales. Although initially e-books helped jump backlist sales, Reidy said, “not anymore,” noting that “the novelty has worn off.” She said now “there are fewer readers” entering in the digital category and said the slowing growth in e-book sales have pushed publishers back to “highlighting books as beautiful physical objects.”

Asked if the higher pricing of e-books, in the wake of publishers’ new agency agreements with Amazon, had also figured in the slowdown of e-book sales, Reidy noted that in the wake of publisher settlements over e-book price-fixing charges in the case with Apple, “I’m not supposed talk about pricing, ” but added that "our data says that our pricing is effective.”

No wonder she is not supposed to discuss ebook pricing; the higher ebook prices are the primary reason that ebook adoption has slowed among S&S customers.

Remember, Simon & Schuster is one of the publishers that signed an agency ebook deal over the past year. That deal gave S&S more control over its ebook prices, and they used that control to raise ebook prices.

As Scalzi explained, S&S is using higher ebook prices to prop up print sales. This command economy market practice is driving down demand for ebooks and discouraging readers from adopting ebooks.

Far from being a sign that "the novelty has worn off", the fact that S&S’s ebook  sales have leveled off tells us that the only way that S&S could stem the tide of ebook adoption was to follow a pricing policy that switched sales from one format to another.

That is not a stable situation, and it is not in any way, shape, or form an indicator of what the reading public wants. Instead, this is a precarious state that will only last as long as the major publishers maintain their current pricing policies.

We won’t really know what the market wants until the major publishers release their controls, and anyone who says otherwise is either fooling themselves, or trying to fool you.

image by ActuaLitté

The technical publisher O’Reilly Books is holding a sale today in honor of a feature that is being disabled tomorrow.

As of 29 September, O’Reilly will no longer be able to use email to deliver the ebooks it sells you to your Kindle account. To cushion the blow (and possibly also as an act of protest), O’Reilly is holding a 50% off all ebooks sale today. It’s good for all titles, and is only good for 28 September.

O’Reilly confirmed the news on its support pages, telling customers that:

Amazon is discontinuing the Send to Kindle feature we offer on oreilly.com at the end of September. Regrettably, they have not made an alternative process available that we can provide to you through oreilly.com. If you valued this feature you can contact Amazon and request that they either re-enable it or create an API-based solution for publishers to implement.

O’Reilly is only the latest publisher to run afoul of Amazon’s rules. Earlier this year Baen Books made a similar announcement, only to later reveal that the delivery feature wasn’t disabled so much as Amazon had imposed a cap on the number of books Baen could deliver each day.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf has also been forced to drop this feature, although they did not mention any kind of cap.

Curiously enough, Amazon is only imposing this limit on publishers, and not retailers or distributors. Smashwords, for example, can still deliver a purchased ebook via email, and so can netGalley. There are also a number of Polish retailers which offer this feature, thus making it incredibly odd that publishers are no longer allowed to support readers.

If one were sufficiently conspiracy-oriented, one would wonder if this is a negotiating tactic on the part of Amazon. Alas, there is no proof either way.

Teleread

image by miniyo73

With the new Fire tablets due to arrive in just a few days, many will soon enjoy the Word Runner speed reading feature that Amazon has bundled into a new version of the Kindle app.

Word Runner helps you read quickly by flashing words at you, one at a time, but it’s not the only app to do so (nor does it have especially unique features). A couple readers have tipped me to the fact that Word Runner’s special features, the variable speed and rewind options, were more common than I thought.

One app in particular, ReadMe, offers features similar to Word Runner, including both the variable speed and the reverse option, and what’s more the ReadMe app betters Amazon’s app by supporting Epub.

ReadMe incorporates the speed reading tech developed by Spritz. That tech didn’t look like much when Spritz launched in early 2014, but the way ReadMe uses the tech is much more impressive.

Here’s a promo video of the app in operation (the app behaved just like this when I tried it on my iPad):

I’ve  been playing with the ReadMe app today, and it really does have speed reading features very similar to what we’ve seen of Word Runner.

The ReadMe app may not support DRMed ebooks but it does let you load DRM-free Epub ebooks (according to Amazon, Word Runner only works with ebooks bought in the Kindle Store).

