Nate Hoffelder

Are you looking to hire someone to help finish your next book? Then you might be interested in Kobo’s next venture.

The ebook retailer is thinking about expanding its Writing Life publishing portal with a new section where authors and publishers could hire skilled professionals to work on a manuscript.

The new venture has only just begun:

For the moment, we’re in Phase 1 of the project: measuring your interest in each service, so we can prioritize which opportunities are most important to our authors. Please feel free to go and click on which service or opportunity you’d like to see us focus on first. Don’t see what you want? Choose “Tell Us More” and tell us all about it.

Kobo currently partners with Publishers Weekly to sell book reviews through Kobo Writing Life, but that’s just the beginning. According to the Author Services page, Kobo could end up selling ISBNs, offering a POD service, or connecting authors with a cover designer or editor. There’s also a mention of audiobook production.

Kobo hasn’t mentioned how they would provide these services, just that the Author Services section of KWL was:

… a project we’ve been working towards for several years: offering a list of recommended professional services – cover design, editorial help, print on demand, and more – that we trust and believe offer good value for independent authors. When possible, we’ll negotiate a great discount so you’ll get more for your money.

Kobo could develop "Author Services" as an internal division, or they could create a marketplace where authors would hire freelancers.

Either option is possible, and another likely option is that Kobo will outsource the work to a company like FastPencil (or one of its competitors.) As we saw with Books-a-Million’s new publishing services unit earlier this year, outsourcing the work lets a retailer like Kobo add all of the desired services quickly and efficiently.

But that’s not where Kobo is planning to go, according to Kobo Writing Life director Mark Leslie Lefebvre. He told me by email that "The services will be, in the Kobo way, about collaboration and partnerships. But what’s key is checking into services to make sure they’re author-friendly and not about exploiting authors. That’s a key driving principle for us – and one of the reasons it has taken so long to roll this out."

Kobo has wanted to offer this type of service for a while, Lefebvre said "It’s an attempt to meet the huge demand so many authors ask about, so we’re trying to provide referrals to curated trusted 3rd parties."

image by Alan_D

Only weeks after launching in Latin America, Bookmate expanded its presence in southeast Asia with a partnership with Indosat, Indonesia’s second largest telecom.

Best-known for focusing on markets rife with piracy, Bookmate’s local service is launching under the brand name Cipika Bookmate, and is available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Subscribers will be able to pay $4 a month to access a library of 250,000 titles that includes English language works as well as Bahasa Indonesian. In anticipation of the launch, Bookmate had signed deals with the leading Indonesian publishers to add 4,000 locally-published titles to its catalog.

The Indonesian expansion follows Bookmate’s debut in southeast Asia last December via a partnership with Singapore telecom StarHub. Bookmate is facing several established competitors in Indonesia, including WayangForce and Scoop.

According to Tech in Asia, Scoop may have anticipated Bookmate’s arrival when it changed its business model last month to allow people to read an unlimited number of titles for a flat fee.

"The global book publishing industry is worth $120 billion, about eight times the size of the music industry, and we are seeing an accelerating transition to digital and mobile," Andrew Baev, managing director of Bookmate, said in a statement. "Our strategy is to focus on high growth, under-served markets where readers are jumping the gap directly from paper to mobile reading. Indonesia is right in our sweet spot for offering our mix of fun, social, and on-the-go reading."

image by Johan Larsson

One Education is an Australian non-profit and OLPC partner that wants to take up where OLPC left off by developing a modular and affordable educational computer for students.

Earlier this year One Education announced  a modular laptop called the Infinity, and promised that the first prototypes would ship next spring. This week the organization started taking reservations from folks interested in buying an Infinity when it is available.

The first thousand optimists to reserve an Infinity will be given the opportunity to buy one for $249 to $299 when it’s ready some time next year.

The XO Infinity is designed to be the ultimate modular laptop where every component from the keyboard dock to the camera, CPU, and even the screen is a module that can be swapped out at will.

The core of the design is a tablet unit with an 8.9″ screen. It packs in a camera module with 2MP and 5MP cameras, a battery, and a CPU module with a quad-core 1.5GHz CPU, 2GB RAM and 24GB storage.

That’s a slightly different design from the original concept revealed 6 months ago; that earlier design also had a connectivity module (Wifi, Bluetooth, etc). and One Education also says that the new design is about 3mm thinner. They’ve also reduced both the height and width by about 1cm.

