Nate Hoffelder

With Apple adding content-blockers as a core iOS 9 feature and web publishers suing ad blocking companies and acting like they’re in an arms race, 2015 is rapidly turning out to be the year that website visitors no longer have to bend over and grab their ankles.

And that’s going to be a good thing all around, as VentureBeat reported yesterday. It turns out that blocking ads doesn’t just improve your browsing experience, it can measurably improve network performance:

A recent study (.pdf) by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia has found that installing ad-blocking software reduces ordinary Web-browsing bandwidth usage by 25 percent. The reduction is even more dramatic for streaming video: blocking the ads cuts bandwidth by 40 percent.

This means that when you use an ad blocker, everyone who is on the same Wifi network as you benefits from your blocking the adverts.That almost moves ad blockers into the "good manners" category of sharing a public Wifi network, doesn’t it?

I think so.

The simple fact is, far too many websites are bloated embarrassments which take a ridiculously long time to load. Dean Murphy proved that point a few weeks ago when he quickly slapped together an ad-blocking extension for Safari. (We all know that ad blocking is nothing new, but the changes Apple is making to iOS 9 has inspired iOS developers to demonstrate the benefits.)

Murphy picked a popular Apple blog, iMore, and applied his filter. He noticed that the mobile version of the site was immediately more usable:

He also noted that iMore’s homepage was a mess that used more resources than I would have believed possible:

With no content blocked, there are 38 3rd party scripts  (scripts not hosted on the host domain) running when the homepage is opened, which takes a total of 11 seconds. Some of these scripts are hosted by companies I know, Google, Amazon, Twitter and lots from companies I don’t know. Most of which I assume are used to display adverts or track my activity, as the network activity was still active after a minute of leaving the page dormant. I decided to turn them all off all 3rd party scripts and see what would happen.

In comparison, this blog has about a third as many scripts as iMore. The average webpage measures on this site about 1.5MB, while an article page on iMore can be more than 14MB in size, according to Nick Heer.

I’ve worked really hard to keep this site lean and fast because I know that faster is better. Murphy proved that point when he enabled his ad blocker. Murphy also confirmed Venture Beat’s report of reduced network traffic:

After turning off all 3rd party scripts, the homepage took 2 seconds to load, down from 11 seconds. Also, the network activity stopped as soon as the page loaded so it should be less strain on the battery.

This, in a nutshell, is why Apple is building the content-blocking features into iOS 9. It’s a battery booster, a performance enhancer, and a bandwidth fix all rolled into one.

Web publishers should be taking this seriously, but something tells the worst offenders are going to develop pronounced cases of cranium rectumitis.

The Next Web, for example, has taken the position that ad blocking is immoral; this site is also the purveyor of what is arguably the worst advert idea on the internet (it’s like the rolled pop ups, auto-play videos, and the blink tag into a single advert). Similarly, PC Magazine has come out against the changes in iOS 9, while at the same time their website is again a stinking pile of manure.

And then there’s iMore. That blog responded to the news that their site was a resource hog with a post which admitted that yes, their website sucked, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.

That we haven’t made it further, faster is an indication of how hard it is when you’re talking about websites visited by tens of millions of people, and companies that employ more than a dozen writers. Of course, everyone here is going to continue working to find better, smarter ways of solving the problem, because that’s our jobs. I’m sure other large websites are doing likewise.

That may be true, folks, but as I have previously pointed out, if they can’t solve the ad problem then they need to find another business model.

Attitudes like the ones at iMore, PC MAgazine, and The Next Web are why I am convinced that 2015 is going to be the year that ad blocking is recognized not as a problem for websites but will instead be seen for what it truly is: a disruptive innovation.

And I mean that in the classic meaning of the word:

Disruptive Innovation: A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technologyy. (Wikipedia)

Railroads killed the canal system.

Cars killed the horse.

Highways killed the passenger train.

Downloads killed record stores.

The internet is killing the newspaper.

And finally, CraigsList killed the want ad.

And now ad blockers are about to kill a lot of sites that had grown fat and happy by abusing their visitors.

It can’t happen soon enough, in my opinion.

image by docentjoyce

Over the past month B&N has been making us wonder whether it was committed to ebooks. First B&N closed its office in Luxembourg, then it relaunched its website with a borked Nook area, and today B&N has removed all doubt.

Barnes & Noble is sending out emails to customers in Europe, sharing the news that they will soon be ex-customers.

You can find the email at the end of this post (translated from Dutch; Thanks, Martjin!) but the short version is that B&N has reiterated the announcement they made last month when they said the Nook Windows 8 app would no longer be available internationally.

B&N is abandoning most of its international customers on 7 August 2015.

The Nook Store had been available in 40 countries, including Australia, much of Europe, Canada, the UK, and the US; on 8 August the Nook Store will only be available in the US and UK (this was confirmed by B&N).

