Nate Hoffelder

They’ve done it again.

In 2010 Kobo disrupted the ereader market when it released its first Kobo Reader. That wasn’t a very good device, and Kobo didn’t have a huge market share, but Kobo was selling it cheap in the US and Canada. Its $149 price tag forced B&N and Amazon to drop the prices of their models, resulting in a much cheaper ereader market.

And now Kobo has done it again.

This Toronto-based ebook company just launched the Kobo Glo HD, a 6″ ereader with specs similar to the Kindle Voyage, only at a much lower price.

The Glo HD sports a 6″ Carta E-ink display with a screen resolution of 1448 x 1072 and a sharpness on par with Retina screens (300ppi). It runs Kobo’s software on a 1GHz CPU with 4GB internal storage. There’s no card slot, but it does of course have Wifi, a frontlight, and a touchscreen.

After looking at the leaked images, the leaked quick start guide (PDF), and reading the press release (PDF), it’s safe to say that the Glo HD won’t have the nifty edge-to-edge touchscreen found on the Kindle Voyage, but I’m fine with that.

I never liked that touchscreen, and what’s more Kobo makes up for the lack. The new Kobo Glo HD is scheduled to ship in the US, NZ, Canada, and Australia on the first, and it will cost:

• $129.99 (CA/US)
• €129.99 (EU)
• £109.99 (UK)
• $179.99 (AU)
• $219.99 (NZ)

I can’t speak for the markets down under, but the US, EU, and UK prices are equal to the regular price of the Kindle Paperwhite in those markets.

To put it simply, Kobo has redefined what a premium ereader is and what it should cost. They have released an ereader which is comparable to the Kindle Voyage, and then they knocked $90 off of the regular price.

This leaves the Kobo Aura H2O, with its 6.8″ screen and $179 price tag, as the sole premium ereader on the market. The Kindle Voyage and the Kobo Glo HD are now mid-range ereaders.

And as for the Kindle Paperwhite, well, it is going to have to get a lot cheaper.

Is anyone else looking forward to Amazon’s response?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Br5mbK_-5A

Reports of the demise of the German ebook startup txtr have been mildly exaggerated.

An email went out late last week to German publishers, informing them that txtr was being taken over by a European retail conglomerate. Publishers Lunch reported that Media-Saturn-Holding, the parent company of the Media Markt, Saturn, and Redcoon chains, will be adopting txtr as its ebook platform.

The retail services company Storecast.de will run the platform on Media-Saturn-Holding’s behalf. It’s not clear who owns what at this time, but Media-Saturn-Holding reportedly took on the responsibility for payment obligations and contractual relationships as of 1 April.

It’s also hired a number of former txtr employees, including Dan Vidra, but not all the employees will be making the transition. Txtr had previously reported that some of its staff had departed the company to go work at Zalando, an online fashion platform. Also, a number of former txtr staffers, including former CEO Thomas Leliveld, had already left the company last year and decamped to launch Blloon, a new ebook startup which offers a subscription ebook service.

With annual revenues of over 21 billion euros, Media-Saturn-Holding operates stores in 15 countries in Europe, including Russia and Turkey. This makes the conglomerate about as good of a fit for the late ebook startup as we could have hoped following txtr’s bankruptcy in January.

I will admit that I was somewhat surprised that Rakuten isn’t the new owner, given that the Japanese conglomerate recently bought OverDrive. I would have thought that txtr’s tech would be worth buying, but now that so many employees have flown the coop Rakuten may have decided that txtr was no longer worth the expense.

Txtr has not yet informed its customers about the changeover, and if I get an email I will amend this post. I have also queried Media-Saturn-Holding and asked for more details on this story. I’ll post their response when i get it.

Publishers Lunch

We’ve all encountered strange formatting in ebooks, but this next one takes the cake.

Writing over at Science Blogs, Martin Rundkvist reports that the last couple ebooks he bought from Google Play Books were surprisingly terse:

On my Android smartphone, the OCRed texts in my e-book copies of Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass(2012) and Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE (2011) have lost all their apostrophes. All their quotation marks. All their long dashes. And all their diacritic characters. When Stephenson writes “naïveté”, my e-book says “navet”, which is French for turnip. When the problem first showed up, in Roberts’ book, I actually thought he wrote non-standard English as a futuristic device.

