Nate Hoffelder

Companies, creators, and groups have long used free prizes to draw the attention of the public, and now Amazon wants to turn it to their advantage.

The retailer launched a new giveaway service on Tuesday which looks to simplify and automate the process of running a promotional contest online. Anyone who has an account with Amazon can launch a giveaway contest and offer contestants just about any prize they want – just so long as it’s carried in Amazon’s warehouses.

The contests can be set up so the first X participants get the prize, or every Xth participant receives one, thus guaranteeing either a frenzy or a long term build to a finale. The costs of the prizes (as well as shipping and taxes) will have to be paid in advance, but Amazon assures us that any unawarded prizes will refunded and the costs reimbursed.

To get the ball rolling, Amazon is offering a few contests of their own. The first can be entered simply by clicking on the icon, but to enter the other two you will need to follow Amazon on Twitter and let Amazon’s Twitter app have access to your twitter account.

I can’t speak for you, but that is a turn off for me.

While this looks like a useful service which could make a lot of practical sense, I noticed that there are a couple obvious improvements Amazon could make.

I’ve looked over the Amazon Giveaway FAQ carefully and browsed the site, and I can’t find any way for someone to launch a contest and give away an ebook or other digital content.

I would have though digital content would be the ideal prize. The production and distribution cost for even a large number of prizes is minimal, and Amazon could turn the contest to their advantage by suggesting that the winning contestants add the music or ebook to their Amazon account.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t even let you give away an ebook which is in the Kindle Store (nor Kindles), so that idea is out. And that a shame, because I would bet that publishers would like the chance to give away a limited number of copies of their more expensive books – or at least the chance to test the idea.

If nothing else, it would make a change from simply putting the ebook on sale.

TechCrunch

Long the go-to site for declassified US govt documents, The Black Vault has recently faced a setback in its efforts to digitize and upload records from Project Bluebook, the US Air Force’s decades long program which documented UFO sightings and alien contact reports.

It seems that Ancestry.com did not take kindly to The Black Vault copying some of the record which Fold3, an Ancestry.com subsidiary, had digitized and placed online. John Greenewald, founder of The Black Vault, reports that he’s had to take down all Project Bluebook uploads:

It is with great frustration to announce, that Ancestry.com, and their subsidiary Fold3, has laid down a claim to copyright on the Project Blue Book material – which has long been labeled as “public domain” by the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA).   Ancestry.com is claiming ownership to the digital version of this material – despite me having records that Fold3 doesn’t even have in their archive and I received under the FOIA starting back in 1996.  They simply claimed it was 100% theirs and I was forced to remove it.

I haven’t confirmed this with Ancestry.com, but Motherboard did get a comment from the company. "It’s about electronic theft," Ancestry.com spokeswoman Heather Erickson told Motherboard. "[Greenewald] can go over to the national archives and digitize the records, but he used our copies. We asked him to take them down, it’s a permissions issue."

Ancestry.com is either blatantly abusing the DMCA notice to take down content over which they don’t have a copyright, or they think they can claim copyright on the basis of having scanned the documents.

Either way, it’s complete hogwash.

Just to be clear, all documents created by the US government are automatically in the public domain. This isn’t true for all national governments, but US copyright explicitly excludes works of the federal government.

Since Ancestry.com can’t claim to have created the original public domain documents, its copyright claim would have to derive from a type of "sweat of their brow" copyright claim. In other words, the work invested in scanning the documents justifies the copyright claim.

While that argument would stand up in some countries, it fails in the US.

The US Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that (Feist v RTS Co, 1991) the mechanical act of gathering together facts into a single place isn’t enough to deserve a copyright. While the Feist case was focused on the copyright status of phonebooks, it is arguably applicable in this situation:

The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. See Harper & Row, supra, at 547-549. Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity.

One could argue that I took that out of context, but Project Gutenberg, which has itself been scanning documents for 4 decades now, has expressed a similar legal opinion.

They believe that digitizing, proofreading, scanning, or other mechanical alterations to public domain documents do not meet the minimum threshold to meet the definition of original work, and thus don’t qualify for copyright:

Work performed on a public domain item, known as sweat of the brow, does not result in a new copyright. This is the judgment of Project Gutenberg’s copyright lawyers, and is founded in a study of case law in the United States. This is founded in the notion of authorship, which is a prerequisite for a new copyright. Non-authorship activities do not create a new copyright.