This really comes as no surprise; B&N had only announced its international expansion plans following the 2012 partnership with Microsoft. Outside of the US and UK, the Nook store was only available via the Windows 8 app (which is why I joked that the international store really belonged to Microsoft).

And what with B&N  buying out Microsoft’s share of Nook Media in December, it’s not like we didn’t see this coming.

The next question, of course, is where does B&N go from here?

With Nook revenues having fallen to half that of the previous fiscal year ($264 million) and expected to continue declining (authors are already reporting that the malfunctioning website has killed their sales) the odds are very good that B&N is going to throw in the towel on their ebook money pit.

Should that happen, the only question will be whether they will sell the Nook platform or simply shutter their ebook operation.

If Nook users are lucky, B&N will find a buyer. Kobo, for example, could take over the customer accounts just like they did when Sony pulled out of the ebook market last year.

But B&N could still simply close the Nook Store, and there is a chance that incoming B&N CEO Ron Boire might pull a rabbit out of his hat and save the Nook.

Dear Customer,

We recently announced that Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have agreed to terminate their commercial partnership. As a result, payments through your Microsoft account no longer supported. In addition, the NOOK App for Windows will from August 7, 2015 are no longer available outside the United States. This means that your NOOK content can no longer open on a Windows platform.

Our records indicate that you are outside the United States and that you are using your Microsoft account as a payment method in your NOOK App for Windows account. Therefore, you may be eligible for a refund from Microsoft for any purchases you have made with your Microsoft account.

image by JeepersMedia

The Bookseller (paywall’d) reports that Alexander Kidd, formerly of Picador and formerly a literary agent, is showing off a new book discovery app called Alexi.

This iPhone app is currently in beta, but when it launches this autumn Alexi will let readers follow well-known literary authors and get their recommendations on books worth reading, and read the ebooks inside the app. (At the moment, all you can do is read the blurbs and add them to your reading list.)

Rather than offer the huge catalog found in most ebookstores, Alexi is going to focus on the ebooks curated by the authors. It has not yet been decided how you’re going to pay for the ebooks or how much they’ll cost; in fact, Alexi has yet to close deals with publishers. All we know at this time is that The Bookseller reports that Kidd said that the terms would be "fair" to authors, and that the weekly cost of the app would be "less than a Sunday newspaper or a cup of coffee".

The current plan is to offer lists of recommendations that will be posted for a month and then removed. During that one-month period, readers can add recommended titles  to their reading lists to read in full without paying extra.

So it’s going to be a subscription type of service, only without a large selection. That reminds me somewhat of Rooster, an iPhone app which launched early last year. Rooster offers a $5 a month service which sends users daily snippets from a book, enabling them to read the book bit by bit.

Both Rooster and Alexi curated your next read, but the latter wants to offer readers more options than just a single title.

But not too much more. Alexi wants to split the difference between Scribd and Rooster. "Subscription is an interesting experiment in digitizing content and it makes sense that people would attempt to build a Spotify for books," said Kidd. "Book subscription services are vast digital libraries. From a reader’s point of view that is just presenting them with another problem, rather than a solution [to what they should read next]. We have turned that on its head."

I’ve tried the app. (It is currently invite-only, but I waited only about half an hour before I got the invite.)  It looks very pretty and offers some intriguing recommendations by literary authors.

Julian Barnes' "Four Great Novels that don’t look like novels" features public domain works, while Alan Johnson has chosen five political biographies and Bret Easton Ellis has assembled a list of "Great LA novels".

Those suggestions won’t appeal to all but there are readers who will be interested.  If this app gets enough attention (and if it gets the investment required to go to the next stage) then it could find a niche market .

Alexi is currently available for the iPhone; iPad and Android apps are planned for later this year.

iTunes

Buyer Beware.

A "publisher" by the name of Forgotten Books has just gave us another reminder that there is enough money in ebooks to attract scammers.

Forgotten Books supports a website where it claims to publish public domain works. It then puts adverts up next to the (poor quality) ebooks, and tries to entice you into signing up for a paid membership. While FB claims to have a half million titles in its catalog, there’s nothing here worth paying for.

If you haven’t heard of this "publisher" before (I had not), Forgotten Books says that it was founded in 2007 with the goal of "rediscovering and republishing formerly out of print books" (it’s rediscovered 484,473 titles so far, and plans to discover another half million).

To put it another way, Forgotten Books scrapes books uploaded to Project Gutenberg, and titles posted to Google Books, and republishes them under its own imprint.

FB is not the only ones to do that; many sites, including Feedbooks and MobileRead forums, host collections of public domain titles. Few sites, however, charge you to download those ebooks or can claim to produce such abysmally poor ebooks.

While other sites make efforts to create legible ebooks, Forgotten Books has hit upon the easy way to publish half a million books with no effort.

I spent a few hours browsing the Forgotten Books website this morning and I can report that none of the ebooks on that site would meet most people’s definitions of ebooks – they would not even be allowed in the Kindle Store.