When you run operating systems in non-English language modes, like Swedish or even Chinese, you get used to misidentified characters, with ÅÄÖÜ becoming all kinds of junk symbols. But this doesn’t look like a case of that. Google’s reader software is just quietly omitting some of the most common characters in English novels!

As a geek and an ebook blogger, I like to collect stories of unusual formatting and other technical errors. Whether it’s Google deleting ebooks just because someone crossed the wrong international boundary, or strange text inserted into a copy of Game of Thrones, formatting errors are fascinating puzzles which are fun to solve.

In the case of the missing punctuation, I wasn’t able to replicate the error. But I would bet that Martin encountered a bug which involved the user language being set to Swedish and the language code for the ebook set to English.

I’m not sure where he got the idea that OCR had something to do with this, though; the ebooks in question are new enough that they were published digitally, and not converted from a scanned copy.

Does anyone know how this happened? Have you seen similar errors?

image by dlofink

Hints have been circulating for over a month now that Kobo would launch an ereader this spring, and it looks like they just came true.

Update: the Kobo Glo HD launched on Tuesday, 7 April.

Numerous retail sites in New Zealand and Australia have leaked details about the Kobo Glo HD, Kobo’s next ereader. Sporting a 6″ E-ink Carta screen, the Glo HD is built to be a competitor to the Kindle Voyage.

According to the NZ retail site Mighty Apes, this device is set to ship in New Zealand on 1 May 2015, and carry a local price of $219 NZD.  Another source puts the Australian price at $149 AUD.

An earlier rumor said the US price would be $149, or about $50 less than the Kindle Voyage. I have no information on a US launch, but I would expect the Glo HD to ship in the rest of the world by the end of the month.

We actually know very few details at this time; in fact, I haven’t even gotten an invite to the launch event. But the leaked listings do tell us that the Glo HD will have the same 6″ screen as the Kindle Voyage, pack in both a frontlight and touchscreen, and ship with 4GB of internal storage.

Curiously, there’s no mention of a microSD card slot. While it’s possible that this detail was left out, there’s also a chance that the Glo HD doesn’t have a card slot at all.

Kobo Glo HD Specs

• 6” Carta E Ink HD touchscreen
• 1448×1072 resolution
• 300 ppi
• Built in ComfortLight
• Battery life of up to 2 months
• 4 GB on-board memory

This is a thin report, I know, but I can flesh it out with a few more details. After googling the model number (N437-KU-BK-K-EP), we know that the Glo HD will have an optional sleepcover.

I also discovered that Kobo leaked the FCC ID (NOIKBN437). Kobo hasn’t filed the FCC report yet, but what with all of the details and the video I am certain that they’re going to do so in short order.

The Glo HD is one of two ereaders which we expect Kobo to launch this spring. The other model, codenamed Pika, is going to be a budget model with a screen resolution of 800 x 600, and a touchscreen but no frontlight.

The latest rumor said that both models would launch by Easter. That hasn’t happened, but I do expect a launch this week.

If this works out the way I expect, Kobo will carry 3 ereader models. At the high end we’ll have the Aura H2O, which will have a 6.8″ screen and be priced to compete with the Kindle Voyage. The new Kobo Glo HD will be priced to compete with the Kindle Paperwhite, while Pika is Kobo’s equivalent of the $79 Kindle.

MobileRead

Thanks, David!

Sony has opened a new chapter in its long history as a DRM pioneer.

The news is a little late crossing my desk, but two weeks ago Sony announced a new partnership with Immanens, a French company which develops distribution technology for digital publishing companies. Immanens will adopt Sony’s new URMS (User Rights Management System) DRM in the platforms it develops for third parties.

Under development since 2011, URMS is based on an ebook DRM standard created by the Marlin Development Community. The standard is touted as being more flexible and more secure than either industry standard Kindle DRM or the Adobe DRM used on EPub ebooks and some PDFs.

