Nate Hoffelder

In April 2013, the law firm of Giskan Solotaroff Anderson & Stewart filed a class action lawsuit against Penguin and its scamtastic vanity press, Author Solutions.

The case survived several motions to dismiss, and this past February it completed discovery and filed for class certification. Now Writer Beware reports that the same law firm has filed a second class action against Penguin Random House and Author Solutions.

The new suit was filed in Indiana on behalf of a couple authors in California, and it alleges alleges unjust enrichment, fraud, and that Author Solutions violated UCC code, the California Unfair Competition Act, , the Indiana Senior Consumer Sales Act , and the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act.

According to the complaint (PDF) filed on Monday, Author Solutions bilked the plaintiffs out of $25,000 and "over $10,000" by selling them publishing and marketing packages and then not following through and providing the promised services.

This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Author Solutions. The company has a reputation for running a vanity press operation where its revenue comes not from helping an author distribute and sell books but from selling books and useless services to authors.

Author Solutions partners with ostensibly legit companies like Lulu and Barnes & Noble as well as publishers like Simon & Schuster to set up front operations where authors are sold over-priced publishing packages. (The front companies get a kickback commission on any victims authors which buy a package.)

Those packages aren’t a good value, but as we’ve learned from the discovery in February, the real profit (and the real reason that ASI partners with other companies) is in upselling authors on overpriced marketing packages which ASI then fails to deliver.

For example, the filing for this lawsuit details $8,000 one author spent to buy a marketing package. ASI promised to get positive responses from 5 literary agents and place adverts in The Bookseller, New York Times Sunday Book Review, and Baker & Taylor Forecast Magazine.

There’s no evidence that the adverts were ever placed, and only 4 responses were received from agents, two of which were requests that ASI stop sending spam.

And that’s just one incident; don’t forget that Author Solutions has been running its scams for over a decade, and has fleeced hundreds if not thousands of authors.

You can read the  complaint (PDF) for more details.

Writer Beware

images by Fæ,

Kindle owners are angry today, and with good reason.

When Amazon launched their new unlimited storage tier yesterday they gave their customers more storage than you can shake a stick at, but they also quietly killed the free storage which they used to offer their customers.

A couple readers have told me, and I have confirmed, that Amazon is no longer offering the free 5GB storage tier. (Thanks, Tiberiu!) While no one would expect to get a freebie forever, the changeover is having an unexpected impact on Kindle owners, who have lost access to the cloud storage they have been enjoying since late 2011.

Update: Amazon reports that the SendToKindle conversion service did break, but they fixed it. Also, Kindle owners now have a separate place to store the personal documents they SendToKindle which Amazon says "will no longer count against your Cloud Drive storage limits". (This too was not temporarily nonfunctional.) And as always, the ebooks you buy from Amazon will always be hosted by Amazon.

Please disregard the rest of the post. It covers an issue which has been fixed by Amazon.

Since Amazon also offers an email conversion service for Kindle owners, this presents a special problem. As my tipster put it:

I just found out this morning that sending files from my PC to my Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t work anymore.

Why is that? Because Amazon has killed the free 5GB option for all Cloud Drive users, and people are now forced to choose a yearly Cloud Drive plan in order to still be able to use the Send-to-Kindle feature.

Edit: I can now confirm the report. I just set up a new account at Amazon and registered a Kindle to it. That account has no online storage.

So Amazon took storage away from Kindle users? That sucks, but here is the kicker:

I still have 10 GB of storage on Amazon’s servers.

Amazon might not be giving any free storage to Kindle owners, but I’m getting 5GB as a Prime member, and I’m getting another 5GB because I also own a Fire tablet:

To be clear, I do own a Kindle, but I’m not getting 5GB of free storage to go with it.

Take a moment and wrap your mind around that, people.

If you own one type of Amazon hardware, you get 5GB of storage. But if you own another type of Amazon hardware, you get diddly.

Am I the only one who is having trouble fathoming that decision?

Amazon has nullified two of the features that made the Kindle better than any other ebook platform, while at the same time making the platform less useful to Amazon’s customers. I don’t understand why they did that, so I have queried Amazon on the matter. Right now I am hoping that they will respond with the explanation that this was a mistake, and that they will fix it.