The titles I saw were made from the scanned print editions (like what you might find in Google Books) and did not contain text. The books were marginally readable at best; most had artifacts from the scanning process blurring the text on one page or another. And to top things off, Forgotten Books also slaps adverts inside the ebooks they "publish".

But hey, Forgotten Books has published a half million of them, and is working on putting out another half million. Who cares that the ebooks are crap?

Clearly Forgotten Books does not, and they’re hoping they can find readers who don’t know any better.

FB will let you read the ebooks online, but if you want to download one of the books you will need to sign up for an account. Also, if you want to read without adverts you will need to get a paid membership for the site.

Yes. Forgotten Books is offering a paid membership to read the same ebooks you can find elsewhere for free. They want $9 a month for access to this crap.

On second thought, I may have mischaracterized Forgotten Books; it is not a spam publisher so much as it is a scam publisher.

They’re charging readers for access to free content?

That is a scam, folks. It’s not the first one I’ve seen and it won’t be the last, but it is most definitely a scam.

Buyer beware.

image by jepoirrier

It’s that time again.

Every couple years some outsider comes up with the brilliant idea of reinventing ebooks. If it’s not Vook, it’s Atavist. If it’s not Inkling, it’s Colliloquy. If it’s not Byliner, it’s Atavist. And if it’s not Atavist, just wait 15 minutes and I’m sure another startup will be launched.

This time around the reinventor is London-based Visual Editions, which wants to "reimagine what the ebook can be from the ground up". VE announced in April that:

The realm of making digital books that are as playful and immersive as printed books are, is something we’ve been thinking about for a little while now. And we’re ridiculously excited to tell you, at long last, about our latest project Editions at Play, working with Universal Everything and Google’s Creative Lab to create a new space for digital books that couldn’t possibly live in print.

Visual Edition plans to work with Google to launch a new part of the Google Play Store called Editions at Play. It’s expected to launch sometime this fall, and will be "a place to showcase, celebrate, and bring out digital books that are immersive and were written and developed with the idea of being digital".

They don’t have anything to show yet, but they are talking about their goals in lofty terms like their hope that "Editions at Play will have a URL that transports readers to a digital location or even into the real world (well why not?), or chase you across the internet; we imagine digital literature that has no beginning or no end, or landscapes that can travel in any direction or have any number of characters, plots, side plots and inventions".

In short, Visual Editions has discovered the idea of enhanced ebooks, and they plan to fling all sorts of ideas at the wall and see what sticks.

From what I have read VE hasn’t proposed anything that could be called a new idea; it’s all been done before in either enhanced ebooks, apps, websites, games, ebook apps, or some combination thereof, only now the ideas are being flung in the name of improving ebooks.

Sigh. Why do so many outsiders think that ebooks are a broken or incomplete art form?

I am all for someone developing a new way to tell stories; this has led to better story-telling in games and other media. But what I don’t understand is why people keep insisting that their new art form has to replace ebooks.

It’s not just that I like ebooks the way they are, but also that every past effort to reinvent them has failed utterly for the simple reason that readers don’t want something different. They want ebooks as they are.

You can’t fix what isn’t broken, and yet so many people keep trying.

Okay, you can actually do that, but it requires genius on the level of Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos (surrounded by a lot of other really smart people), and judging by their user-unfriendly and visually ugly website it is clear that the folks at Visual Editions aren’t that smart.

But hey, at least the new attempt will have a pretty logo. (It’s an animated Gif, which by itself is enough to tell you where this project is headed.)

The ongoing furor over the changes to KDP Select payment terms continues to generate debate in all quarters. Earlier today TechCrunch weighed in on the story, and all the attention focused on Kindle Unlimited has lead to a novel discussion over on the Kboards forum.

Kboards member Vevo has noticed that the rise in the monthly funding pool for KDP Select was leading towards Kindle Unlimited being bigger than the Nook Store in terms of author revenue.

A lot of his math is utter bunk, but he does have a point. While we can’t directly compare the two figures (B&N reports their digital content revenue – including their cut – and the KDP Select figure is what authors actually receive) it is worth our time to consider them.

For example, in the fiscal year ending 2 May 2015, B&N reported digital content revenues of $177 million. Even if you take out B&N’s cut (and knock off another few points for video and app sales), that is still far greater than the $69 million and change that KDP Select paid to authors over the same period:

• May 2014: $1.2 million
• June 2014: $1.2 million
• July: $2.5 million
• 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 (the thirteenth month)

We are of course comparing B&N’s actual market share with the funds Amazon pays to authors. (We’re not comparing revenues generated by Kindle Unlimited from paying subscribers; Amazon won’t share that info.)

Over the past year the Nook Store was bigger, but here’s where things get fun. Over the last 3 months of B&N’s fiscal year, KDP Select was arguably paying authors more than the Nook Store.