According to what I was told in October 2014 and January 2015, Sony’s new DRM supports a variety of business models and uses, including lending, gifting, sharing, and (assuming the publishers will go along with it) reselling ebooks. The platform is also designed so libraries can loan ebooks for a variable length of time and readily renew loaned ebooks (this is not so easy under OverDrive).

The platform also has benefits for users. Sony told me last year that consumers will be able to combine all of their ebooks on to a "common bookshelf". Library ebooks, gifted ebooks, and ebooks purchased from stores which support URMS DRM can be stored on a common bookshelf and then transferred to any compatible device.

Given that we know of exactly one company which will be using the DRM, it’s not clear how that common bookshelf will work out in practice, nor is it clear whether the DRM will be more secure than its competition.

Sony boasted to PW that URMS will offer increased security. Based on the assumption that any widely used DRM will be hacked, URMS is designed so that it can be updated with patches that repair any security holes found and exploited by hackers.

That is not a new concept in the history of DRM, and it hasn’t worked out well in the past. Amazon, for example, has repeatedly updated its Kindle DRM over the past 7 years, and as a result it now has to support multiple generations of Kindle DRM which are still being used on discontinued Kindle models.

Not so coincidentally, Sony has also used DRM updates to try to keep DVDs secure. There’s no evidence that the technique was effective, but I do know of at least one occasion where consumers got screwed.

In 2007 Sony started distributing DVDs which used a new flavor of DRM and neglected to make sure that all the DVD player manufacturers had updated their firmwares.  A lot of customers complained on Techdirt, Slashdot, and elsewhere that their newly purchased DVDs wouldn’t play on their DVD players.

Sony did eventually fix that problem. Let’s hope that they also found a way to avoid a similar problem with URMS. Let’s also hope that the new DRM is flawless, otherwise it’s going to vanish into a crowded market with nary a peep.

Sony is planning to license its DRM to tech companies in the educational, corporate, and library markets, but there is also a chance that it might also show up in the consumer ebook market as well.

While conventional wisdom says that the ebook market is dominated by 3 DRM platforms (Kindle, iBooks, and Adobe DE), that is not strictly true. Many of the smaller ebook platforms, including Google, Kobo, Scribd, Oyster, and Logos (to name a few), use a unique type of DRM internally (Google and Kobo support Adobe DE DRM as well).

The current market fragmentation suggests the possibility that Sony might license URMS to a new entrant in to the consumer ebook market.

"We’re not pretending we’re going to replace proprietary systems at Amazon and Apple," Spiros Rally, the VP of DigitalWorks at Sony DADC, told PW. "However, we do think that we offer a powerful alternative for trade publishing in the library space, and around direct-to-consumer sales."

images  by rebopper, _Max-B

Last month the culture ministers of 4 European countries called for lower taxes on ebooks, and now French publishers are launching a campaign. France’s Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE) has launched a website where it invites visitors to educate EU commissioners on the difference between books and not books.

The site asks supporters to "Tell the European Commission (@UE_Commission) about what is a book and what is not a book" be either tweeting a picture of an ordinary object along with the hashtag #ThatIsNotABook, or the picture of a book or ebook tagged with #ThatIsABook.

This site is the latest stage in a five-year-long effort to change the EU’s tax laws so that paper and digital books are taxed the same.

While paper books are seen as a cultural item and thus taxed at a lower rate, ebooks are viewed by EU regulators as a service, and they’re taxed at the full VAT (17% to 25%, depending on the country).

France and Luxembourg challenged that tax policy in 2012. They passed laws which lowered the taxes collected on ebooks, and were subsequently sued by the European Commission. Earlier this year the European Court of Justice ruled that the lower tax rates were illegal, and had to be raised to the full VAT rates.

That ruling was a minor setback, and it has deterred no one. This movement has broad support across Europe, including in Italy and Malta, each of which illegally lowered the VAT collected on ebooks, as well as in Poland, Germany, and France, where the culture ministers released a joint statement calling for the lower tax rate. The Italian culture minister also signed the statement.

Publishing Perspective

Scholarly Kitchen posted an article yesterday which explains why Amazon is so much better at marketing and selling than the book publishing industry.

Joseph Esposito uses the post to lay out his vision for a new type of bookstore – one which could compete with Amazon. Describing Amazon as a destination site, Esposito sees its success as primarily due to pull marketing. In other words, Amazon draws people in by offering a huge warehouse of books and a great shopping experience.