If I wanted to, I could cite a half-dozen other legal opinions on the topic, but I don’t see the point. Ancestry.com has no legal basis to make a copyright claim.

Now, they could be planning to sue over The Black Vault’s abuse of Fold3’s TOS, but that would have nothing to do with copyright. That is a contract issue, and filing a DMCA notice in such a situation is no more or less than copyright bullying.

image  by Skley, CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES

Amazon will probably never satisfy typography enthusiasts but that doesn’t mean they’re not continually improving the fonts they offer on the Kindle platform.

A couple months ago Amazon quietly started rolling out a new font for the Kindle platform. There was no announcement, and the font is still not widely available, but if you read on your Fire tablet then you may have gotten a little pop up telling you that there is a new font choice available.

The font is called Bookerly, and for those of you without a Fire tablet, here it is on the right (Georgia is on the left):

I’ve been reading with the new font this afternoon, and I’m not sure what to say. Sure, it looks a little nicer, but I was fine with the existing fonts. I never really had a complaint against Amazon’s font choices (justification is another matter).

I’ve been in ebooks long enough to know that ebooks used to look much worse than they do now, so when I hear the font purists complaining I simply tune them out and go back to reading.

What do you think of the new font?

If you haven’t had a chance to try Bookerly yet, there is a way for you to install it.

The font is not available on my Kindle iPad app nor on the Kindle Android app I checked. And I also have reports that it’s not available on E-ink Kindles either. But if you would like to try it, one helpful soul over on XDA Forums extracted the font files and I have them posted as a ZIP file.

If you’ve hacked your kindle, you can sideload the font. You can also embed the font in an ebook file (Epub or KF8).

What do you think?

One Man and His Blog

While readers are flocking to subscription ebook services in droves, the concept is facing increased legal opposition in France.

In December Fleur Pellerin, the French Minister of Culture, called for the legality of subscription ebook services to be investigated, and now a group of French publishers are taking the position that it is illegal.

The Syndicat National de l’Edition  (SNE) released a statement today which reads (translated by Google):

After careful consideration and legal analysis, the Office of SNE is concluded last December that the subscription offers whose prices are not set by the publishers are not legal, and except as specified by the 2011 Law on the price of digital books, namely the collective use offers proposed for vocational purposes, higher education or research. In these sectors, in fact, multi-subscription offers publishers have long been at the initiative of the publishers themselves, and correspond to the specific characteristics of their business models. In contrast, the market for "mainstream", the law does not allow multi-vendor subscription offers only subscription offers consist of one editor, who control the price.

France is one of a number of countries in Western Europe that has fixed price book laws which require booksellers to offer books at the prices set by publishers.

In letting users read as many books as they want for a flat monthly fee of 10 euros, Amazon is in effect setting the price itself, and SNE believes this is illegal. And they could well be correct, although we will need to wait for the French government to finish its investigation before we know for sure.

Kindle Unlimited launched in France just under two month ago with around 20,000 titles in French and over 700,000 titles in English and other languages. It’s now available in the US and 5 countries in Europe, and it’s facing increased opposition both from indie authors, some of whom blame it for a decrease in revenue, and from major publishers.

Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of Hachette Livre, has gone on the record in opposition to the idea of subscription ebooks. The French blog IDBoox quoted him as saying in December that Hachette will be the last to get into this market.

Hachette Livre is the parent company of Hachette Book Group, one of the two Big 5 US publishers which have yet to sign deals with any of the subscription ebook services (the other publisher is Penguin Random House).

IDBoox

image by jeroen_bennink

The AAP released its monthly Statshot report, and with one month left in the AAP’s annual reporting cycle it’s safe to say that 2014 was a good year for American trade publishers.

The Association of American  Publishers announced today that revenues for trade publishers were up 3.7% in the first 11 months of 2014.  Paperbacks made a surprising resurgence, while ebooks showed solid growth and hardback revenues declined.

The total revenue reported by the 1,209 trade publishers was $6.5 billion, up from $6.3 billion. The adult segment dropped by 1.4% to $4.3 billion, while the YA/kids segment continued to show strong growth. It was up 20.7% for the year, reaching $1.7 billion.

In terms of formats, revenues from hardback sales dropped by just under a percent, to $2.3 billion, while ebooks were up 4.5% (to $1.4 billion) and paperbacks were up 8.3%, to $1.9 billion.