KDP Select paid $27.1 million, while B&N reported $40 million in digital content sales. The best we can manage is a very fuzzy comparison between the two, but if we make a reasonable deduction from B&N’s sales figure then one could argue that KDP Select is actually a greater source of ebook revenue for the publishing industry.

On the other hand, the point can be argued the other way as well, and that is why I would much rather wait until B&N reports its next quarterly revenues. Then it will be more clear.

But on the gripping hand, whether KU or the Nook Store is larger matters less than the fact that we need to start making that comparison. The subscription ebook market has grown large enough that the largest player, Kindle Unlimited, should be mentioned in the same breath as the major ebookstores (Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, Nook, and Play Books).

Kindle Unlimited is on its way to proving Scribd CEO Trip Adler half right. Adler made a prediction in late 2013 that the leading player in the subscription ebook market would be seeing annual revenues of a billion dollars. It’s happening, just not happening to his company.

Instead, it looks like Kindle Unlimited could be the lucky one, with authors being the real winner.

The rise of Kindle Unlimited is going to directly boost author income, and if Nielsen’s consumer surveys are accurate then that growth will not come at the expense of the overall book market. Consumers who subscribe to an ebook subscription service spend more per month than non-subscribers, and so far there has been no sign that getting a subscription encourages a reader to buy less.

If this trend continues then the publishing industry will look very different in ten years.

Thanks, Mike!

images by ginnerobot, jetalone

There’s a story going around today that the upcoming models of the dual-screen Yotaphone will be dropping Android in favor of the Sailfish OS. A number of sites are picking up the wire report published by AFP yesterday, and on Saturday the story started getting picked up by tech blogs, including PocketNow, 9to5Google, Talk Android, Android Authority, and even the news feed at XDA Forums.

Unfortunately for the blogs that leapt before they looked, the story is not true. Yota Devices has denied the report. According to Yota Devices CEO Vlad Martyanov:

We do not have any ongoing development of Jolla version of YotaPhone. I can’t say how things will turn in the future. May be Sailfish will obtain a certain market share as mobile OS.

At this point of time, we are fully committed to Android and recently migrated our customer base to 5.0 and working on the next generation of Android OS.

The Yotaphone is a one-of-a-kind dual screen smartphone which combines an E-ink  screen and an LCD screen. (While there are a few competing dual-screen Android smartphones under development, the Yotaphone is still unique in that it’s the only one available right now.)

It’s both expensive and rare, but it also has a high enough profile that this change would have been announced by both Yota Devices and Jolla, the developers of Sailfish OS. The latter hasn’t announced or confirmed the news and the former has issued a denial.

And frankly, I’m not surprised. This story smelled funny from the beginning; the original report said that Sailfish had beat out Tizen, Samsung’s proprietary OS, for the privilege of being on the next Yotaphone.

That in and of itself failed the smell test (Tizen is actually slightly more useful than Sailfish), and furthermore it simply made no sense for Yota Devices to set aside the years of work they invested in developing Android for their dual-screen smartphone.

If nothing else, dropping Android would reduce the usefulness of the Yotaphone by about 90%. That strikes me as an excellent way to reduce the sales volume from low to none.

Update: I think we’re going to have to take the denial with a grain of salt. A reader that there’s context to the story which is being missed because it’s not being widely reported outside of Russia.

For one thing, the Russian govt wants to start using a mobile OS which is not controlled by an American company (for security reasons, obviously). They’ve chosen Sailfish, there’s even a report that a Russian Minister held a Yotaphone running Sailfish. What’s more, a Yota Devices rep has confirmed on a Russian forum that the firmware exists. They also said that it’s not nearly ready to be shipped. (All this background suddenly explains why two different Russian news sites reported this story last week.)

In short, yes, there is a Sailfish firmware and it might one day be released for use by the Russian govt. But it almost certainly will not supplant Android on the consumer models. So the story going around is still 95% wrong.

The first class action lawsuit filed by authors against the infamous vanity press Author Solutions has suffered a blow this week. US District Court Judge Denise Cote has handed down a ruling that denied class action status.

This lawsuit was originally filed in 2013 by the law firm Giskan Solotaroff Anderson & Stewart on behalf of authors Jodi Foster, Kelvin James, and Mary Simmons. The authors claim that they had been fleeced by Author Solutions.

The authors alleged unjust enrichment, fraud, and violation of various statutes and consumer protection acts. More specifically, the authors said that ASI had neglected to send accurate royalty statements and failed to pay royalties, introduced errors into the authors' books, and sold the authors worthless marketing services.

Having completed discovery in February 2015, the authors' lawyers filed for class certification, and in doing so they aired a lot of ASI’s dirty laundry in public. That certification was denied this week. According to Writers Beware:

That certification has now been denied, in a decision handed down by Judge Denise Cote on July 1. From what I can tell on an initial reading, the decision seems to boil down to the fact that in one of the subclasses they were seeking to certify, plaintiffs weren’t able to meet certification requirements; and in the other, weren’t able to demonstrate a clear pattern of deception on the part of AS that could apply to everyone in the proposed class.