To compete with Amazon, Esposito thinks publishers need to adapt to the new nature of the internet:

But the Web is now being brought to us; it’s evolving into a push medium. All that time we spend looking at the news feeds for Facebook, Flipboard, and Twitter point to where the Web is going and where new bookstores will have to be. To build a bookstore that goes head to head with Amazon is foolhardy. It would be easier to carry the ball into the defensive line of the Chicago Bears.

So a new bookstore is going to have to bring its offerings to where people are rather than the other way around; a new bookstore has to be ubiquitous. A recent example of this comes from HarperCollins,which has created an arrangement with Twitter to sell copies of the bestselling Divergent series of young adult novels from within individual tweets.

The fact that this is a topic of discussion in the publishing industry, in 2015 no less – folks, this is why Amazon is winning whatever war publishing feels it is fighting with the retailer.

It’s not that Esposito is wrong so much as that he is five years late to the discussion. Both Amazon and authors started push marketing at least 5 years ago.

Authors have been on social media since at least 2010, and they’ve been pushing people to bookstore to buy books. This concept is so well established that there are dozens of blog posts by indie authors which discuss the nuances of how to go about it.

What’s more, Amazon mastered the concept of push marketing even further back. I don’t know exactly when Amazon launched its affiliate network, but that was explicitly designed to give other websites a financial incentive to push customers to Amazon (ht to Marshall Poe for making a similar argument in TSK’s comment section).

Tell me, can I make more money by pushing people to HarperCollins' bookstore than by sending them to Amazon? No? Then why would I bother?

Speaking of HarperCollins, they are a great example of a publisher trying and failing to market and sell directly to consumers. Have you visited HarperCollins.com, and tried to browse, search, or buy an ebook?

I have, and so have several commenters on The Passive Voice. It’s terrible. If, as Esposito posits, direct retail is the future of publishing, then HC literally cannot build a retail site to save its life.

But never mind HarperCollins; let’s consider what Esposito wrote next:

From a conceptual point of view, the most interesting project I have stumbled upon for “post-destination” bookstores is that of Chris Kubica, who explained his work in two articles in Publishers Weekly, which you can find here and here. Kubica gathered a group of publishing people in New York to brainstorm about a post-Amazon bookstore. The conclusion was that each individual potentially could be the site or source of a bookstore–a bookstore of one. With seven billion people on the planet (and growing), that’s potentially seven billion bookstores. Now, how can Amazon compete with that?

Easy. Amazon thought of it first, they thought of it ages ago, and they do it better than anyone in publishing.

Folks, if you want to beat Amazon then you need to come up with an idea first. You can’t decide to adopt an SOP five years after it becomes an SOP. That’s not innovative; it’s reactionary.

image by dennisforgione

Some companies might want to spread out their product launches in order to get more press, but not Google. The ad network and its hardware partners announced a slew of new devices today which run Chrome on everything from a dongle to a convertible tablet to super-cheap laptops.

First up is the Asus Chromebit. Powered by a quad-core Rockchip 3288 CPU, the Chromebit packs most of a Chromebook into an HDMI dongle which plugs into your TV.

There’s no word on screen resolution or storage, but we do know that the Chromefit has wifi, BT, a full-sized USB port (for peripherals) and a mini USB port for power. It’s due out later this year, and is expected to cost less than $100. – Slashgear

To the best of my knowledge, this is Chrome’s first official dongle (not counting illicit models out of China), but it won’t be the only new Chrome device this summer.

Hisense and Haier are each launching a $149 Chromebook today. The Haier Chromebook 11 (pre-order at Amazon) and the Hisense Chromebook (pre-order at Walmart) sport identical price tags and quad-core Rockchip 3288 CPUs.

They come with 2GB RAM (expandable to 16GB), 16GB internal storage, a microSD card slot, a couple USB ports, HDMI, and an 11.6″ screen. Or so says Walmart; Amazon is quoting a different CPU speed (on the same CPU) for the Haier  Chromebook 11.  But Amazon is also quoting a longer 10 hour battery life on that slower CPU, so perhaps Haier stepped the speed down to extend the battery life. – Liliputing

And last but not least, Asus also revealed the next best thing to a Chrome tablet today.