One common problem shared by modular gadget projects is how a user might go about building their own module. The much-delayed Project Ara has basically made that option impossible, but it will be relatively easy for a hardware hacker to build a custom  module for the XO Infinity.

One Education has adopted USB-C as the standard connector for all the modules. That means that even if the official project falls through, a hacker would be able to build their own module by combining a module shell and a USB connector board with a Chrombit or Raspberry Pi. They could even build their own sensor module, or rebuild the battery.

You could conceivably use a commercially available USB-C accessory with the XO Infinity. There might be an issue with drivers, but the XO Infinity does run Android (Linux and Windows firmwares are in the works) so that won’t be an insurmountable issue.

And that’s a good thing, because the official XO Infinity project isn’t drawing a lot of support. That reservation list was first announced on 2 August, and it is still open as I write this post.

Let’s hope that One Education has institutional buyers lined up, because if they’re relying on single unit sales then this project won’t get much further than the core design and a set of schematics that you can have 3d-printed.

One Education doesn’t expect to ship the XO Infinity until next year, and they don’t have a working unit yet. but they did post a series of photos on their Facebook page which shows what the latest design looks like.

One Education via Liliputing

For the past several years E-ink has been talking up possible niche uses for E-ink screens, including sunlight-readable displays for motor bikes and bicycles.

To the best of my knowledge, no gadget maker has stepped up to serve this niche market, so one hacker has developed his own solution.

David Schneider’s a bicyclist, and he was recently inspired to build a bike computer for people who don’t like to squint. He writes over at IEE Spectrum that he grew frustrated by products which either had screens to small to read or were to expensive for his tastes, so he decided to build his own.

As you can see in the following video, Schneider has combined a Kindle Touch with a Raspberry Pi to build the ultimate bike computer. The Pi reads in data from the sensors (GPS and two reed switches, crunches the numbers, and then posts the data to a webpage that the Pi serves up on a local Wifi network. The Kindle Touch access that network and displays the page in its web browser.

It’s not that simple, of course. Schneider says that he had to install a long list of software for this to work. He also had to find a way to trick the Kindle into thinking it was connected to Amazon’s servers (otherwise it refused to connect to the Pi’s Wifi network).

A Raspberry Pi is rather over-powered for a bike computer, and Schneider took full advantage of its abilities to build a device with GPS, mapping, and data logging features:

In the end, I managed to pull together a system that shows distance, instantaneous speed, average speed, cadence, elapsed time, and clock time all at once, with digits large enough to read without squinting. Swiping and pressing buttons brings up other screens that offer such goodies as real-time mapping and logging. Even if you have to buy a Kindle for this project, the cost of the hardware involved is probably less than half what you’d be paying for a commercial unit with these capabilities.

You can find more details over at the IEE Spectrum site.

Hackaday

When Scribd culled its romance catalog a couple months back, I predicted that the ever-popular SF&F category would be the next to go under the knife. I was wrong.

Scribd quietly announced on its blog late Friday night that it is imposing a quota on audiobooks. Starting 20 September, subscribers will be limited to listening to a single audiobook per month, and they will also have the option of buying additional audiobook credits for $8.99.

Scribd also promises that they will offer "a rotating catalog of thousands of audiobooks for unlimited listening" which "are being made available through special arrangements with publishing partners".

The subscription cost will remain $9 a month, and the ebook access is not being curtailed at this time. Scribd is merely taking steps to make their audiobook catalog less attractive to subscribers. (Scribd wants subscribers to pay $9 to listen to a second audiobook, when you can often buy an ebook+audiobook bundle in the Kindle Store for not much more.)

This is the second time that Scribd has cut back its service in the last couple months, and it is also the second time that one of Scribd’s bold moves has backfired.

Scribd’s first mistake was in signing an exclusive deal with Harlequin and then actively recruiting romance readers in late 2014, only to discover in June 2015 that romance readers inhaled so many novels that they were draining Scribd’s coffers.

Scribd’s second mistake was when they signed a deal in November 2014 with Findaway to add 30,000 audiobook titles to Scribd’s catalog. To give you an idea of how bold that was, Kindle Unlimited had around 2,300 audiobook titles at the time (4,500 now).