The ruling can be read in full here.

Giskan Solotaroff is probably going to appeal this decision. They are also pushing forward on the second lawsuit they filed against Author Solutions earlier this year.  That suit has been consolidated with another lawsuit brought by two individual plaintiffs, Everette et al. v. Author Solutions LLC.

Writers Beware, TIPM

image  by steakpinball

With the news coming out earlier this week that Scribd was cutting back its romance catalog (including titles from Harlequin), I’m sure some Scribd subscribers are thinking about cancelling their subscription (or have already done so).

And so I want to pass along a friendly warning about Scribd’s cancellation process.

Many companies have a relatively obvious process to cancel an online subscription. They may make you jump through hoops, beg you not to leave, but in the end I’ve rarely had trouble canceling a service.

Scribd, on the other hand, has set up their cancellation process so that it is easy to trick yourself into thinking that you’ve canceled your account before you’ve actually completed the process.

I had to find this out the hard way, and I’m hoping you can learn from my mistake.

Back in May I decided that I no longer needed my Scribd account, and I canceled the monthly payment – or so I thought. Much to my surprise, I discovered earlier this week that I was still subscribed to Scribd.

It turns out that, after navigating through 3 screens and after having told Scribd three times to cancel my subscription, I hadn’t actually canceled the account.

No, there was a 4th screen where I was required to scroll down, find the correct text entry area, give Scribd feedback, and cancel my account a 4th time before it would take.

Personally, I find the design of that process to be deceptive, but the more important issue here is that I want to help you avoid my mistake.

If you canceled your account at Scribd, go make sure they’re no longer charging you. And if you decide to cancel your account, please be more careful that I was.

We don’t want you to become part of the "gym membership" part of Scribd’s business plan (continue to charge people for a service they aren’t using). Scribd costs $9 a month, and if you’re not reading the ebooks that money is better spent elsewhere.

image by W_Minshull

After nearly two years of development, Barnes & Noble launched a new site that has some asking whether this will be the digital solution to B&N’s ecommerce woes.

I, however, am wondering how much damage the new site will do to B&N’s Nook sales.

The new site went live on Tuesday, and it is a mess. While it looks slightly cleaner and less cluttered than the previous design (Wayback Machine) the biggest change is in the backend for the Nook Store.

Barnes & Noble has taken a clunky but functional digital library platform and turned into a non-working piece of crap.

I have spent a couple of hours today trying to access the ebooks I bought from B&N, to no avail. Where I used to be able to archive, download, or (in some cases) read an ebook online, now I can only browse the content and be frustrated by an inability to use it.

The listing pages for many of the ebooks in my Nook Library have vanished, and the read online option has disappeared with them. What few links still work lead to the store pages for the ebooks.

Yes, B&N won’t let me download the ebook I bought but they will let me try to buy a replacement. And when I click the buy button I am shown this:

In case you were wondering, yes, you can actually buy from the B&N website; the process is just fucked up.

I have contacted B&N, both PR and customer service, and asked for help. I have not received a response, but I plan to watch and see how long it takes B&N to fix this.

***

There has been doubt in my mind as to whether B&N is really interested in keeping up the Nook platform. While they haven’t killed the Nook outright they also haven’t really invested in the platform in the past year.

The only major improvements and new services were designed more to make the platform attractive to investors when B&N still planned to spin it off, and now that that plan has been set aside I think apathy has set in.

I can understand the reluctance; digital revenues continue to drop quarter after quarter. Nook continues to be a money pit so B&N might take a pessimistic view and simply assume that the digital side is dead.

And if they do hold that view, they won’t make great strides to fix this issue. Instead they’ll ignore it and fix the other problems first.

But if B&N does fix this issue promptly then it would indicate that they’re still interested in the Nook, and that might give us a clue as to what B&N is planning to do this fall.

There’s been some speculation that B&N is going to update the Nook Glowlight this year. I’ve been hearing rumors from store-level staff about a new model, and a couple days ago Joanna Stern mentioned in her review of the new Paperwhite that:

… and Barnes & Noble hasn’t updated its Nook Glowlight in nearly two years. (I expect the company to refresh it this fall.)

I don’t think that is going to happen; B&N has previously shown no interest. But if B&N fixes the Nook Store promptly, I would change my mind.

A repaired Nook Store is one that B&N plans to keep. If it stays broken then the best we can hope for is that B&N sells it off quickly.

Photo credit: J.P. Gownder via Forrester

When news broke on Tuesday that Scribd was cutting romance titles from its catalog, all the stories focused on indie published titles from either Smashwords or Draft2Digital but the activity was not limited to just those two distributors.