And for the first time I can also report that downloadable audiobooks were up 26%, to $147 million, while physical audiobooks droped 8%, to $65 million.

As always, all I received was the standard press release, which included these details and not much more:

While we’re on the topic of book revenue stats, earlier today Shelf Awareness posted this useful little chart. It shows all of the date which the AAP is tracking but not releasing to the press (it’s for sale).

I think it offers a useful perspective of just how large the trade industry is vs the rest of book publishing.

The rumors that Amazon is interested in RadioShack store leases has lead some to wonder what Amazon would do with the spaces, and today Amazon spontaneously answered that question.

The retailer officially launched its new something at Purdue University today. Purdue is one of the three US universities that has an affiliate deal with Amazon, and like UMass-Amherst Purdue has a contract for Amazon to supply textbooks. But one way that Purdue differs from other schools is that it now has an Amazon "unstore" (my word) open on campus. (Amherst has a textbook annex where Amazon will probably install an unstore, but that hasn’t happened yet.)

According to the press release, the square footage of the location is about 2300 sq ft, and it isstaffed by Amazon personnel. It’s located in the Krach Leadership Center at Purdue University, and is described as a "customer order pickup and drop-off location". Amazon also shared this render of what it looks like:

As you can see, this isn’t actually a store. There are lockers, a customer service desk, and a drop off location, but no actual product on display.

In fact, I wouldn’t even call this a retail location, which is why I coined the term "unstore". Amazon’s pop-up stores came closer to being retail stores than this new unstore, but in spite of the incongruity of that comparison I think this image says a lot.

If Amazon does secure those RadioShack leases, this is about what I would expect the stores to look like after they are remodeled. This image probably also offers a few clues about the customer service location which Amazon is said to be planning for the office building it recently leased in Manhattan. That will likely have a very different interior, but both locations will share certain elements.

What’s more, we might even see this idea replicated on other college campuses. As I pointed out last August, Amazon is encircling US universities with delivery lockers located in off-campus convenience stores. If the Purdue location works out, Amazon could decide to rent space on other campuses.

Of course, all this speculation could be a case of putting the cart before the horse. We don’t know yet whether the idea will work, much less whether Amazon wants to expand.

For as long as I’ve known them, Amazon has always released free tools which you could use to make ebooks to sell in the Kindle Store. That’s a common modus operandi for tech companies, so when a reader told me today that Amazon was charging for an en ebook making app, I was surprised.

Kindle Convert is a $19 app which is designed to help users digitize their archives. Based on the description, I would say that this is less intended to create a sellable ebook than to help users make a more accessible copy of any scanned documents and images.

The app is only available to US residents, and it’s only available for Windows 7 and 8.

Amazon says that the app works by turning scans of English-language printed books and documents into ebooks. A user can either elect to leave a scanned page as an image, or run the image through Amazon’s OCR software and convert it to text. If you stick with the image, you can crop the image, rotate it, center it on a page, and perform other basic image editing tricks. The text generated via OCR can be edited to remove errors, and styled.

Once a user is done cleaning up the source material, they can save the resulting ebook to their Kindle account. There’s no way to upload an ebook to the Kindle Store, but the app does offer the option of delivering the ebook to any of a user’s Kindle apps or devices.

As I said earlier in this post, this tool is intended for personal use, and not for making ebooks to sell. I suppose you could use it for that purpose, though; it would just require a few extra steps.

I do find it curious, though, that Amazon made those extra steps difficult and slapped a price tag on this app.

Kindle Convert is Amazon’s 5th ebook creation tool, and it’s the first one Amazon has charged for. KindleGen, Kindle Comic Creator, Kindle Kids Book Creator, and Kindle Textbook Creator are all free downloads for Windows and OSX.

This app is $19, and it is probably an experiment on Amazon’s part. They want to see if they can sell this kind of app, and in this case I think the price is worth it.

Thanks, Timothy!

HP’s efforts in the edtech market may not get as much press as its printers, but this tech giant continues to invest and today it announced a new deal with OverDrive.

A couple weeks ago HP announced a line of Education Edition tablets and notebooks which are being marketed to 1:1 programs. Those devices come bundled with the HP School Pack, a suite of instructional tools. Today HP is adding the popular OverDrive library ebook app to the pack, and it is also bundling a variety of eBooks and audiobooks specifically curated for HP Education Editions.