As I suggested at the time, KU carried fewer audiobooks because they had a higher unit cost:

I would bet that Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited with only 2,300 audiobook titles because audiobooks usually cost 4 times or more than the price of an ebook. This suggests that an unlimited audiobook subscription plan is simply unsustainable at Scribd’s $9 a month or the KU’s $10 a month.

Both of Scribd’s bold moves made the service attractive to potential subscribers, but they came at too high of a price. Rather than just draw in paying customers, Scribd attracted the type of customer it does not want – those who would use the service as it was intended by consuming as much content as they can.

And that’s a problem for Scribd, because it has committed to paying its suppliers (authors and publishers alike) a cut of the retail price each time a book is loaned.

That is simply an unsustainable model for access-based services of any type, beit ebook, music, or video.

At this point it’s clear that there are two sustainable payment models for access-based services. The first is to pay suppliers a tiny fraction of the retail price, and the other is to limit payments to a finite pool.

Pandora and other streaming music services have gone with the first model, and so has Germany’s Skoobe. (According to Matthias Matting of Self-PublisherBibel.de, Skoobe pays indie authors between 20 cents and 60 cents per loan.)

Amazon, on the other hand, has been using a funding pool to pay authors and publishers ever since Kindle Owner’s Lending Library launched in late 2011.

In light of today’s news, that doesn’t seem like such a bad model, does it?

I mean, on one side we have a service that paid out more than $33 million to authors and publishers in the past three months and generated more income for authors than they earned from the Nook Store.

On the other side we have a service that has had to cut back its offering twice in the past two months.

That’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

images by Shermeee, Stephen Cummings

When Random House Germany announced earlier this week that it was softening its stance on DRM by adopting digital watermark DRM, many erroneously reported that the German ebook market had gone DRM-free.

The forecast isn’t quite so rosy, but this does present a great opportunity for German ebook retailers to start actively competing with Amazon for the euros spent by Kindle users.

As of 1 October, the majority of ebooks published in Germany will be available (outside the Kindle Store) with only minimal DRM. This means that a tech-savvy consumer can buy one of those Epub ebooks, download and convert the ebook to Kindle format, and then load the ebook on to their Kindle.

It also means that a retailer can launch a feature which does this on behalf of the consumer.

It’s technically feasible for ebook retailers to automatically convert the ebook and email the ebook to a customer’s Kindle account. This feature isn’t common in all markets, but several publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks direct to consumers, including Baen Books and O’Reilly, have offered this option almost since the day the Kindle Store launched, and Hachette intended to offer it in the ebookstore they didn’t launched last year.

Hachette’s ebookstore, eBooksForAll, was going to use digital watermarks so that the publisher could sell to Kindle owners. Now German ebook retailers have the option to follow the same path, but will they?

One would think that the retailers would take the obvious step, but that’s no guarantee that they will.

Take, for example, the Dutch ebook market. Publishers in the Netherlands wholeheartedly adopted digital watermark DRM several years ago, and so did the ebook retailers.

Those retailers have every opportunity to support Kindle owners with a conversion+email service, and yet Timo Boezeman of CB Logistics informs me that retailers like eBook.nl and Bol.com do not offer this option.

I’ve never been able to find out why the Dutch ebook retailers don’t better support Kindle users; as we can see in the Polish ebook market, there’s no technical reason that this can’t be done.

Poland’s ebook market exists in the shadow of the Amazon ever since the German Kindle Store launched in 2011, and that shadow has shaped the market.

Polish consumers have bought Kindles, and then turned to local ebookstores to buy the Polish-language ebooks that Amazon would not sell. This forced the local ebookstores to adapt and sell ebooks that could be read on a Kindle.

Many now offer to send ebooks directly to a customer’s Kindle account, including:

• Publio.pl
• Nexto.pl
• eBookPoint.pl
• Virtualo.pl

In short, the Polish ebook market is, in many ways, the ideal market that we all want. There’s just enough DRM to satisfy publishers, but not enough to annoy consumers or create walled gardens. It’s a market where Amazon’s customers are fair game for its competitors.

So do you think German retailers will head down that path?

image by kodomut

Many stories focus on fictional people and places, but sometimes the most colorful part of a story is when the setting, ie the plants surrounding the main character, have a key role to play.