And while they’re at it, I would hope that Amazon will extend the free 5GB to Kindle app users as well (it would be silly to leave them out in the cold).

Given that the Kindle help pages still say that Kindle owners can store personal documents on Amazon Cloud Drive, I think there’s a 50-50 chance that this really was a mistake, technical or otherwise.

Stay tuned.

After fewer than 3 months on the market, the profanity-filtering reading app Clean Reader has been neutered by its developer.

Inktera announced on Twitter Wednesday afternoon that it was bowing to pressure from authors and publishers, and was yanking its ebookstore out of the Clean Reader app.

In support of #authors #readers #books everywhere, the @Inktera bookstore system has been pulled from @CleanReader, effective immediately.

— Inktera (@Inktera) March 26, 2015

Inktera is a subsidiary of PageFoundry, the ebook company which had developed and is supporting the app on behalf of Jared and Kirsten Maughan, Clean Reader’s owners.

PageFoundry is an otherwise ordinary ebook company which had developed an ebook platform (apps, ebookstore, backend). PageFoundry’s apps were combined with a custom content filter to create Clean Reader, and aside from the filter PageFoundry’s ebook apps are just your typical ebook apps.

While Inktera’s announcement doesn’t quite kill the app (I checked, and you can still sideload ebooks), it does effectively neuter the app. What’s more, this act suggests that the death of Clean Reader will probably happen as soon as PageFoundry can find a reason to get out of its contract with the Maughans.

Update: Or maybe not. Clean Reader posted an update to their FB page which acknowledges the removal and says "there will be several changes made to the app and an update will be released in the near future". So they don’t see the app going away.

This news arrives in the midst of a storm of protests from authors who object to readers choosing to filter the content in the books they read. Over the past week many authors have protested the app with arguments ranging from moral rights and religious bias to objections to its poorly designed filter.

I’ve covered the highlights of the protests before, so I won’t repeat myself here. But I do want to point out that the listing for the Clean Reader app in Google Play shows that the app has an install base between 500 and 1,000. (Hat tip to Felix Torres for spotting that detail.)

The thing is, folks, this app probably had more protesters than actual users, making this whole series of events a tempest in a thimble. There’s the principle involved, sure, but as I see it far too much energy was invested in protesting an app which no one was using anyway.

Many readers challenge themselves with books in other languages. Usually they have to install a translation dictionary in order to catch the nuances, but there are other options.

Yesterday a friend on Twitter pointed me at Duolir, an iOS app which offers an instantaneous translation feature.

While instant translation is nothing new, most current examples involve mechanical translation of the text;  an article is fed through either Google or Bing Translate and the result is spat out – errors and all.

Duolir goes one step better.  This platform offers dual-language ebooks which have been specially made so you can click on each sentence and read the sentence in another language.

In practice it looks something like this:

That’s a nifty trick, but it’s not exactly a new one.

Google does something similar with Google Translate, and you can also find ebooks like the ones in Duolir on another site, DoppleText. Those ebooks work in (almost?) any app which supports Epub. They also reportedly work on the Kindle, but I would test that first.

I was also told on Twitter that a French publisher had shown a proof of concept several years ago. That example reportedly used Javascript in Epub3, although I haven’t found a file which shows it. (Thanks, Jiminy!)

If you would like to see a similar trick in action, ReadBeyond.it posted a demo ebook. It doesn’t work quite the same as Duolir, but it does work in iBooks and in the Menestrello app. (Thanks, Alberto!)

The ReadBeyond.it translations look like this:

This is a pretty well-known trick, so you’re probably wondering why it’s not more widely used.

While Duolir offers around 50 titles, and Doppletext has around 40 public domain titles, that’s just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the hundreds if not thousands of books where this could be used.

If I had to guess, I’d bet that the cost of making the ebook is probably the killer. There isn’t a huge market for this feature, not compared to releasing two separate single language ebooks, so it is difficult to justify the expense.

And that’s a shame, because on a technical level this is nifty.

Goodreads may have picked up tricks from their corporate parent since being bought by Amazon in 2012, but beta testing new features was apparently not one of them.

The social network added new relationship options on Friday. Ostensibly intended to better define how authors and the hoi polloi interact, the new options are causing more problems than they solved.

Update: GR posted an update on Monday with the news that they fixed most of the problems described in this post.