More than 100 ebook and audiobook titles will be included. Most, including Alice in Wonderland, A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo and Macbeth, will be public domain works which could have been downloaded for free anyway.  (Librivox is a good source of PD audiobooks, in case you were interested).

When it comes to gadgets in the classroom, the iPad and the Chromebook get most of the press but they’re not the only players in this market. Intel is perhaps the best well-known of the minor players, and it has invested a lot in developing special hard ware designs and academic platform, but all of the major consumer electronics makers are interested.

For example, when the Guilford county schools went with the Amplify tablets in 2013, they chose the NewsCorp sub over HP, Samsung, and Dell (and probably Apple, although I can’t confirm that detail). The latter 3  had each partnered with Pearson to combine its hardware with Pearson’s platform.

On a related note, Apple had a similar deal with Pearson for the LA school district’s botched billion dollar 1:1 program.

In the time since bidding on that Guilford contract, HP has developed its own educational platform. They announced it a couple weeks ago, along with a bunch of new tablets and notebooks. I covered the launch of the tablets, and missed the launch of the platform in the buzz.

HP educational tablets are built around 10″ screens and run either Windows 8.1 or Android 4.4. They are powered by Intel’s Bay Trail Atom Z3735G or Z3735F chips with 1GB or 2GB RAM, 16GB/32GB internal storage, Wifi/BT, a pair of cameras, and a 28.5 WHr battery.

The Android-equipped Pro Slate 10 EE G1 starts at $279, and the Windows-equipped Pro Tablet 10 EE starts at $299 for education and $349 for all other customers. The price includes a 1-year subscription to Office 365 personal, but it’s not clear whether the educational platform comes bundled with the consumer sale.

The tablets in question are being drop tested and are certified to meet the IP52 standard, which makes them not much more rugged than your average consumer device. According to Intel’s website, its tablets meet the same standard and can survive a 2 foot drop.

A new Chrome plugin was uploaded to GitHub last week which enables users to browse the book sections on Amazon’s website and check to see whether the book they are viewing is also available via Oyster.

This ebook subscription service boasts over 1 million titles, and while that is a smaller catalog than the Kindle Store, Oyster does offer titles from major US publishers, including S&S, HarperCollins, HMH, and Macmillan, as well as Pottermore.

And thanks to the plugins, readers have the opportunity to ask themselves if they really want to buy the book they’re looking at, rather than read it in Oyster’s apps for Android, iPad/iPhone, and their web browser.

This plugin is the work of Connor Montgomery, an engineer with Pinterest, and he reports that the plugin checks the book you’re viewing with Oyster’s catalog, and if it finds a match it adds an Oyster icon so you can read the ebook via the subscription ebooks service.

He posted a screenshot (the Oyster icon is in the address bar):

Amazon is known for having a well-made website which is easy for developers to build services which integrate into it, but that advantage is quickly being turned against the retailer.

This isn’t the first plugin which works to divert customers away from Amazon; I know of several that link users to The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites, and a bookstore cooperative in France released a plugin that enabled readers to browse Amazon.fr and buy from a local bookseller.

"Let’s not browse Amazon and not shop there" is almost becoming a cause celebre, is it not?

This plugin is available via GitHub, and it will soon be available in the Chrome Web Store.

GitHub via Dear Author

Just over a year ago the FCC granted US makers of ereader devices a limited exemption from complying with certain accessibility regulations, and this past week the FCC extended that waiver for another year.

As I reported last year, this waiver excuses Amazon et al from having to make ereaders which comply with the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010. This law requires that makers of "advanced communications services" to make sure those services are accessible to the disabled.

That is a generally good idea, but one tiny problem with the law is that the term "advanced communications services" is fairly broadly defined. It covers pretty much everything that connects to the web, from software to services to hardware, including tablets and ereaders.

Naturally this presents a problem for ebook readers, given that most do not offer TTS. Those same ereaders also lack the verbal cues required to make their menus usable by the visually disabled. This lead Amazon, Sony, and Kobo to ask for a waiver in August 2013.

A one year waiver was granted last January, and was extended this week. It’s now set to expire on 28 January, 2016.

The waiver continues to exempt ereaders from this regulation, and defines them as:

• the devices have no LCD screen;
• they have no camera;
• they are not offered or shipped to consumers with built-in email, IM, VoIP or other similar ACS client applications and the device manufacturer does not develop ACS applications for them;
• they are marketed to consumers as reading devices and promotional material about them does not tout the capability to access ACS.