The following infographic details eighty fictional plants  that can be found in books, comics, games, and movies. Besides Audrey Jr, the Mandrake, and the Whomping Willow, you will find both obscure and well-known plants from The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Pokémon, Star Wars, and other sources. If you would like a more complete list, try Wikipedia.

Which of these plants would you like to grow in your home?

eBookFriendly

One of the earliest (publisher-sponsored) author communities will be closing at the end of the month.

HarperCollins has announced on the Authonomy blog on Wednesday that "Unfortunately in recent years publishing of titles from the site has slowed as we have opened other submissions channels, and the community has become smaller, so the decision to close Authonomy has been made."

like BookCountry and many other writing communities, Authonomy worked by letting authors submit their manuscripts. The works were publicly critiqued and raked by other users, with some of the better works optioned by HarperCollins. The Bookseller notes that Miranda Dickinson, Steven Dunne, and Kat French had been recruited through the site.

A grand total of 47 HarperCollins titles had been sourced through Authonomy since it launched in 2008. An unknown (but almost certainly larger) number went on to be independently published by the authors.

In comparison, Amazon’s Kindle Scout program has optioned 74 titles in less than ten months. (While Kindle Scout has a very different design and also works differently from Authonomy, the latter’s website suggests that they had a similar purpose.)

What with the multitude of online writing communities, it’s to be expected that some would close, but the biggest reason for Authonomy’s decline is that it launched in a different era. In 2008 an author’s best chance for getting published was to sign with a major publisher, but that stopped being true from about 2011.

The promise that "every month, five Authonomy manuscripts are selected to be reviewed by HC editors for possible publication" just isn’t as attractive to authors as it used to be, not when they can publish on their own, make money today, and maybe get an offer tomorrow.

The Bookseller

image  by streetwrk.com

As everyone who has been following the news over the past few days can tell you, many people both inside and outside of Amazon are not happy with the company.

The same can’t be said for Amazon’s robots. The retailer has long pursued capital investments as a way of reducing its operating costs, and nowhere is that more true than in Amazon’s warehouses. The Dallas Morning News recently took a tour of one of the warehouses in Texas, and they found a bustling workplace that has looks like it has nearly as many robots as people.

According to press reports, Amazon now uses over 10,000 mobile robots in its warehouses (this doesn’t count the stationary units like the label sticker), so clearly that impression is a gross exaggeration, but still.

The robots range from massive hydraulic arms to the smaller 700 pound forklift bots from Kiva Systems. They’re complex devices, and that includes the stationary units:

At the point when the machine applies the mailing label on with a gentle poof of air, it’s also weighing the box faster than you can notice whether Amazon’s logo is facing up in a smile and not upside down in a frown. If the box weighs more or less than it should, based on what the scanner just read is inside, it’s sent on a side track over to humans. Yes, this technology can detect even if the wrong Harry Potter book was packed

You can see this for yourself. First up is the guided tour, and after that is some raw footage of the robots at work.

Bertelsmann announced on Tuesday that its Germany publishing subsidiary, Verlagsgruppe Random House, will allow its distributors to start using digital watermarks, or "soft" DRM, on 1 October.

Do you here that? It’s the sound of a fundamental shift in the industry.

Though it is described as "not formally part of" the international Penguin Random House publishing conglomerate, Random House Germany is still a close cousin. It’s also the largest publisher in Germany, and now it is following in the footsteps of its next two largest competitors, Holtzbrinck and Bonnier, both of which opted for a lighter form of DRM earlier this year.

They have not yet gone DRM-free, but this is still great news for ebook readers everywhere.

As I have reported in the past (including as recently as last Friday), a digital watermark is one of the lighter forms of DRM. It consists of a tiny bit of unique code that is added to a copy of a file when it is (ideally) sold to a customer. The code doesn’t impact the reading experience, and it can be used to identify the customer who bought the file should that file turn up on a pirate service.

This is not DRM-free, but it is the next best thing. But I would not set off fireworks just yet, because the publishers could still be using hard DRM in certain ebookstores.

There’s disagreement in technical circles as to whether digital watermarks count as DRM, but for the time being we’re going to have to count it that way – and not just because publishers think that way.

While the publishers are using a softer form of DRM, they still see digital watermarks as DRM (Random House Germany was clear on this point in their announcement). That means when they don’t have the option of digital watermarks, they could opt for hard DRM.