Where under the old setup you could be a friend or a fan of an author (or both), the new system offers "three ways you can choose to engage with author pages on Goodreads" : friend, follow, or favorite.

While I’m sure it sounds like follow is simply a new name for fan and that favorite is a brand new option, it’s more complicated than that.  The relationships friend:fan and friend:follow:favorite don’t match up cleanly.

To start with, the old system had members forming connections with authors, while under the new system members "engage with author pages" – and yes, that is the way GR framed the interactions.

Yes, authors are no longer members of Goodreads; they’re now pages. In other words, Goodreads sees authors as things.

Goodreads apparently made this change so that they could set up profiles for authors not on GR. Looking at how they talk about it in the FAQ, I think they plan to use the unclaimed profiles for marketing purposes:

Why would I want to Follow an author who isn’t a member of Goodreads?
First, we’re working really hard to get every author to join the Author Program. When an author you’re Following joins, you’ll automatically start receiving their updates. Additionally, we want this to be the way you keep up with the latest from all the authors that matter to you, regardless of whether they are on Goodreads or not.

Why would I want to Follow a dead author? Isn’t that kind of morbid?
Well, it’s not likely that Mark Twain is going to claim his author profile and start writing pitch-perfect reviews of contemporary novels (though if he did, that would be pretty cool, right? OK, it’d also be a little creepy). The short answer here is that we want “Follow” to be a way for all our members to get updates about all of the authors that matter to them, living or dead, in the author program or not.

So Goodreads snuck in a marketing plan in with an update to the structure of their social network.

I think I could have swallowed it, or at least I wouldn’t have noticed, had Goodreads not mucked up the change.

Numerous Goodreads members have responded to the announcement with complaints that the existing "friend" relationship has morphed into a mutant friend+follow engagement. Anyone who was a friend of an author is now both a friend and a follower of an author page.

That would not be an issue of not for the simple fact that unfollowing an author page also breaks the friend engagement with that page.

Apparently it escaped Goodreads' attention that a member might be a friend of an author because they like the person while at the same time not having any interest the books that person writes.

I don’t know why GR missed it (other than that GR sees authors as things and not people), but that makes perfect sense to me. I know several people who write stuff which I would not read to save my life, but I would still regard most of them as friends*.

And to make matters worse, there are GR members who didn’t even know that their friend was also an author until the changeover:

This is beyond frustrating. I don’t want to "follow" dead people. I don’t want to "follow" most of my author friends, many of whom I all of a sudden realize are authors. I would be okay with substituting the word "follow" for what used to be "fan," though I don’t see what that improves.

And even authors aren’t happy with the change:

I write erotic romance and erotica. When before I was able to "vanish" in the number of friends a friend had, without drawing attention to the kind of genres I write, now that is obviously over.

There are scholars, teachers and civil servants among my friends. Do you seriously mean to expose them openly like that? I understand everyone of them who deletes me from their list.

There are now some 400 responses to the announcement, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who like the change.

In any reasonable world, that would be enough to encourage Goodreads to revert to the old system.  Then again, in that reasonable world Goodreads would first have tested the new set up before inflicting it upon users.

As it stands, we’re probably stuck with the munged together  system. Goodreads has promised to reconsider the change, but I don’t have much hope that they’ll fix the damage they caused.

Goodreads

Thanks, Glinda!

image by Appelez moi thibal

The US trade book market (or at least, the part of the market for which data can be had) closed out 2014 with a slight growth overall and in ebooks, but the news from France was mixed.

The market research firm GfK  reported this week that their latest estimates show that the French book market declined by 1.3% in 2014, to 3.9 billion euros. The decline was driven by a 1.4% drop in the number of units sold, to 351 million.

While the loss was minimal, GfK noted that this was the fourth consecutive year in which French book purchases declined. They estimate that 26 million French aged 15 and older bought a book last year, with 60% of purchases made by women.

That includes ebooks, which were the one bright spot in this week’s report. Paid ebook downloads increased by 60% in 2014, to 8 million copies sold. The estimated market value was 64 million euros.

For those of you who don’t have a calculator handy (or whose mother and grandmother weren’t both teachers) GfK is telling us that ebooks made up about 1.54% of the French book market in 2014.