Obviously tablets are excluded from this definition, and so are some ereaders. For example, Onyx and Pocketbook both make devices that have email, or web abilities, or a camera, and so might not be able to enjoy the exemption. Luckily for Onyx and Pocketbook, the devices aren’t sold and marketed in the US, so they can continue to skate the 2010 law.

Not all are happy about the renewed waiver, with David Rothman writing over at Library City:

This decision is a setback not just for disability-related causes but also literacy-related ones. Regardless of what the industry lobbyists say, TTS is reading—just a different kind. Even people without disabilities can benefit, using TTS to whet their interest in a book, and then getting hooked and enjoying the text the usual way. Not to mention all the commuters who could start aurally and continue with traditional reading. A little commonsense and social awareness, please. Can’t this be about more than K Street needs and arcane legal and legislative technicalities?

While I can understand how he feels, if I were in the position to need an accessible device, I think a tablet would suit me just fine. Given how much work Apple has put into the iPad and the accessibility features found in the latest versions of Android, I think they would serve better than an ereader with an E-ink screen.

And while we’re on the topic, let me add that this waiver only covers the one federal regulation. All other regulations, including rules about libraries buying accessible devices and companies making their services accessible to the disabled, still apply.

image by kodomut

Along with Amazon’s Kindle platform, Google Play Books is one of the few ebook platforms which will let you upload your own ebooks to its servers and then download them and read them in an app.

I was recently asked for help on how to upload the files, so I thought it would be useful to document the steps involved and share them.

I don’t use Google Play Books for my main reading app, but I have uploaded several ebooks, and I can tell you that their are 3 different ways to go about it.

You can upload ebooks via your:

• iPhone/iPad
• Android device
• Web browser

Limitations

Before we get to the instructions, let’s first cover the limitations.

• Epub/PDF: Only PDF and Epub files can be uploaded, and not any other type.
• DRM: You can’t upload ebooks with DRM; Google won’t let you (according to Google’s own troubleshooting guide).
• File Size: Only files smaller than 100MB can be uploaded.
• A Thousand And One: Google will only let you upload 1,000 files.

Web Browser

Perhaps the easiest way to upload files is through the web browser on your PC.

To start, you’ll need to have an account with Google.

Open the My Books page on Google Play Books, and look for the upload button.

After you click the button, you should see a window like this. You can click the button and select the file you wish to upload, but I like to open a folder in another window and  simply drag the files from one window to my web browser. It’s convenient and simple.

Once you’ve uploaded the files, you’ll need to wait a while for the upload to finish. If you have a large file, this can take a while.

And once the file has been uploaded, you should be able to read it in your web browser.

iPad/iPhone

In addition to uploading through your computer’s web browser, you can also upload on your iDevice.

You’ll need to have the Google Play Books app installed first, and you’ll also need to have logged into your Google account before you try to upload a file.

Oh, and just so you know, there’s no option for selecting an ebook from inside Google Play Books and choosing to upload it. You’ll need to choose the ebook while you’re in Safari or another app and select the option to open the ebook in the GPB app.

Simply download the file with Safari or another web browser and choose Google Play Books as the app with which you want to open the file:

That will cause the app to open, and you will be prompted to upload the file:

The actual upload process will take some time, depending on the file size and your internet.

Android

You can upload an ebook to Google Play Books from your Android, but like the process for iDevices this process does have a few quirks. You’ll need to have the GPB app installed first, and you’ll need to find the ebook in another app and choose to upload it to GPB.

And if you are uploading a PDF, you’ll first need to go into the GPB app and enable the option before you try to upload the file.

Once you’ve down that, find the ebook you wish to upload in a file manager, your download folder, etc. Select it, and you should be prompted with the option to upload the ebook to GPB.

Choose that option, and the ebook should be uploaded automatically.

Addendum: How to Read Your eBooks

Once you’ve uploaded your ebooks, you can read them in your app or web browser  almost immediately, but before you do that you might want to also take the extra step of downloading the ebook.

One of Google’s less endearing quirks is that they don’t automatically download an ebook when you read it. Instead, they’ll send you bits and pieces of an ebook as you read it.

If you want to use your mobile device to read an ebook offline, you’ll need to specifically tell the Google Play Books apps to download the ebooks. Luckily, the process is pretty simple.

Simply find the ebook you wish to download, and press the "3 dot" menu icon. This will bring up a menu for the ebook.