For example, the Kindle Store only offers two DRM options in KDP: no DRM and hard DRM. This forces a publisher to either use Kindle DRM or no DRM, and we cannot assume that the publishers will opt for DRM-free.

Pottermore, for example, uses digital watermarks on the ebooks it sells, but it also applies Kindle DRM to any Harry Potter ebook you send to your Kindle account.

Similarly, a spokesperson for the Bonnier imprint Ullstein Buchverlage confirmed that its ebooks use Kindle DRM.

Edit: In the comment section, a reader confirmed that this mixed-DRM situation was common in France:

That’s what happens here in France, where many small publishers choose watermarks, many small to medium e-booksellers do watermarks, and only Amazon, Kobo, Apple and Google do encryption-based DRM.

I am still waiting to hear back from Random House Germany, but I would not assume that any publisher has completely switched to soft DRM without explicit confirmation.

BuchReport.de

Amazon has released its monthly author report on Kindle Unlimited today. The retailer has boosted the funding pool for July 2015 to a record high of $11.5 million dollars.

The funding pool is used to pay authors and publishers who had submitted their books to KDP Select and agreed to give Amazon a digital exclusive. The pool is divvied up via an opaque calculation where each publisher and author gets a share for each page read from one of their books.

The share varies from one month to the next. In June, when Amazon was still paying each time an ebook was loaned, the share was worth about $1.34.

The payout for July is based on Amazon’s standard page says, and according to one author I spoke to the payout was $0.0057791577669113 per page read. (SelfPublisherBibel.de is reporting a slightly different figure, $0.00576 per page read.)

That is just over half a cent per page, which works out to serious money for prolific authors or novelists whose books are read cover to cover.

Take Kate Wrath, for example. One of her books, E, earned her $2,132.07 in Kindle Unlimited in July. Subscribers read a total of 368,924 pages (by Amazon’s measure), or the equivalent of 795 people each reading the book cover to cover.

If we divide the earnings by the number of reads, we get $2.68 for each time the book was read cover to cover. In comparison, Wrath has this book priced at $2.99 in the Kindle Store, netting her just under $2 per copy sold.

The $11.5 million paid out for July is over four times as much as the $2.5 million Amazon paid out last July, and it brings the total paid to authors and publishers over the past 12 months (August 2014 to July 2015) to $98.15 million.

The previous monthly pools were worth:

• May 2014: $1.2 million
• June 2014: $1.2 million
• July: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches)
• August: $4.7 million
• September: $5 million
• October: $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

***

Amazon changed the way it paid authors a month and a half ago in order to better reward authors for putting their longer works in Kindle Unlimited, but the new setup has proven equally beneficial for authors of shorter works.

Some authors have objected to the change from the old system to the new, but as you can see from the above math  it is possible for authors to earn serious money.

And I’m not the only one to say so; Hugh Howey wrote earlier today that he was thrilled by last month’s results. (Edited to add: Joe Konrath has also shared his results; he is pleased.)

Howey only added his books to KU after the new system took effect:

Even though the new KU seemed to reward novels over short stories, I immediately began publishing shorter works and making them available in KU. I wanted to see if short fiction — an area I’m fond of and have made a career exploring — was still viable in KU. After joining the program, I released several titles in the 7,000 – 12,000 word range. KU is no longer as generous when it comes to short fiction, but the pay-per-page estimates seemed fair to me. I went all-in with my backlist novels, and I published my new short stories.

I knew within a week that I’d made the right decision to join KU. My KU ebooks saw an immediate boost in ranking. Not only were the page-reads mounting, but the sales of those ebooks were also on the rise! This was like advertising that I got paid for, and advertising that led to more paid sales. The only cost was exclusivity.

Based on the past month, Howey has reached a conclusion contrary to the one recently espoused by John Scalzi. Howey thinks that limiting the distribution of an ebook can have a positive benefit by concentrating sales in a handful of channels, thus boosting sales rank and leading to more sales.

Kindle Unlimited has reached a million titles and continues to grow, so I would bet that Howey is not the only author to figure that out.

image by Bill Selak

PubSlush , the first startup to style itself a "Kickstarter for books", is shutting down on 23 August.