At least one other ebook distributor was impacted, and Scribd has confirmed today what readers have been saying for a couple days now and what my own eyes saw in the Scribd catalog: that Harlequin, the world’s largest romance publisher, is feeling the pain as well.

eBook Partnership, a UK-based ebook distributor, confirmed that they too had received a notice from Scribd. They were unable to share specifics, but did note that they had only started to upload to Scribd fairly recently. Given that Scribd is cutting the more popular titles there is every chance that titles distributed through eBook Partnership might not have been in Scribd’s catalog for long enough to draw attention.

Similarly, BookBaby does not expect to have any titles pulled from Scribd’s catalog due to the simple fact that this ebook distributor doesn’t distribute romance titles to Scribd.

I was told that Bookbaby’s deal with Scribd initially excluded romance and erotica titles. That later changed, but those two genres were never a significant part of BookBaby’s catalog. Furthermore, BookBaby’s system is set up to restrict Scribd if the client selected erotica as a sub-genre, so it’s unlikely this distributor will feel the pinch.

Harlequin, on the other hand, is going to notice. Scribd has confirmed that titles from Harlequin, as well other traditional publishers had been removed from the Scribd catalog. This detail had been left unsaid earlier this week, but now I have been told that the "adjustments to the romance catalog are being handled identically with all publishers who provide us with romance content".

Harlequin had signed a deal with Scribd last October to give Scribd an exclusive on 15,000 titles from Harlequin’s backlist. That exclusive had likely expired by April when Harlequin signed a deal with Playster, but the 15,000 titles still made up a huge chunk of Scridb’s romance catalog.

According to user reports, Scribd’s romance catalog had 30,000 titles before the cull. That same user reported that the romance catalog now boasts 8,000 titles.

Edit: It’s been made clear that the 30,000 refers contemporary romance, not the entire genre. But if we apply it across the genre then this is a huge reduction.

I was a little surprised by that detail; like many I was under the impression that romance titles made up a major chunk of the 300 thousand plus titles in the Smashwords catalog, and that most of the romance titles had made their way to Scribd.

I have asked Scribd to confirm this detail, but they would only go so far as to say that "we have not specified the amount of titles".

Edit: Okay, now Scribd is willing to say that the figure is not accurate. Gee, thanks, guys.

While we won’t know the true scale of the cull until Scribd shares those figures, I do think we can point to the cause.

It would have to be that deal with Harlequin, and the subsequent promotion.

Scribd had been promoting its subscription ebook service with a 3-month free trial. It was widely available and heavily promoted by both Scribd and Harlequin. One author I know had even mentioned it in one of her giveaways.

Harlequin and Scribd were both encouraging voracious romance readers to read as much as they want for 3 months and not pay a dime.

In retrospect that was a terrible idea, but I would think that Harlequin at least should have foreseen the problems this would cause.

But would they care, and would they speak out against the idea?

No one is talking about that deal (not to the press, anyway) so there’s no way to know for sure. But it is clear from this week’s events that everyone is aware of the limitations of the subscription ebook model now.

As I and many others pointed out when Scribd and Oyster launched in late 2013, a subscription plan can’t afford to pay book publishers at the same rate retailers pay. This week has shown that the service only works until it is actually used as intended, at which point the company behind starts bleeding profusely.

The readers who would get the most value out of a subscription ebook service are also the ones who drove Scribd to cut their catalog this week. And to be clear, that was just a stopgap measure and not a true solution; those readers are still subscribed to Scribd (and to a lesser degree, Oyster) and so the problem is merely abated but not resolved.

In the long run the only solutions may be to either switch to payment terms similar to Kindle Unlimited or drop the unlimited aspects of certain Netflix-style ebook services.

TotalBoox, for example, is has developed a service where pay for what you read, but based on their recent press releases is having trouble drawing the attention of consumers or publishers. (A similar service proved unworkable when PaperC tried it a couple years ago.)

Similarly, Blloon launched with the goal of offering a much more limited service with restrictions on how much a subscriber can read in a given month.

Blloon is still in beta in the UK, but unfortunately it has gone down the same path as Scribd and Oyster. Blloon is now being pitched as an all you can read service with 700,000 titles and a cost of  £7.99 per month. That is no more a workable model than the service Scribd and Oyster offer, and I expect Blloon will suffer the same fate.

image  by docoverachiever

July marks the start of the new payment terms for KDP Select. Where Amazon used to pay participating authors based on the number of times an ebook was loaned in Kindle Owner’s Lending Library or KDP Select, under the new terms Amazon will pay each author based on the number of pages that have been read by subscribers.

Amazon has defined a new standard for a page called the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC)*, and at the end of the month they’ll count the KENPC and divide it into the funding pool.

Amazon hasn’t announced the total funding for KDP Select for July, and we obviously don’t know how many pages will be read. So at this point the payment per page is a little hard to pin down, but one author has come up with an estimate based on what we know about current activity.

According to Morris Rosenthal’s back of the envelope calculation:

My first estimate for the Kindle Select royalty system that starts today is $0.0058, or 0.58 cents per page read. This is based on Amazon’s announcement that the global pool for July will be at least $11 million, and that last month, the number of pages read was almost 1.9 billion.