Loading the ebooks in the ReadMe app is a clunky process, and you have to jump through a couple hoops in order to use the speed reading feature offline, but if you want to speedily read your own ebooks then it is worth the hassle.

The ReadMe app is a free download in Google Play and iTunes.

OOO

At this point it is still too early to say whether Spritz or Word Runner is better, but Spritz has pointed out that their tech was developed to fix a problem that they identified in earlier RSVP tech, a problem that is shared by Word Runner.

If you head over to the post I wrote on Word Runner, you’ll see that WR centers the words before it flashes them at you (you can see it in the GIF at right).

According to Spritz, centering the words is the less effective approach because it makes the reader shift their eye more.

They found that a reader’s eyes naturally fixate at one point in that word, which visually triggers the brain to recognize the word and process its meaning. They call it the Optimal Recognition Position (ORP), and they’ve found that it is different for each word.

The ORP of a three-letter word is the center character, but that’s not true for longer words or for every word. As a word gets longer the ORP shifts more and more to the left.

Spritz’s speed reading tech has integrated the idea by positioning a word not so it is centered on the screen but so that each word is instead centered on the ORP for that word:

And here’s why Spritz did it:

 Each time you see text that is not centered properly on the ORP position, your eyes naturally will look for the ORP to process the word and understand its meaning. This requisite eye movement creates a “saccade”, a physical eye movement caused by your eyes taking a split second to find the proper ORP for a word. Every saccade has a penalty in both time and comprehension, especially when you start to speed up reading. Some saccades are considered by your brain to be “normal” during reading, such as when you move your eye from left to right to go from one ORP position to the next ORP position while reading a book. Other saccades are not normal to your brain during reading, such as when you move your eyes right to left to spot an ORP. This eye movement is akin to trying to read a line of text backwards.

Saccades are not a serious problem when reading a block of text; as your eye scrolls over the text you will naturally find the ORP for each word and recognize the word.

And this isn’t a dire problem for speed reading either, but Spritz thinks that by fixing this issue they have optimized the reading experience and improved comprehension.

And they certainly could have done so (that’s up to researchers to argue) but at the very least we can say that the Spritz tech is more readily available than Word Runner.

And that is a recommendation all on its own.

The ReadMe app is a free download in Google Play and iTunes.

It’s that time of year again.

Starting with Nicholas Carr in 2013, it has become a biannual tradition for someone in the media to proclaim that print isn’t dead, and that ebooks are declining.

The last publication to cheer on the revival of print was The Guardian, which proclaimed in April that paper books were opening a new chapter, and now the NYTimes has picked up the standard.

Yesterday the NYTimes announced that print was far from dead and that due to declining ebook sales, the expected digital apocalypse had been indefinitely delayed.

Or at least that is what the NYTimes would have you believe; unfortunately, it’s pretty obvious that they do not understand the ebook stats they cited:

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

Yeah, those sales stats don’t mean what you think they mean.

The NYTimes is citing the AAP’s monthly sales stats. This data is collected from some 1,200 and collated each month. The stats are good and accurate, but they also come with a huge caveat:

The 1,200 publishers represent less than half of the industry’s ebook revenues.

According to the AAP’s year-end report, the 1,200 odd publishers generated $1.58 billion in ebook revenues in 2014.

That is a lot of money, but not in comparison to the AAP’s figures for 2014 ebook revenues for the trade publishing industry.

You see, the AAP collects and releases revenue data from 1,200 publishers on a monthly basis, but they also publish an annual estimate that covers the entire trade publishing industry.

That annual estimate is called Statshot Annual. According to the figures released in June 2015, the total 2014 ebook revenues for the trade publishing industry were an estimated $3.37 billion dollars.

The share represented by the 1,200 publishers comes to 46% of that $3.37 billion, in case you were wondering.

While I’m sure some readers are thinking that you can reasonably extrapolate from a limited data set to the entire market, that will not work in this case because the 1,200 publishers are not a representative sample of the market.

There’s a fundamental difference between the AAP’s data and the non-AAP industry. While the majority of the AAP monthly data about ebook revenues comes from the Big Five US trade publishers, the majority of the non-AAP ebook revenues goes to self-published ebooks and indie published ebooks.

