Nate Hoffelder

Remember last week when a drunk govt employee crashed a quadcopter on the grounds of the White House?

DJI, the company which makes the thousand dollar drone that crashed last week, is a little embarrassed by the irresponsibility of one of their customer, and the bad publicity has inspired them to push forward with a firmware update which adds a number of no-fly zones where the drone will be blocked from operating.

According to Engadget and Time, DJI is pushing out a firmware update for the Phantom 2 drone which will block the drone from being flown anywhere within 15.5 miles of downtown DC. It will also add no-fly zones for US airports.

I’m still waiting for a confirmation from DJI, but at this time I do know that Time is reporting:

The company said it would release what it called a mandatory update for its drone operating system in the coming days. The update would automatically disable drone flights over Washington D.C. and fence off no-fly zones around than 10,000 airports across the country. However, owners of most DJI drones won’t be forced to download the update — those who choose not to install it would just miss out on new features down the road.

“We are pushing this out a bit earlier to lead in encouraging responsible flight,” said DJI spokesperson Michael Perry. “With the unmanned aerial systems community growing on a daily basis, we feel it is important to provide pilots additional tools to help them fly safely and responsibly.”

The Phantom 2 drone costs $899 from DJI (and up) and weighs in at just under 3 pounds. And for those who live in DC, it is now a very expensive paperweight.

And it wouldn’t be possible without DRM.

There have been times where I have been tempted to take a milder position on DRM, but then shit like this happens and I am reminded just how wrong DRM is from concept to practice. While some might claim that DRM exists to protect content creators, time and again it is used to abuse the rights of the end user.

Whether it’s making it impossible to transfer legally bought ebooks between devices, breaking a $200 litter box when it runs out of cleaning solution, or making movies vanish from a user’s account, or blocking users from installing a 3rd-party coffee pod, DRM is clearly a user-hostile technology.

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Update: A reader has pointed out a key detail which I missed and may change your opinion. It’s illegal to fly drones in DC, a fact which DJL acknowledges on their website. In short, DJI is choosing to enforce federal regulations when they have no obligation to do so.

While that is their privilege, I still object to their decision to retroactively turn a thousand dollar drone into a paperweight.

When news broke yesterday that Blinkbox Books would be shutting down after it failed to find a buyer, I hoped that a 3rd-party would step in and at least save Blinkbox Books customers from losing all of their money.

And now one has.

Blinkbox Books has sent out an email today to its customers today with the news that they will soon become customers of Kobo (if they aren’t already).

The text of the email is at the end of this post. It doesn’t say much beyond announcing the deal, but it does include a link to an FAQ which contains quite a few more details.

The FAQ informs us that Kobo will be taking over Blinkbox Books' customers' accounts. There’s no information on whether the distribution deals will transfer, but a customer’s library and the record of the books they bought will/should make the transition.

The annotations made in an ebook in the Blinkbox Books apps will not transfer, just the record that a customer bought a book, and any credit or vouchers will not be transferred and should be redeemed before 9 February.

Blinkbox Books' customers are advised to open an account at Kobo, if they don’t have one already. Blinkbox Books will be shutting down on 28 February.

Update: Tesco has released a statement:

“We will work together with Kobo to transition users’ libraries to the Kobo service, ensuring they continue to have access to their previously purchased books and have the option to buy new ones from Kobo,” a spokesperson for Blinkbox told TechCrunch. “Those who access blinkbox Books on a Hudl [Tesco’s low-cost tablet] will be able to install the free Kobo reading app on their device. We will be communicating the timelines for the transition in due course.”

In short, this is largely the same deal that Sony struck with Kobo when the Japanese company pulled out of ebooks last year. That deal did not work out so well for all of Sony’s customers, but it was a better alternative than Sony simply walking away.

Thanks, Sam!

As a beloved customer of blinkbox Books, we wanted to let you know as early as possible that sadly, the decision has been made to close blinkbox Books.

Customers who have bought ebooks with blinkbox Books will be moving to Kobo and we’ll be contacting them in 2-3 weeks. If you have not bought any ebooks with us, then we recommend you register with Kobo before we close the business on 28th February 2015.

About Kobo

Kobo offers a comprehensive digital reading ecosystem, which includes a catalogue of more than 4 million eBooks, top-ranking eReading apps, and award-winning devices.

image by LoopZilla

Draft2Digital, an Oklahoma-based ebook distributor, has inked a deal with Tolino to distribute indie published titles through the ebookstores which make up the Tolino consortium. Authors and publishers whose titles make up the 40,000 D2D catalog now have a new sales channel: a network of German, Belgian, Italian, and Dutch booksellers.

Like its larger competitor, Draft2Digital distributes ebooks under a commission (as opposed to fee for service distributors like BookBaby). It currently distributes to Nook, Kobo, iBooks, and Scribd.

With its own ereader and tablets, Tolino represents 1,800 stores spread across 4 countries. It was formed in early 2013  when 4 German media retailers (Thalia, WeltBild, Hugendubel, and Bertelsmann) and Deutche Telekom pooled their resources to better compete with the Kindle Store’s dominance of the German ebook market.