Here’s what the menus look like on Android and the iPad:

 <- iPad

Android ->

As you can seem on Android the option is labeled "keep on device" while on the iPad the option is appropriately labeled "download".

Troubleshooting

If you have questions, the comment section is open. But you might also want to head over to the forums; that might be the better venue for tech support.

Publishers Weekly has a new article up today on a ebook startup called Trajectory, which has a strikingly familiar business model.

Cal Reid reports that Trajectory is developing a familiar sounding discovery engine:

. Using networked computers, the Trajectory NLPE scans the text of thousands of books, turning each sentence and its components into language data patterns that can be analyzed and extracted. The NLPE charts more than 30 “attributes” in the text of a book, including length, chapter, pace, intensity, mood, word type, and reader age. Using this data the NLPE can identify other scanned books that share similar attributes and language patterns.

Rather than comparing a book buyer’s purchases for book recommendations—like Amazon and most other online retailers—Trajectory’s technology analyzes and reveals the linguistic structure inherent in the text of a book. The Trajectory NLPE can also capture the emotional content, or “flow of sentiment,” inherent in a book by tracking the occurrence of keywords. The NLPE, Bryant said, can extract a “fingerprint” or a “personality,” from the text that can be used to compare one book to another.

If you think that sounds an awful lot like what Booklamp was doing before it was snatched up by Apple last year, congratulations. You just made a connection which Cal Reid and Porter Anderson both missed.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Booklamp was a quiet little ebook startup which had been working since 2008 on what it called the "book genome project". As I explained it when I covered the acquisition:

Booklamp had developed algorithms which analyzed a book’s structure, pacing, word use, viewpoint, action, dialog, description, perspective, genre, and other details in order to identify a book’s DNA, as it were.

At this point I don’t know how similar the tech is, but clearly the two startups are working from similar ideas in the same general area.

And that raises a few questions, including how Trajectory plans to succeed where Booklamp failed. The latter company sold out to Apple in part because it was a better deal than trying to survive as a digital publishing startup.

Of course, Trajectory might actually benefit from Booklamp’s spectacular exit; now that the idea of this kind of a discovery engine is well-known, Trajectory should find it easier to sign new customers.

If nothing else, trajectory has better looking graphs:

But I could be getting ahead of myself; Trajectory has the feel of a relatively young company:

So far Trajectory has scanned about 30,000 titles, including the HarperCollins catalog (Trajectory acquired the assets of the now-defunct startup Small Demons, which included access to Harper’s e-book catalog) and about 1,000 public domain classics.

According to the LinkedIn profile of Richard Nash, one of the senior folks at Small Demons, the Trajectory deal went down in early 2014.

I’ll have more to report when I get a chance to speak to Trajectory next week.

Sources have been telling me for about 3 months now that Adobe was going to release a Digital Editions app for the iPad, and that app showed up in iTunes yesterday.

And like any new app, it could use some work. In spite of its name, Adobe Digital Editions 4.0.2 for the iPad is very much a beta release of the app.

It offers the same Epub3 support found in the Adobe DE4 app which Adobe launched last fall for Windows and OSX, including rich layouts and embedded audio and video. From the mentions of support for interactive quizzes, and math formulas, it looks to be Adobe’s bid to enter the nascent digital textbook market.

The app doesn’t have much in the way of features yet, but there’s a search function and a timer which will tell you how long you’ve been reading. Readers can bookmark, highlight, or look a word up in the dictionary. There are optional dictionaries for a wide variety of languages from English to Russian to Thai.

The app doesn’t offer many formatting options, but it does let you change the font size and margins (in Epubs). It also has 5 color themes (including white, night, ivory, sepia, and blush):

I’ve been testing the app for a few minutes this morning, and it is rather slow and clunky. It works, but this wouldn’t be my preferred app (even if I hadn’t caught Adobe spying on users several months back).

But if you use Adobe DE 4.0, you might want to install the app. There’s been some speculation that Adobe’s spying activities had been intended to function as a syncing service which would let Adobe DE users share an Adobe account across multiple devices – PC and iPad.

Most of the major ebook platforms offer this kind of sync service, and it would make sense for Adobe to add a similar service. And since it would be useful to some readers, this app is worth a look.

But I also don’t see a way to enable that sync, nor is it mentioned as an option at this time. So there’s really no need to rush out and install the app.