That difference is especially important because the Big Five are the same five publishers which negotiated agency contracts last fall and spring, giving themselves more control over their ebook prices. According to the WSJ, the new contracts resulted in higher ebook prices and fewer ebooks sold.

Edit: And here’s why those publishers pushed for higher ebook prices.

And it’s not just the WSJ; there’s independent confirmation in terms of ebook sales in the Kindle Store. According to the Author Earnings report, the share of Kindle ebook unit sales represented by AAP members has dropped from 45% to 32%.

You can find more data on average ebook prices for Amazon, indie, and self-pub ebooks over on the Author Earnings website. While you’re there you should also look at the report that the Big Five have been increasing the average price of their ebook for over a year.

The data shows that the publishers sending monthly sales data to the AAP are selling fewer ebooks, so it should come as no surprise that their sales are down.

But it does not follow that the market as a whole is down.

To look at the AAP data and say that the ebook market is down is an example of wishful thinking, confirmation bias, or what have you.

But no matter what the motivations, the simple fact is the data does not support the claim.

And as for the rest of the NYTimes piece, that is just window dressing.

image by Julian Partridge

The debris from Monday’s news that Oyster will shortly be shutting down has begun to settle, but not all the conflagrations have been put out.

New info has come in since the bombshell Monday night that points to a different outcome for the beleaguered company. Far from being a straightforward acqui-hire of a failed startup, it now looks like Google may have also acquired the tech that Oyster developed over the past two plus years.

Fortune shared that tidbit Tuesday morning:

Specifically, Google has also acquired (or at least licensed) the startup’s core underlying IP (one source says Google acquired the entire company, which a Google spokeswoman denies). Moreover, most of the Oyster team will be working out of a Google Books development center in New York (unclear if this new iteration will be Google’s version of Oyster or more of a direct challenge to Amazon’s e-book retail biz, although I’d wager on the latter). No word on terms of the Oyster deal.

It’s not clear how Google will use Oyster’s tech, but we do know that Google has bought ebook startups before. For example, they bought ETI in early 2011 and then folded that company’s staff and tech into Google’s ebook efforts.

Oyster will likely have the same fate, but at this point it is still too early to say. We don’t even know when the company will be shutting down, and according to Smashwords CEO Mark Coker it won’t be soon:

I received an update from our friends at Oyster this morning.  Here’s the scoop:  Oyster has been acquired by Google.  The Oyster service will continue to operate as normal until sometime in early 2016, at which point it will shut down and cease to exist.

Between now and the ultimate closing (exact date TBD), Smashwords will continue to deliver new books and updates to Oyster, and Oyster will continue their great work generating readers and income for our authors.

All we do know right now is that Nieman Journalism Lab says that Google bought the tech, acqui-hired the staff, but did not get the contracts with publishers.

This precludes keeping Oyster’s subscription service open, but of course there’s nothing to stop Google from negotiating their own contracts with publishers and launching their own access-based subscription ebook service.

But why would they want to?

Sure, anyone in digital publishing could give you a half-dozen good arguments in favor of that idea, but are any of those arguments valid for a tech company as large and diverse as Google?

I think not. As Laura Owens reiterated over at Nieman JL, ebooks are becoming just another type of content to Google, but I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s always been that way.

Google cares more about having a diverse offering of content than any single type of content.

This is why they’ve only put minimal effort into developing their ebook publisher portal (the admin pages are confusing, and the system behaves unpredictably), and it is also why you should not expect Google to do something amazing like launch an access-based subscription ebook service.

The world’s most popular English-language song is (possibly) still under copyright, only now we don’t know who owns the rights.

Earlier today US District Court Judge George King issued a ruling granting summary judgement to the film maker who had sued Warner/Chappell over its claim to own the copyright on the song, Happy Birthday, writing in part that "Because Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics, Defendants, as Summy Co.’s purported successors-in-interest, do not own a valid copyright in the Happy Birthday lyrics."

While some sites are reporting that the song is out of copyright and into the public domain, that is not what the judge wrote.