According to the latest estimates from GfK, it accounts for a 45% share of the German ebook market. Its impact on the other markets in central Europe is less certain, largely due to only having signed new partner in the second half of 2014 (Belgiam retailer Standaard Boekhandel joined in July, followed in September by the Dutch bookstore coop Libris, and in November by the Italian retailer IBS.it).

image by torkildr

Late last month I asked whether consumers were buying fewer books after switching to subscription ebook services like Scribd, Oyster, or Kindle Unlimited, and according to the latest info from Neilsen Book the answer is No.

A few details from the latest edition of the Nielsen Books & Consumers Market Research crossed my desk today, and this report shows that the subscribers in the UK and the US spend more on average than non-subscribers.

The data I have shows that about 4% of book buyers have subscribed to one of the standalone ebook subscription services. Curiously, when you add in the Amazon Prime members that figure jumps to 10%. It also shows that subscribers tend to be male (59%) while book buyers tended to be female:

When it comes to age, subscribers to any of the leading services tended to fall into the 18 to 44 years old age groups, while the older age groups were better represented among book buyers.

But no matter the age, the survey group was spending a lot of money on books. As a group, subscribers had a monthly budget of $58, while non-subscribers had a budget of $34. The survey also showed that subscription customers were willing to pay more for their subscription than the standard flat rate of $9 to $10. Men were willing to pay an average of $17, while women would pay $14.

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That’s an interesting survey report, isn’t it?

I don’t have all of the data, but one of my takeaways from what we do have is that publishers are right to be concerned about making their ebooks available through Oyster or Scribd.

In a trend which mirrors the rise of ebooks, the ebook subscriber base tends to be concentrated among the most profligate book buyers.  If more publishers signed up then those book buyers would have fewer reasons to buy outside of the service, and they could end up spending less money on books.

Jonathan Nowell, the President of Nielsen Book, laid out in his talk the week before last how print sales have declined with the rise of ebooks over the past 5 years, and I’m sure that’s not a trend which publishers want to see repeated.

BuchReport.de

The UK ebook market is going to be a little less crowded in March.

Tesco has announced this morning that it will be shutting down Blinkbox Books, one of its digital subs. Apparently the rumored deal to sell it to Waterstones has fallen through, leaving Tesco few options other than to close the store:

We have taken the decision to close our e-book service blinkbox Books. We’ve learnt a lot since launching the service and whilst we saw encouraging levels of take up, we believe that we can do more for our customers by focusing on our core business. The service will close by the end of February.

Tesco has been having financial issues for about 6 months now, and as part of its cost-cutting measures it has decided to get rid of its money-losing digital sub, Blinkbox.

Blinkbox Movies was sold off earlier this month, and there is a rumor that a buyer has stepped forward for Blinkbox Music (edit: it’s been sold to Guvera). And a couple weeks ago rumors circulated that Blinkbox Books would have a similar fate. Unfortunately for its customers, that didn’t happen.

Tesco had been working to build an ebookstore since 2012, when it bought the whitelabel ebookstore provider MobCast for £4.5 million. After sinking what had to have been millions of pounds into the company, Tesco then launched Blinkbox Books in March 2014.

And now, less than a year later, it’s being shuttered.

I’m still looking for info on how consumers are going to cope with losing access to their ebooks. I can see in the FAQ that the ebooks are locked inside the Blinkbox apps, so downloading an ebook to Adobe DE is out, but at this point we don’t know whether Tesco will be doing anything to compensate readers or help them move their content to another platform.

It’s a shame Tesco couldn’t work out a deal to sell its customer lists to another retailer. Sony arranged a similar deal with Kobo when it got out of the ebook market in 2014 – certainly a better option than simply walking away.

The Bookseller

Tom Kabinet may be best known for its ongoing legal fight over its used ebook marketplace, but that’s not all there is to this startup. Founder Marc Jellema announced at a pitch at the Startup Bootcamp on Friday that he plans to launch a subscription ebook service later this year.

Details are still limited, but we do know that the service is expected to open in the third quarter with a cost of 5 euros per month. Jellema hasn’t revealed the specific terms of the subscription, but he plans to expand the service to six other countries in Europe by the end of 2016.

There’s no word yet how many titles have been secured, but Jellema is raising has lined up an additional 300,000 euros in capital investment. eMerce.nl also reports that Jellema has a distribution deal with HEMA. This would appear to be a retailer with operations in seven countries, which could explain Jellema’s confidence.

But even with a retailer as a partner, operating this kind of service in 7 countries is an ambitious and perhaps foolhardy goal. Amazon, with all its resources, hasn’t pulled it off, and while Tom Kabinet could pull it off the odds are still stacked against the company.

Even leaving aside the question of whether the subscription model is viable, Tom Kabinet operates under a financial cloud. While its used ebook marketplace is legal under Dutch law (for the moment), the Dutch publishers who oppose it will almost certainly continue to sue, only this time pursuing their legal options in EU courts.

Right now there are German court rulings which contradict the Dutch court ruling that allows Tom Kabinet to continue operating. This gives the site’s opponents a chance to appeal to the European Court of Justice to decide the issue once and for all.