The Chromebook Flip combines a low-power Chrome OS rig with the body style made popular by the Lenovo Yoga.

This $249 Chromebook features a 10.1″ screen, making it the smallest Chromebook to date. It runs Chrome OS 42 on a quad-core Rockchip 3288 CPU with 4GB RAM and 16GB internal storage, and it also has Wifi, Bluetooth, 2USB ports, HDMI.

The Flip will ship some  time this summer. Until then, we’re going to have to content ourselves with a few product images, and brief hands on reports. The Verge, for example, was intrigued by the Flip’s ability to switch between laptop and tablet mode. – OMGChrome

Flickr announced on Monday that it was adding CC-Zero and Public Domain licensing options. Users who want to share their images freely with the public now have the option to release their work with no strings attached.

The site has offered CC licensing since 2004, but for all the nuances built into the Creative Commons license it simply doesn’t cover all situations. For example, photos taken by the US government are automatically in the public domain, and the same applies when a member scans and uploads a century old photograph.

What’s more, lately Flickr has been asked by their users to provide more options for uploading new images and releasing them without restriction. For example, last week SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space flight company, uploaded hundreds of photos last week but had to use a CC-By license because that was the least restrictive option.

Today those photos are labeled public domain. They’re free for anyone to use, without no restrictions (moral rights excepted).

Or at least that is what SpaceX and Flickr intend; I’m not sure that the legal status of a preemptively declared PD work will stick.

As in most countries, the US has automatic copyright protection. Make a work and boom, it’s under copyright. But what the US lacks is any way to formally release a work from copyright. This in part inspired first Creative Commons licensing and later CC-Zero.

Under a CC-Zero license, someone still owns the copyright, and they’re granting permission for all to use the work willy-nilly. This differs from the public domain, where no one and everyone owns the copyright.

If someone releases a work under a CC-Zero license they still have the option of changing the license at a later time, but a work released into the public domain would theoretically be free until the end of time.

That is how it’s supposed to work, but here in the US we have courts which have repeatedly yanked works out of the public domain and placed them back under copyright. What’s more, the US copyright law also has termination clauses which would enable someone to terminate existing licenses after 35 years (TechDirt discussed this issue in depth in January).

That means that a work released into the public domain could be returned to copyright 35 years later – perhaps by a creator’s heirs. The heirs would then sue to regain control, and they’d probably win.

I could easily see that scenario happening with a work which had been preemptively declared public domain, can’t you?

Ars Technica

image by Alexandre Dulaunoy

When Amazon launched the Dash last spring they gave shoppers an easy way to re-order groceries and other consumables, and now they’ve made the process even simpler.

The retailer has just launched the Dash Button. This simple device has but single button and fills a single purpose: it lets you re-order a single item on Amazon (or possibly an entire order – it’s not clear).

Amazon hasn’t released any technical details on the Dash Button, but I think it’s safe to say that we’re looking at the device which went through the FCC yesterday. This tells us that the device has Wifi but no other connectivity or sensors, and that raises a few questions.

As you cans see in the demo video below, Amazon envisions its customers sticking the Dash Button to the wall and forgetting about it until the next time they need to restock. That’s when the customer presses the button and the Dash Button does its thing.

An always on wifi device would be dead within a week, so I’m betting that after it pings Amazon, the Dash Button disables wifi and goes to sleep until the next time you press the button.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMacTuHPWFI

Amazon and its competitors (Target, to name one) have been offering timed re-orders for some years now. I think Amazon calls it a subscription, but no matter the name clearly the Dash Button is the next step in Amazon’s plan to keep you from shopping elsewhere.

It’s a nifty idea, but I don’t know if it will prove useful enough to justify the clutter. The buttons may be small but by the time you get 6 or 7 stuck on the wall it’s going to start looking tacky.

I can’t speak for other consumers, but I’m much happier with simply keeping a spare box of whatever in the cabinet, and then ordering a new box when I open the spare. It’s a low tech alternative, but it works for me.