According to copyright attorney Naomi Jane Gray, the ruling did not say that the lyrics were in the public domain:

.@eriqgardner Careful there. The ruling doesn’t say the song is in the public domain. It says Warner-Chappel doesn’t own copyright in it.

— Naomi Jane Gray (@ShadesofGrayLaw) September 23, 2015

And FYI: I got my copy of the ruling from Gray’s website.

What the ruling (PDF) says is that Warner/Chappell does not own the lyrics to Happy Birthday. The lyrics had supposedly been written by sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill, but the ruling voided their claim (and named a couple other possible copyright holders).

What the ruling does not say is exactly who owns the copyright on the lyrics to Happy Birthday. That is still up in the air.

And while we’re on the topic, the melody for the song Happy Birthday went out of copyright in 1949. That copyright can be traced back to a song called Good Morning to all, which was written in 1893 by sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill. The copyright expired at the end of the second 28 year term.

According to today’s ruling, the alternate set of lyrics that make up Happy Birthday were created at a later date by someone other than the Hill sisters, which means that they never had the copyright and thus could not transfer the copyright to anyone.

So what does this mean?

The short version is that if you want to hum the tune, play it on a nose harp, or arrange it for the koto, you’re fine.

But if you recite, publish, or perform the lyrics, you could be violating someone’s copyright.

To be clear, you are probably not violating someone’s copyright; as this is almost certainly a pre-1923 work, the copyright has expired.

But we don’t know that with absolute certainty, and that is why Happy Birthday has gone from being the most popular English language song to being the best-known example of an Orphan Work. Someone could own the copyright, only we don’t know who.

Orphan works are a known problem, and it one that the US Copyright Office is trying to solve. The USCO has recently proposed a solution which would resolve today’s issue by enabling those who wish to use an orphan work to register and pay a fee.

But that is only a proposed solution, so it matters less today than the fact that Warner/Chappell has been collecting license fees on a copyright which it did not own or control.

That copyright was worth $2 million a year, according to estimates floating around. That is of course a wild guess; Warner/Chappell hasn’t said how much they earn from the Happy Birthday copyright, but we’re going to find out eventually.

The LATimes reports that the plaintiff’s attorneys  "will move next to qualify the lawsuit as a class-action, in an effort to recoup millions of dollars in royalties that Warner/Chappell has collected on the tune over the years".

Copyright law has a statute of limitations that lasts three years, which (assuming that the law blogs I checked were correct) means that everyone who just learned that they can sue Warner/Chappell now has three years to file that suit.

Warner/Chappell is looking at paying back tens of millions of dollars in license fees, if not more.

Of course, those fees might eventually have to be paid to someone else, but that is a concern for tomorrow. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

image by melenita2012

With textbook prices rising faster than inflation, more and more universities (and even state-wide university systems) are adopting free and open-source textbooks. And now the idea has taken hold in Canada.

Earlier this month the province of Manitoba announced its new Open Textbook Initiative, a program to provide freely licensed OER textbooks to college students.

OER (open educational resource) textbooks are licensed under CC and open copyright licenses and made available online for students, teachers and members of the public. Through this new initiative, faculty members at colleges and universities in Manitoba will be able to offer content in the highest-enrolled academic subject areas.

"Textbooks are one of the biggest costs faced by post-secondary students,” said Education and Advanced Learning Minister James Allum. "While we work hard to keep tuition fees among the lowest in Canada, this new initiative will save students money by giving them free online access to the reading material they need to achieve academically."

The initiative is delivered by Campus Manitoba, and currently uses works developed for the open textbook project that British Columbia started in 2013.

The textbooks can be found on the BCcampus website. Around 80 titles are available now, and the catalog is expected to expand by another 50 volumes this fall (to late for the fall semester, but still in time for next spring).

While this doesn’t mark the death of the college textbook market, it is one more nail in the coffin. This market is dying off, which leaves the lucrative K-12 textbook market. That market is focused on district- and state-wide purchases rather than student purchases, so it is more resistant to price pressures, but I still expect that market to follow the same path.

As districts realize that they can save huge sums by using OER textbooks they will switch over in droves.  Funds are tight everywhere, and the idea that a district can save money on textbooks and use those funds to buy equipment will prove too tempting to ignore.

image by spakattacks