I think that his estimate is a little high (KU subscribers will read more pages) but I also think it is in the same neighborhood as the per KENPC payment for this month. That’s good for authors because they can now use that estimate to calculate how much they might get paid for each book.

An author can calculate the payment they’ll get for a book by finding the book’s KENPC and multiplying it by the estimated royalty payment. Amazon says you can see a book’s KENPC listed on the "Promote and Advertise" page in the author’s Bookshelf (they can also see the total pages read on their Sales Dashboard report).

Amazon is letting authors opt out of KDP Select if they disagree with the new payment terms, but that’s a tough decision to make when an author doesn’t know how much money they could be earning.

but now we know that if a reader finishes a book with a KENPC of 100 then the author will be paid around 58 cents.

That is considerably less than the $1.35 Amazon was paying for an ebook loaned during April 2015, but then again Amazon was paying that fee for each short story or novel read by a subscriber, no matter the length. That tended to reward shorter works over longer ones, but the new system removes the financial incentive to split a work into multiple units.

Instead authors will be rewarded for volume. That means that some could be tempted to write even more short stories and novellas so they can stuff Kindle Unlimited with their work, but I don’t know at this time whether that trick will be successful.

What do you think?

Is the half a cent per page worth it?

I would like to say that this is the better option than what Scribd did yesterday when they reduced their romance catalog from 30,000 titles to around 8,000 titles. But to be honest that argument smacks of Amazon fanboyism but it is still some truth to it.

P.S. Here’s Amazon’s explanation for the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC): "We calculate KENPC based on standard settings (e.g. font, line height, line spacing, etc.), and we use KENPC to measure the number of pages customers read in your book, starting with the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of your book. Amazon typically sets SRL at chapter 1 so readers can start reading the core content of your book as soon as they open it. Non-text elements within books including images, charts and graphs will count toward a book’s KENPC."

image by Asim Bijarani, nan palmero

Apple got a lot of attention for yesterday’s iOS 8.4 update, but that wasn’t the only release to come down the pipe.

The company also released a new version of iBooks Author which finally gave that OSX app the ability to make ebooks designed to fit the iPhone’s screen. Authors and publishers can now use iBooks Author to create fixed layout ebooks which look good on the iPhone’s screen.

Update: I’m running slow this morning and I missed the real story here, which is that iBooks Author now offers Epub templates which can be exported as Epub3 files. (I learned this thanks to an email from a reader; thanks, Kira!) Those files work on the iPhone, but they will also work on a lot of other reading apps including Adobe Digital Editions for Windows and iOS.

According to Apple, the new Epub templates:

• Export to ePub3 format.
• Allow the reader to read in both paginated and scrolling view.
• Allow the reader to change the font size in the book.
• Can include some interactive widgets, such as movies, audio clips, HTML, and image galleries.
• Can be viewed in any ePub reader that supports ePub3.

That’s a huge change for Apple, and it changes the entire tone of this release. With that in mind, I’ve deleted some irrelevant parts of the post. You can find a new conclusion at the end of the post which better reflects the real story.

Talking New Media started working with the new templates yesterday, and they report that the templates are far less capable than what a developer can do when creating an ebook for the iPad:

I’m discovering serious problems with the new iBooks Author and its support of the iPhone. I found that if you use one of the ePub templates and have a video that you want to autoplay it will. If you have built a book with one of the older templates and have an autoplay video it will not autoplay. Big problem.

The other thing I noticed is that when building an eBook using one of the older templates you could disable portrait, or what they now call scrolling view. This can’t be done with the new ePub templates (not surprising since it is ePub). But this means you really cannot design for landscape, something required by many designers.

What we have here is a compromise: you can publish new books with limited design for the iPhone, and have your older eBooks work on the iPhone. But if you want a truly interactive eBook you’ll still have to design for the iPad. That may be disappointing news to many publishers, what with iPad sales declining.

So Apple will now let you make an Epub3 file?

That’s a huge deal, and I’m not exaggerating. When iBooks Author launched in early 2012 it only made ebooks for the iPad. It was a tool for making iBooks-format digital textbooks, and Apple launched it to support their goal of selling more iPads to schools.

Last week iBooks Author only made ebooks which worked only on Apple hardware. Now it can make ebooks which work everywhere. They won’t be as pretty as what you can make for the iPad but they should work.

Apple has torn down part of one of their walled gardens, and enabled anyone working in that garden to produce content for other devices. Something tells me they have assessed their location in the market and decided that they would rather have creators use their tools to make ebooks for other platforms rather than see creators use someone else’s (possibly inferior) tools.

iBooks Author is free in the Mac App Store.

Scribd has just run up against one of the known problems with subscription ebook services.