You can find the app in iTunes.

Indie Authors have long paid for advertising to promote their books, and now Amazon is pitching the idea directly.

Self Publishing Review reported this morning that Amazon is now pitching pay-per-click advertising to indies with titles in KDP Select:

According to the quoted parts of the FAQ, Amazon’s offering to run a targeted ad campaign which could either be broadly targeted or could be limited to only certain viewers. This includes the option of a focus as tight as a "customers who previously browsed the Kindle Store for a particular genre". The advertiser would pay for each time a customer clicked on an advert, rather than for each thousand times an ad is shown. The minimum ad budget is $100, and the minimum CPC is 2 cents.

Update: The related page is now live in KDP. Early results are mixed.

I must say, this is new to me. I’ve only ever heard of indies using email newsletter blasts and other offsite promotions, both of which have proven to be quite effective on occasion.

While it has always been possible for indies to buy ads on the Kindle, Amazon’s websites, and on the Fire tablets, this is the first I have heard of Amazon pitching the idea directly inside KDP. It’s almost as if Amazon has decided that KDP is mature enough that it worth pitching services to it.

What next, will Amazon start asking for coop fees?

In all honesty, that is only half a joke. In August 2014 Amazon extended the option of pre-order buttons to all users of KDP, both indie author and publisher alike. Now that Amazon is extending advertising into KDP Select, the next obvious step would be for Amazon to let indies stat paying coop and other promotional fees – just like the big boys.

I know some indie authors who have said that they have wanted to be taken seriously as publishers. Congratulations; Amazon is now taking you seriously.

I hope your pocketbooks are deep enough.

Hard on the heels of Tesco pulling out of the UK ebook market comes troubling news from Germany.

A German startup blog reported on Wednesday that txtr is insolvent. The future of the company is not known at this time, but I do know that an administrator has been appointed. Christian Köhler-Ma, a lawyer with Olswang LLP, has been tasked with overseeing txtr’s affairs.

Launched in 2008, txtr was originally focused on developing a 6″ ereader with a novel design. The txtr reader featured 3g connectivity and  a unique interface, but it was plagued by development and production issues.

After the txtr reader was shelved in 2010, txtr pivoted to providing a whitelabel ebookstore platform which built on the cloud services originally developed for the ereader.

Txtr launched its own ebookstore in a number of markets, and it counted companies companies like Sony, Deutsche Telecom, and other telecoms among its customers.

Perhaps txtr’s most well-known customer was 3M, which both invested in the ebook company in 2011 and hired txtr to develop parts of the 3M Cloud Library.

3M remains one of the larger investors in txtr, but I would not count on them to rush in and save the day. I reached out to Tom Mercer, the 3M Cloud Library Marketing Manager, and he told me that:

I can’t comment on txtr or what they will be doing. However, the Cloud Library ended our relationship with txtr and took over development in late 2013. We now develop all of our apps and technology with our own development teams in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Txtr went on to develop a second ereader, the beagle. This 5″ device was designed to be paired with a smartphone and was going to be bundled with and subsidized by new smartphone contracts. No one really liked that idea, so when the beagle finally hit the market it cost as much as the Kindle and did far less.

Needless to say, it flopped – in the European market, at least. The beagle was recently licensed to a Japanese firm and launched in Japan under a new name. The fate of that device is not known at this time.

Txtr has had little good news to report since the beagle flopped, but that’s not to say that the startup hasn’t been busy.

Last summer the team behind txtr launched the ebook subscription service Blloon as a wholly separate ebook startup. At the time, I wondered why the companies were kept apart, but now I think we know the answer.

I can’t speak as to how far in advance they saw this coming, but I do have a source which told me that txtr was supposed to be bought by foreign investors at the end of last year. That deal fell through at last moment.

According to my source, Blloon is an independent company which should not be affected by the bankruptcy. I was also told that some of the txtr shareholders received shares in Blloon before it was spun off last summer. Blloon subsequently launched its ebook subscription service in the UK last fall, and plans to expand into the US and Germany this year.

The fate of txtr is still unknown, but given that a number of key employees now work at Blloon, it is safe to assume that the older company has been abandoned to its fate.

And that’s a shame, and not just because txtr’s customers will get screwed if the servers are turned off. It’s also regrettable because txtr had developed an interesting ebook platform with features that were in some ways better than what is offered by Kobo or Nook.

Thanks, Mik!