That sounds shockingly low, but I don’t have any data to contradict it. In fact, i don’t have any other data at all.

I know of one public source of sales data which might shed light on the French book market, and that would be the publishing conglomerate Lagardère. This media company owns book publishers in the US, UK, France, and elsewhere, and they recently released their annual report for 2014.

Unfortunately for us, Lagardère isn’t saying anything about ebook sales in France. They do say that ebooks made up 26% of US revenue and 31% of UK revenue. and that digital accounted for 10.3% of Lagardère Publishing’s revenues.

But all they’ll say about the French ebook market is that it is "still at an early stage" (source, see slide 11).

While we shouldn’t read to much into Lagardère’s reticence, it does tend to support GfK’s claim that the French ebook market doesn’t amount to much.

Frankly, that comes as a surprise.

GfK via Actualitte

image by Piano Piano!

High taxes on ebooks may be the law in the EU, but it’s certainly not a popular one.

Following just two short weeks after the EU high court ruled that ebooks aren’t actually books and thus could not be taxed as such, the Culture Ministers of Germany, France, Poland, and Italy released a joint statement decrying that ruling.

Declaring "a book is a book, no matter the form", the culture ministers* jointly called on the European Commission to take steps to change EU law so that paper books and ebooks carried the same VAT rate.

There’s no English language version of the statement, but the French language version came through Google Translate reasonably clearly:

Books are essential to the development and circulation of knowledge and culture. They play a crucial role in promoting cultural diversity, one of the greatest strengths of Europe, and reinforce the sense of European citizenship. The promotion of reading and literature should be at the heart of our cultural policies. 

The digital age offers huge opportunities for the future of books and literature, particularly to encourage reading among young people. Support innovation in the book industry is the only way to meet expectations, evolving, readers and creators.

Whether printed or dematerialized, it is the content that makes the book and not the way in which the reader will have access. A book is a book, whatever its shape.

For these reasons, we are convinced of the need to apply the same reduced rate of VAT to the digital book as the printed book. The principle of technological neutrality must be clearly stated at the European level so that innovation and development of digital books are not compromised.

The culture ministers are responding to a recent decision handed down by the European Court of Justice. The ECJ had ruled that France and Luxembourg had violated EU law when the two countries had reduced the VAT collected on ebooks.

That case has been thoroughly reported before, so I won’t repeat myself here.

I will note, though, that this debate has taken on a life of its own. When Luxembourg first changed its tax laws 3 years ago, it looked like a cynical tax move intended to encourage businesses to set up shop in the Grand Duchy.

But now we have minsters in four of the stronger EU member nations pushing for the EU to revise its tax laws. I’ve long believed that ebooks should be taxed at the lower rate, and now that it is a cause célèbre there is a high probability that the laws will change.

In about 4 or 5 years.

Call it realism or pessimism, I don’t expect the EU to move much faster than that.

P.S.  The four culture ministers are: Fleur Pellerin, French Minister of Culture and Communication; Monika Grütters, Delegate of the German Federal Government for Culture and Media; Dario Franceschini, Minister of Property, the Cultural Activities and Tourism of Italy; and Malgorzata Omilanowska, Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.

Lesen.net, Actualitte

image by kodomut

We still don’t know for sure when Google’s Project Ara will make its way to store shelves, but when it does arrive it will have some nifty options. In addition to a cornucopia of CPU, screen, camera, and other options, Project Ara owners will be able to add a radiation sensor.

The Russian company Intersoft unveiled a prototype dosimeter-radiometer sensor at the second Ara developers conference (in January, but it only crossed my desk today). The DO-RA.Modul takes Intersoft’s existing sensor tech and shrinks it down to about the size of a postage stamp:

Intersoft’s been working on the module since at least last July. They’ve also developed an Android app to control the sensor, and they’re hoping to have both available at the end of the year.

And given that the new module is only about a third the size of Intersoft’s existing products, I’d say that they’re going to pull it off. The current dosimeter-radiometer sensor is designed to plug into a smartphone’s headphone jack (iPhone, for example) and feed data to an app. It launched last summer with a price around $150.

Speaking of nifty modules for Project Ara, Lapka is also working on a bevy of sensors ranging from CO2 to an EKG to a glucometer.