Mark Coker has announced over on the Smashwords blog that Scribd is thinning out its catalog. More specifically, Scribd is now pulling titles from what is probably its most read genre: romance.

Effective immediately, I estimate 80-90 percent Smashwords romance and erotica titles will be dropped by Scribd, including nearly all of our most popular romance titles.  Books priced at free are safe and will remain in their catalog.

Based on what I’ve been able to glean, the lower the price and the higher the word count, the better the odds the book will remain.  Few books priced $3.99 and above will remain.  Scribd is not publicly revealing the formulas for what stays and what goes, probably because much of this is still in flux. They’re cutting all publishers and distributors with the same blunt knife.

It’s ugly.  The problem for Scribd is that romance readers are heavy readers, and Scribd pays publishers retailer-level margins for the books.

Neither Mark nor I know for certain why Scribd is doing this, but I agree with Mark’s conclusion.

Update: The culling has also hit authors and publisher who distribute through Draft2Digital. An author broke the news on Twitter, and Bob Mayer confirmed the news and posted the email he got from D2D.

Romance readers are voracious readers, and Scribd and Oyster were paying what was effectively the wholesale price anytime a reader read more than 10% of a book. To be more exact, Mark revealed in late 2013 that authors were earning 60% of the retail price when that threshold was reached.

Obviously that was going to be unsustainable in the long run (this is why Amazon went with a pool of money for KDP Select). In fact, I’m surprised that Scribd waited so long.

Scribd has been been paying authors at that "hello bankruptcy" rate for the past 18 months, while in that time Scribd has raised capital at least once (possibly twice). I would have thought that the VCs would have pushed for this culling as a condition of their investment (I would have), but I guess they were satisfied at the time with Scribd’s growth and the rate at which was burning through money.

Scribd has released a statement, but it was basically a shorter version of the text Scribd was sending to publishers.

Here’s that email:

Dear Publisher,

As you know, in starting Scribd, we bore the majority of the risk when establishing a business model that paid publishers the same amount as the retail model for each book read by a Scribd subscriber. Now, nearly two years later, the Scribd catalog has grown from 100,000 titles to more than one million. We’re proud of the service we’ve built and we’re constantly working to expand the selection across genres to give our readers the broadest possible list of books for $8.99 per month.

We’ve grown to a point where we are beginning to adjust the proportion of titles across genres to ensure that we can continue to expand the overall size and variety of our service. We will be making some adjustments, particularly to romance, and as a result some previously available titles may no longer be available.

We look forward to continuing to grow subscribers, increase overall reading, and increase total publisher payouts in a way that works for everyone over the long term. We of course want to keep as many of your authors and titles on Scribd as we can, so we’d love to discuss our plans and how we can best work with you going forward.

Thank you for your business.

I don’t know yet just how many publishers have received this email but I suspect that the culling is hitting traditional romance publishers just as heavily as it is impacting indie authors.

Curiously, Scribd is not talking about culling other genres (the statement only mentions romance) at this time but I suspect that SF&F will be the next to go under the knife.

SF readers are nearly as voracious as romance readers, which means they are draining Scribd’s pocketbook almost as fast. Scribd is going to have to get that loss under control, and since they’ve decided to cull the catalog and not the subscriber base, well …

So tell me, do you think this is going to work?

I don’t. My feeling is that the smaller catalog will be less attractive, leading readers to decide to cancel their subscriptions. Yes, that will get rid of the heaviest readers but it will also drive away the lighter readers.

Scribd needs readers who only read a single book a month; they’re Scribd’s bread and butter. If they abandon the service, Scribd is doomed.

image by mikecogh

Pundits have been hoping for a couple years now that Apple would give the iPhone support for ebooks made with iBooks Author, and now that it has arrived I do not think it lives up to the anticipation.

The iOS 8.4 update was released today, bringing with it Apple Music,  bug fixes, and new features in iBooks on the iPhone. The app now supports the display of the fixed layout ebooks made with iBooks Author. Those ebooks were generally made to fit a 9.7″ iPad screen, so for obvious reasons Apple had previously stopped you from trying to view them on a 4″ iPhone.

But now that we have iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus (4.7″ and 5.5″ screens) Apple may have thought the screens were big enough that they could handle squeezing such a large page size down to a smaller area.

I’m not sure I’d agree. Talking New Media has beaten everyone to the punch and posted a video which shows what an ebook designed for the iPad looks like on the iPhone.

The tl;dr version is that it looks about the same as if you took an 8.5×11 PDF and zoomed it to fit a smartphone’s screen. Apple does add a few tweaks to improve the experience, including a TOC menu and an option to zoom in on a body of text (this can be either a true zoom or more of a reading mode where everything but the body of text is stripped away).

It’s workable in a pinch, but I agree with TNM that it would be nice if Apple would update iBooks Author with new iPhone-centric templates. That would let creators update their ebooks with designs that properly fit iPhone screens.

Update: And Apple has listened. The new version of iBooks Author includes iPhone templates.