IndieReader reported, and several authors have confirmed, that PubSlush sent out an email on Thursday which announced the abrupt closure. No reason was given, although PubSlush did say that "We want to thank you for your constant support of Pubslush through the years and we wish you the best of luck in your business".

The news has left authors scrambling to  – well, I would not say that any author was scrambling.

The news hasn’t caused much of a ruckus on Twitter (that might be an indicator of just how little business PubSlush has been doing), although I did find one author who planned to eventually find a replacement platform for pre-orders.

Launched in September 2011, PubSlush Press was originally intended to be a crowd-sourced publisher. Authors could submit a sample, and if accepted by PubSlush it would be promoted on the site. If the project picked up enough backers then PubSlush would publish the book and distribute the pre-sales.

While that sounds like a workable idea, Victoria Strauss of Writers Beware read the fine print when PubSlush launched and found many questionable contract terms and misleading claims, many of which remained unchanged even after Strauss publicly criticized PubSlush.

According to PW, in July 2012 PubSlush shifted away from publishing books to simply crowd-funding them. To the best of my knowledge PubSlush continued as a crowd-funding right up until it decided to close.

Aside from the issues raised when it launched, PubSlush did not draw much attention in the press in the following three years, and according to one author it did not do much business, either.

Caren Gussoff reviewed PubSlush for the SFWA blog last October. Her opinion was generally good but she did not that the site wasn’t terribly busy:

Frankly, once I’d annoyed my social network and email lists about my campaign, and begged them to share with their networks, that was about all the exposure I could wring out of it. … Pubslush gets virtually 0% of the “stranger browsing” traffic that Kickstarter does. So, though my project was findable, there was no one to find it. In fact, every single contributor to my campaign — except one — was directly associated to me by first or second degree, and I feel fairly confident that if I did some sleuthing, the one stranger is also associated…I just don’t immediately recognize his name. 

It sounds like authors would be better off at one of the major crowd-funding sites, doesn’t it?

That’s not just an idle question; PubSlush is survived by several competitors with similar models, including Pentian and Inkshares. And to make matters more interesting, both of those companies use a model very similar to the idea that PubSlush discarded in 2012.

IndieReader

image by Guzmán Lozano

In 2015, the web is a wild and chaotic place. Few could have predicted that it would come to epitomize the saying that we cannot live with it or with out it, but author Bruce Sterling is the exception to the rule.

Back in 1993 Sterling testified before the US Congress. He was speaking in favor of the National Research and Education Network(NREN), a proposed network infrastructure that would be overseen by the National Science Foundation, NSFNet. But Sterling didn’t come as himself; instead he spoke in the role of a time traveler from 2015.

Gizmodo recently discovered Sterling’s testimony from 1993, and it is shockingly accurate summary of modern society. He predicted everything from 80% of the web being porn, the prevalence of encryption, and Anonymous to our utter dependence on the web and the power of online communities.

For example, tell me if this sounds familiar:

Since communications *is* power in an Information Society, giving fantastically advanced communications to the Research and Education communities did in fact empower those communities quite drastically by comparison with interest-groups lacking that advantage. Today, one of the most feared political organizations in the world is the multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the Students for an Utterly Free Society.

That reminds you of Anonymous, doesn’t it? Sure, the names are different and the tech is different, but the description is more of a hit than a miss.

And so was Sterling’s description of how online activism spreads at the speed of an electron, crossing not just borders but languages:

Thanks to NREN, however, spasms of student unrest can now spread like lightning across entire continents. Advanced AI translation programs installed on the Net only made matters worse, since in 2015 the global leaders of the student movements are not only extremely radical, but French.

Sterling also predicted that everyone, including even the authorities, would become so dependent on the web that they would not know how to live without it. (This hasn’t quite happened, but we are getting there.)

And finally, Sterling foresaw the prevalence of encryption, porn, and piracy:

Take for instance a recent FBI raid on an enormous archive of encrypted Iranian files, illicitly stored in an obscure NREN node in North Dakota. Luckily the FBI was able to decrypt these files thanks to an inside informant. Deciphering these archives revealed the following contraband:

• Eighty percent graphic image files of attractive young women without veils on, or, in fact, much clothing of any kind.
• Fifteen percent digitally stored pirated copies of Western pop music and Western videos, still illegal to possess in Tehran.
• And, five percent text files in the Farsi language describing how to build, deliver and park truck-bombs in major urban areas.