As you may know, this company has its own modular sensor platform, and it’s using its past experience and know-how to turn a Project Ara smartphone into an honest-to-goodness tricorder:

I can’t find any way to tell whether those are functional models, and not just a concept mock up, but it’s nifty nonetheless.

I learned of Lapka’s plans a few weeks ago, and while I can’t wait to see them come to market I do have to wonder about the practicality. Sure, the above concept is nifty, but did you notice that the CPU and battery modules are missing?

I think that could make it a little hard to use all those sensors, don’t you?

PhoneBloks

District Court Judge William Sessions ruled on Thursday that the ADA lawsuit filed against Scribd will be moving forward.

As regular readers of this blog know, Scribd offers a subscription ebook service where users can pay $9 a month to read as many titles as they like. It’s a good service, and judging by the latest funding round, it’s also a popular one.

But it’s not accessible to the visually disabled, hence the lawsuit.

The story got little press attention at the time (I missed it completely), but in July 2014 Scribd was sued by lawyers working on behalf of a blind Vermont woman, Heidi Viens. The lawsuit alleges that Scribd violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by depriving blind readers access to its online service.

This lawsuit came across my desk on Thursday when a reader tipped me to Scribd losing its motion to dismiss. (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Scribd had argued that "the ADA does not apply to website operators whose goods or services are not made available at a physical location open to the public". While it might sound ridiculous that a website wouldn’t be included under the ADA, there is precedent to support the argument (see Young v Facebook, Earll v Ebay, etc).

Judge Sessions disagreed. He concluded in his ruling that (PDF) that "The
fact that the ADA does not include web-based services as a specific example of a public accommodation is irrelevant because such services did not exist when the ADA was passed and because Congress intended the ADA to adapt to changes in technology."

And so the lawsuit is moving forward to its inevitable conclusion. Scribd is going to lose, and well they should.

The law is clear on this point, and what with the $22 million in capital which Scribd raised in December 2014 Scribd has both the means and the ability to comply with the ADA.

The fact that they would rather fight it out in court rather than invest in an accessible service is simply reprehensible.

image by quinn.anya

I have long been expecting that OverDrive, the dominant player in the library ebook market, would one day be acquired by a bigger fish who wanted to secure control of a market, and today that finally happened.

Rakuten and OverDrive announced on Tuesday that the latter had been acquired by the former for $410 million. The deal is expected to close in April this year, after which OverDrive will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary.

OverDrive is a leading player in the library ebook market, and it distributes audiobooks, ebooks, music, and video to over 30,000 libraries and schools around the world. It also counts a number of retailers among its customers, including Waterstones (which sells Kindles in store but also has its own ebookstore).

Rakuten is a $5 billion a year Japanese conglomerate with a presence in a dozen retail markets as well as a solid core business in the financial services industry. OverDrive is the third digital publishing company Rakuten has acquired in the past 4 years, and perhaps the 8th or 9th media company (this is important, trust me).

Rakuten bought Canada-based Kobo in late 2011 for $315 million, and followed that up a short while later with the purchase of Aquafadas, a French company which offers a platform for building and distributing apps and Epub3 ebooks (it also builds said platforms under contract for other companies, including one for Kobo).

Yes, OverDrive is selling today for more than the asking price of Kobo 3 and a half years ago. This can be explained by the fact that Kobo was sold before the bubble burst, and also because OverDrive is profitable (Kobo was and still is a money pit).

Rakuten hasn’t shared many financial details from OverDrive, but they did say at the press conference earlier today that OverDrive generated an EBITA of $25 million in 2014. There’s no info yet on annual revenues, but Rakuten did say that they expect the acquisition will push its ebook division into the black in 2015.

The purchase will likely also have a positive synergy with Rakuten’s other media companies. It’s a little too early to predict exactly how it will play out, but I expect that OverDrive’s experience with distributing audiobooks, music, and video will also prove useful.

***

So is anyone surprised by today’s news? I’m not.

I’ve been expecting this deal since July 2013, only with a slight difference: I thought Amazon, and not Rakuten, would buy OverDrive. In fact, when OverDrive had that Kindle ebook snafu last month I wondered whether that snafu was actually an Amazon negotiating tactic. It really could have been, but there’s no way to tell for sure.