Plus I’d rather shop at Walmart, where consumables are often cheaper than Amazon.

If you would like to try it for yourself, the Dash Button is available only to Amazon Prime members, and only by invitation. It’s launching with only a limited number of eligible products, including items like toilet paper, cleaning products, dog food, and much more.

If you do get one, let me know what you think.

For the past couple years Amazon has followed Henry Ford’s maxim on color choices: you could have your Kindle in any color you want, so long as it was black.

With almost no fanfare, Amazon has quietly launched a new white basic Kindle in China and Japan. The new model is essentially identical to the $79 Kindle Amazon launched last fall, only in a new shell. It sports 4GB internal storage, wifi, an 800 x 600 resolution screen plus a touchscreen, and ties into Amazon’s Kindle Store.

It has all the same great software as on the black model, and if you don’t like the white color you can also order a case in any of 5 colors and 3 prints. The white Kindle is up for pre-order today for 499 yuan in China and 6,980 yen in Japan (that’s the ad subsidized price), and is scheduled to ship next Wednesday.

I’ve queried Amazon, but don’t have any info on when the white Kindle will ship in the US or the rest of the world. If and when it does arrive, you will probably find it on this page on Amazon: www.Amazon.com/white-kindle

Until then, I will be sitting here scratching my head. I’m not just puzzled by the exclusive launch; I also don’t see why Amazon launched a white Kindle at all. It’s not that black conceals dirt and smudges better than white, but also that there is a valid technical reason for choosing a black shell over a white one.

It’s a known fact that a black shell will make an E-ink screen look whiter, while a white shell will make it look more gray. This simple fact explains why Amazon first went with a gray shell on the Kindles released in 2011, and then black on all models released in 2012 and later.

And now Amazon is bucking the trend.

eReader Palace

Earlier this month Nvidia announced the Shield gaming console. This was the first Nvidia flagship device to use the cutting edge Tegra X1 CPU, and it won’t be the last.

Recent regulatory filings suggest that Nvidia is going to release both a new Shield tablet and a gaming handheld. There’s no evidence yet to suggest that the new devices have the Tegra X1 CPU, but I’d say the odds are in its favor.

Earlier today I discovered an FCC filing for a new Nvidia device. (There are actually a couple filings; one belongs to the console announced earlier this month, but the other belongs to the tablet.) All the useful identifiable info is concealed in that FCC filing, but the FCC ID revealed the new device’s model number: P1761WX.

This is similar to the model number for the Shield tablet which launched last year, and it suggests that the rumors from February were correct: we will see a revised model coming soon.

According to the test results, said device will have Bluetooth and Wifi, but not LTE. It will probably also have a Tegra X1 CPU. There have been rumors to that effect, and it is a reasonable conclusion.

And it’s just as likely that the new Shield handheld gaming device will also use the Tegra X1 chip. That device hasn’t shown up on the FCC website yet, but it has turned up on the Bluetooth and WiFi trade group websites.

A device labeled as the Nvidia P2523 has been certified for Wifi and Bluetooth. The listings don’t reveal much in the way of detail, but what we do know suggests that it will run Android 5.0 Lollipop and support the latest Wifi and BT standards:

• 802.11a/b/g/n/ac dual-band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi
• Bluetooth 4.1

There’s no info on the screen (unless the 5.0 referred to the screen), CPU, or other hardware, but I’m betting that we’ll soon be reading of the Tegra X1 CPU again.

The current Shield handheld resembles an Xbox controller with a 5″ screen bolted on, and it’s over two years old now. It’s running Android on an aging Tegra 4, so it could use an update.

FCC, Liliputing

Amazon’s contract to run a staffed pickup and drop off location at Purdue is ruffling a few feathers.  The NACS (National Association of College Stores) is suing Purdue University to force it to reveal all of the details from the contract it signed with Amazon.

NACS had recently filed a public document request and asked for a copy of the contract, but the document arrived with multiple pages redacted. Citing the Indiana Access to Public Records Act, Purdue said that the redacted sections covered Amazon’s trade secrets and could not be disclosed.

The trade group disagreed, and filed suit last Tuesday. The NACS argues that the redacted materials constitute public records that the university must release upon request. It supported its arguments ny pointing out that the NACS had obtained similar information from the contract Amazon had signed with the University of California-Davis in late 2011.