You can fault him for getting the ration wrong if you like (90% porn, 9% piracy, and 1% text files), but the concept is eerily accurate.

And so was his prediction of the power of an online community when it focuses its wrath on a single target:

Since it is now possible to transact business entirely in cyberspace, including financial transactions, many information entrepreneurs in 2015 have simply given up any physical home. Basically, they have become stateless people, 21st Century gypsies.

"A recent tragic example of this occurred in the small town of North Zulch, Texas. There some rural law enforcement officers apprehended a scruffy vagabond on a motorcycle in a high-speed chase. Unfortunately he was killed. A search of his backpack revealed a device the size of a cigarette pack. In searching the dead man’s effects, the police officers, who were not computer literate, accidentally broke the device. This tiny device was actually a privately owned computer bulletin board system with some 15,000 registered users.

"Many of the users were wealthy celebrities, and the apparent outlaw biker was actually an extremely popular and nationally known system operator. These 15,000 users were enraged by what they considered the wanton destruction of their electronic community. They pooled their resources and took a terrible vengeance on the small town of North Zulch, which, by contrast, had only 2,000 residents, none of them wealthy or technologically sophisticated. Through a combination of harassing lawsuits and sharp real-estate deals, the vengeful board users bankrupted the town. Eventually the entire township was bulldozed flat and purchased for parkland by the Nature Conservancy.

That is a fictionalized event, but we’ve seen online mobs attack with even less justification than a direct attack on an online community and so I have no problem picturing the scenario described by Sterling.

The EFF has the entire testimony archived on its site. I think it’s worth your time to read; this is perhaps the most accurate prediction of modern society short of Forster’s short story, The Machine Stops.

image by hanspoldoja

Three major textbook publishers filed a lawsuit this week against a a textbook importer by the name of Information Recyclers, and the three fellows accused of running it. The lawsuit, Cengage Learning et al v Hunting et al, was filed on Tuesday in the US District court of Massachusetts.

The 14-page filing accuses the three men of importing and selling pirated counterfeit copies of textbooks whose copyrights belong to the three publishers. The publishers allege that the imported textbooks were unauthorized reproductions which violate the publishers trademarks and copyrights.

If this case sounds familiar, you’re not alone. The filing immediately reminded me of Kirtsaeng v Wiley, the landmark US Supreme Court ruling that said that legally produced textbooks could be imported with or without the approval of the original publisher.

Originally filed in 2008 against Supap Kirtsaeng, then a college student, Kirtsaeng v Wiley settled a key detail of the first sale doctrine. Kirtsaeng was sued for importing and reselling cheaply produced foreign editions of textbooks belonging to Wiley. The publisher argued that this violated US copyright law, and won the case at both the district and appellate level, but ultimately the US Supreme Court ruled that Kirtsaeng had the legal right to resell textbooks which had been produced legally.

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(the rest of this post has been eaten by a wordpress bug, sorry)

When Amazon first announced in May that the Kindle platform would be getting prettier ebooks, they left a lot of questions unanswered, including exactly how Amazon was pulling it off.

Yesterday’s update has answered some of those questions.

Reports are coming in from a couple different directions that the new typography, kerning, and other improvements are tied to a new Kindle file format. Alles eBook.de reported yesterday, and a couple readers on MobileRead Forums confirm, that ebooks which have the new features also come with a file suffix of KFX.

Little is known about the file format at this time, but we do know that you can’t build one on your own (ebook developers have tried without success).

Someone has already unpacked one of the new KFX files and revealed clues in the metadata that suggest Amazon has a new ebook generator tool which they use to make the KFX files:

{key:"kfxgen_package_version",value:"PackageVersio n:YJReaderSDK-1.1.67.2 Month-Day:06-18″},
{key:"kfxgen_application_version",value:"6.24.1.0″ }

I can also report that Amazon is claiming that many ebooks have the new features when in fact they do not. I bought three two books which Amazon promised would have the new typography,but when I read the ebooks in the Kindle iPad app they did not have the formatting. Also, when I downloaded them, they were still in the older AZW3 file format.

While I am annoyed to have wasted my money, I can also see that Amazon has given us an obvious indicator that tells us which ebooks have the new features.

Now we can start taking the file apart and seeing how it ticks.