Google may operate the second largest app store in the world and serve a billion people in over 190 countries, but for the longest time that store was allowed to operate under Wild West rules. Just about anything short of malware was allowed free reign, but that’s beginning to change.

Google announced this morning that it would now review apps prior to publication. In fact, it actually started reviewing apps several months ago be having real people, including "a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies " examine the apps and pass judgement.

Alas, this review process doesn’t extend to ebooks, just apps, so the ebook section of Google Play Books will still be stuffed chock full of malware-ridden and pirated ebooks, but at least Google is raising their standards for the app section.

In related news, Google is also going to adopt the local rating system in each of their local markets.

Here in the US, for example, the apps will carry ab ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) rating, while elsewhere users will find ratings from the Pan-European Game Information (PEGI), Australian Classification Board, Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK), and Classificação Indicativa (ClassInd).

Apps sold in markets which lack a specific ratings authority will display an age-based, generic rating.

TechCrunch reports that Google has actually been working to implement the new app review system for over 6 months now, and that it went live a couple months ago with few complaints and little notice. They quote Purnima Kochikar, Director of Business Development for Google Play, as saying that: "We started reviewing all apps and games before they’re published – it’s rolled out 100%." The review process was so fast and efficient that "developers haven’t noticed the change."

Part of the reason that the process is so fast is that it has largely been automated. Each app is scanned for malware and possible content violations. For example, the images, music, and videos in an app are scanned for possible copyright infringement as well as for adult material.

The automated process is helped by a new questionaire which Google is going to start requiring in May. Developers will have to  complete the new rating questionnaire for each of their apps, otherwise the apps will be marked as unrated and could be excluded from some markets. Come May, app updates and all new app releases will have to have a completed questionnaire before they can be published on Google Play.

Amazon released its monthly KDP Select report yesterday, and the news was unsurprising.

The report revealed that last month Amazon was paying indie publishers and authors  an average of $1.41 each time an ebook was loaned from Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. The loans were funded out of a pool of some $8 million, and with a little math and the back of an envelope we reach an estimated 5.67 million loans for February.

That’s down slightly from January, (6.16 million loans) but the February figures still represent the second largest number of loans since Kindle Unlimited launched last summer.

In short, the peak in January was the expected post-Christmas surge as users tried Kindle Unlimited for the first time, and the slight drop in loans in February reflects the readers which didn’t stay past their trial.

Update: Sometimes I miss the obvious. February has 10 % fewer days than January, so the fact that loans dropped by less than 10% is not remarkable. (Thanks, Fbone, Daniel!)

Given that Kindle Unlimited has yet to reach its first anniversary, we don’t have enough data to do a year over year comparison. But I do find it interesting that I can see a clear connection between the expansion of KU into Germany (October), Spain and Italy (November), France and Brazil (December), Mexico and Canada (February).

Kindle Unlimited was the subject of controversy late last year as a number of indie authors claimed that readers had stopped buying ebooks as they switched to KU (I had an alternate theory). In retrospect, that seems more than a little implausible, given that the US ebook market alone was worth a couple billion dollars last year, and Kindle Unlimited funding worth only millions of dollars a month.

Foner Books, Roger Packer

The best things in life may be free, but registering a new domain with Amazon’s new TLD probably won’t be one of them.

This hasn’t shown up in the wider blogosphere yet, but The Domains reported on Saturday that Amazon had outbid Google, Donuts, Minds +Machines, and Uniregistry in a private auction to buy the rights to DotFree top level domain.

Along with DotBuy and DotBook, this is at least the third top level domain which Amazon has bought the rights to over the past 6 months.

A top level Domain (or TLD) is the suffix on  website names, and includes familiar terms like DotCom and DotOrg as well as country specific suffixes for the UK, Poland, Libya, and a host of other countries.

Over the past couple years ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been expanding the number of available TLDs by auctioning off the rights to the highest bidder. Around 1,200 TLDs have either been proposed or sold with about half being specific brands and the other half generic TLDs.

Amazon hasn’t shared any specific plans for its newest TLD, but it’s widely expected that Amazon will be selling domain registrations to the public. "Why would they close it off?" Raymond King, CEO of Top Level Design asked PW when Amazon bought the DotBook domain last November. Top Level Design owns the generic TLD .ink. King went on to add that "You don’t want to limit your TLD. Amazon is known for being a visionary company, and it’s in their interest to make .book available to all authors."