I’m not sure that’s a good argument.

Just because UC Davis may have disclosed information it should have redacted, that doesn’t mean that Purdue is in the wrong. What’s more, the deal Amazon struck with UC Davis is quite different from the one signed with Purdue.

The Purdue University deal involved Amazon acting as a surrogate college bookstore by installing a staffed unstore on campus, while Amazon’s deal with UC Davis is closer to being an affiliate deal.

UC Davis gets a cut of purchases made by UC Davis students on Amazon.com, but continues to operate the on-campus bookstore. Amazon has also leased space to install lockers on the UC Davis campus, but that is closer to a real estate lease agreement than a contract containing trade secrets.

But in the case of the Purdue contract, that could well contain operational details which do indeed count as trade secrets.

I will definitely be following this lawsuit. Amazon beat out a number of other companies, including Follett and Cenage, to secure the Purdue deal. The contract they signed will likely reveal clues about Amazon’s intentions, and it will offer hints on the deals that Amazon might strike with other schools.

The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, for example, is currently letting companies bid on running a virtual college bookstore on campus. According to the documents I obtained, that store is going to replace the college bookstore with a location quite similar in concept to the unstore which Amazon has at Purdue.

Trade secrets are nothing new, and in fact the Indiana law does say that they are exempt from disclosure requirements. But the public also has an interest in learning the details of public contracts, so it will be interesting to see which way the judge rules.

Lafayette Journal Courier

Libraries are getting screwed on ebooks even worse than consumers. Where a consumer has to worry about content vanishing with a deceased ebookstore or an expired contract, libraries have to contend with annual fees, expiring licenses, and mysterious technical glitches.

JA Konrath wants to help. Around this time last year he and August Wainwright launched eBooksAreForever, a new startup  which offers a library-friendly ebook solution.

Based on the idea that it’s more important to get ebooks into libraries than make a buck off of them, eBooksAreForever sells DRM-free ebooks under a "forever" license – meaning libraries never have to re-license at set time intervals, or after a certain number of uses.

In the long run they want to offer the ebooks DRM-free under a "one copy, many user" license, but right now the ebooks are still limited to one user, one copy.

The startup has been in a quiet beta test since May of last year, and on Thursday Konrath formally launched the service publicly invited indie authors to join. He reports that EAF now has just under 1000 ebooks in its collection.

According to EAF’s blog, this includes  titles from successful authors like Hugh Howey, Belle Andre, HM Ward, Melissa Foster, Barry Eisler, JA Konrath, Bob Mayer, and Barbara Freethy. The company has been carefully selecting the authors which have been allowed to join the service, resulting in a curated catalog which focuses more on quality than on quantity.

And that, folks, is just one of the many differences between EAF and the last distributor to offer this type of deal to libraries.

As you may recall, way back in August 2012 Smashwords launched a  service called Library Direct which enabled libraries to buy a slate of the top 10k, 20k, 50k, etc,  popular titles in the Smashwords catalog. The ebooks were sold with DRM and limited to a "one copy, one user" license.

That service never came to much, leading Smashwords to decide to instead distribute through OverDrive and 3M Cloud Library. When I queried Mark Coker, he said that SW changed direction because"the Douglas County model has been slow to take hold".

Douglas County refers to a particular library system in Colorado which is best known for running its own ebook DRM server. DCPL buys ebooks direct from publishers, checks them out to patrons, and avoids having to pay OverDrive’s annual hosting fees for those ebooks. (Instead, they pay a license fee to Adobe.)

Coker is correct in that the Douglas County model has been slow to catch on, and it’s easy to see how that stymied Smashwords' plans to sell direct, but luckily this issue won’t have as much of an impact on EAF.

Since EAF sells ebooks with almost no restrictions, libraries can host the ebook catalog without having to shell out additional fees to support DRM. This should reduce costs and technical headaches considerably.

For more details, visit the eBooksAreForever FAQ (library, author/publisher) and Konrath’s blog post. You can also reach out to EAF at [email protected].

eBooksAreForever

images by state_libraryofohio,