While the DotBook domain could well end up as being administer by either KDP or Amazon Publishing, I would bet that DotFree and DotBuy will more likely fall under the purview of Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing platform Amazon has been running for the past decade. I’d think that selling domains more closely aligns with AWS' web hosting services than with Amazon’s retail operation.

image by protohiro

This being the 21st century, I’m sure that we’re all used to a certain lack of privacy online, but this next tale is simply appalling.

Students in New Jersey are in the middle PARCC testing right now. This is a new standardized test which is administered by Pearson. It’s not without its detractors; many parents are opting their kids out of the test, and after what Pearson just did I’m sure the number will grow.

A blogger by the name of Bob Braun got his hands on an email one NJ school district superintendent sent out to a mailing list. Said email discusses a dire "security breach" in which a student tweeted a mention of the recent PARCC test.

As you can see in the photo below, we found out about the security breach because Pearson is spying on students:

So one kid mentions a test question to another kid online, and Pearson calls down the wrath of the New Jersey state Dept of Education as well as the full weight of the school district administration upon that student.

Luckily for the kid, it was only a single tweet. Had several students gotten together to form a study group, they might have been prosecuted for felony interference with a business model and gotten the death penalty.

Do you suppose Pearson has hidden microphones set up around the schools so they can also listen in and see if students discuss the tests during lunch? I ask because that is basically the offline version of the student’s infraction.

Incendiary reaction aside, the WP reports that Pearson has confirmed the spying, and I can add that the superintendent confirmed that the email is real.

This is not the first time that states or other entities have monitored social media during standardized tests, but due to the bungling on the part of the NJDOE it is the most appalling.

This student was accused of tweeting an image during a test, when in fact they didn’t. Luckily the school district investigated before responding, otherwise this would have turned out so much worse.

Had the school district simply taken the "security breach" notice at face value, they would have suspended or expelled the student. Instead, the student was merely frightened to learn that his school went Big Brother bsed on nothing more than the complaint of a publisher.

So rather than come out of this with a tarnished record, the student learned a couple valuable life lessons: you can’t trust those in power, and there is no such thing as privacy any more.

Those are lessons we all need to learn at some point, and thanks to Pearson it has been driven home.

image by laverrue

Writing communities like Wattpad, Write On, and Widbook represent concentrated sources of writing talent, and Kobo is looking to tap in. Earlier this month Widbook and Kobo announced a new partnership which will enable Widbook members to sell ebooks through Kobo.

According to Widbook’s blog post, premium members can sell their ebooks through Kobo with only a few clicks. The member simply has to set the price, title, description, and category, enter an ISBN (it’s not provided), and the ebook can be automatically uploaded to Kobo and sold through Kobobooks.com and Kobo’s retail partners in around the globe.

Although I don’t think this by itself is worth Widbook’s $5 a month premium membership fee, it could prove a convenient option for Widbook members.

Let’s just hope it’s not too convenient.

I’ve been browsing Widbook today, and I noticed that a lot of the ebooks had basic formatting and editing errors. I mention that not as a criticism of the writers but as a critique of Widbook. The formatting errors in particular are a sign that Widbook isn’t designed to produce good quality content as a default (other platforms, like Feedbooks, have pulled it off).

This tells me that authors would be wise to either engage an editor or give their work another pass before publishing it for the second time.

Founded in February 2013 and based in Brazil, Widbook boasts over 200,000 members, with the highest numbers coming from the US, Brazil, and India. The site offers a community where writers and readers can write, read, and critique stories as they are published, and according to PW it offers a special emphasis on collaboration – writers can publish one chapter at a time, or they can write an ebook in partnership with another user.

And now that those writers have finished the story, they can publish it via Kobo – which they could have done on their own, thus making me wonder whether this deal has any value at all.

It’s a shame this deal isn’t with Apple. Kobo has their own publishing portal, which any author or publisher can access, but iBooks is difficult to get into. You either need an Apple computer to upload an ebook or you’ll need to have to go through  distributor like Draft2Digital. Had Widbook struck a deal with Apple it could have become a de facto portal for iBooks (perhaps that is Widbook’s next step).

Widbook via eBookPress