While the German court rulings are more technically correct under EU regulation, the EU has a strong tendency to support consumer rights over existing law. This is why the UsedSoft v Oracle decision was decided in favor of consumers being able to resell software licenses (irrespective of the license terms, which usually forbid resale).

But at this point it’s too early to say whether European consumers will ever enjoy a similar right to resell ebooks. It is, at best, a coin toss.

eReaders.nl

image by Ben+Sam

This being January, a new semester is starting at many colleges across the US, and that means that many students are encountering B&N’s textbook platform for the first time.

Barnes & Noble hasn’t officially launched Yuzu in the 9 months since they turned the platform on, but that doesn’t mean they’re not inflicting it upon college students.

The retailer has been promoting Yuzu in the college bookstores it runs while at the same time neglecting to mention that the platform is still under development. Basically B&N has been recruiting college students to be unwitting guinea pigs in the development process, and conning them into paying for the privilege (with no refund option).

And judging by the students who have shown up in my comment section, they’re not too happy about the situation. Three students have left comments on this blog in the past week, all of which have complained about Yuzu.

For example:

I just rented my first e-book for school and of course it’s Yuzu. I hate hate hate it.

The text is tiny and you can’t enlarge the whole page. Highlighter feature seems useless to me. No, you cannot print and I even tried sending to onenote to enlarge it there, but it didn’t work. I so regret the $73 I had to spend for this and hope they get enough of the same feedback to stop using this affiliation for textbooks. I would have been so happy if I could have read on another platform…sigh.

And then there’s this one from yesterday:

Yuzu is horrible. I wish I would have gotten the hard textbook because it takes twice as long to read the digital book. It is hard to turn the pages, every time you touch the screen the note tab pops up, so you have to close it. Very irritating. It is hard to navigate, not intuitive at all. It also freezes up frequently, so you have to reload it all the time. Do not use yuzu!

And one from last week:

Posting this as a word of caution to any students considering purchasing an e-book on the YUZU platform. I am using the webapp organic chemistry e-textbook I purchased for a class and will never do this again. This would have been fine for a casual read, but there are several issues in functionality that make this almost useless for a class text book. (The price difference was not that significant either, compared with the hardcopy).

My biggest complaints: The pages appear to be protected such that you cannot print. Since turning a page takes about 5 seconds (each…turn….), I tried to print out the end of chapter questions so that I can work on them while referring to the text. What I got was a blank page. NO PRINTING!

And then there are the reviews on iTunes, where the iPad app has a two-star rating:

What the heck. This doesn’t allow us to copy and paste for easier quoting in our papers and we can’t even use the ctrl + f shortcut or Find shortcut to find keywords for easier studying. I guess they did this so people couldn’t cheat on papers? Yet Blackboard has a program to catch plagerism…. Why why limit us customers on how we use this app? I feel so cheated. Buy the eBook from the publisher or some other site, not Yuzu. Life will be easier without this app/site.

In short, this platform has been around for 9 months and is an utter fiasco.

So why does that matter (other than to show that B&N doesn’t care about fucking over college students)?

Well, B&N is still planning to spin off Nook Media into a publicly traded company later this year, and that means they will need to pitch it to outside investors. And with digital revenues declining by 50% each period, B&N can’t pitch Nook Media based on growth, so they’ll have to pitch its diverse offering of services, including the Nook Store (which consumers are fleeing in droves), the overpriced POD service, the author editorial services (which have been outsourced to Author Solutions) and Yuzu.

My point, folks, is that Nook Media is a stitched together patchwork of technologies which – at best – resembles Frankenstein’s monster.

But I would not make that comparison, because in the novel the monster was at least minimally functional as a unit, while you can’t make that claim about Nook Media.

A more apt description for Nook Media would be to compare it to an early failed experiment from The Island of Doctor Moreau – one which was never shown to the public.

Alas, if only B&N would show that same courtesy to Nook Media, but it looks like this chimera is going to be put on display at least once later this year when it is spun off. Let’s hope someone (other than this blogger) notes the kludged together nature of Nook Media and comments upon it.

image by Ant1_G

Having successfully transitioned from author to brand, the famed James Patterson is now trying a new business model: not writing at all.

He’s offering a unique opportunity for a single individual to pay $294,038 for the privilege of destroying the next Patterson-branded book. The package includes a first-class flight to an undisclosed location, two nights’ stay in a luxury hotel, a 14-karat gold-plated binoculars, a five-course dinner with Mr. Patterson, and a complete autographed set of the Alex Cross series, including the books Patterson wrote himself.

And at the end of your trip, you’ll get to read Private Vegas, shortly before watching it be wiped from this Earth.

I don’t know about you, but $300 thousand sounds like a good deal if it keeps the next Patterson book out of circulation, so much so that I am about to go launch a crowd funding campaign to raise funds.

Who’s with me?

No, wait – scratch that idea.

Apparently I misunderstood the story in the NY Times; the $300 thousand only give you the privilege of destroying a single copy, not the book itself. My bad.

Yes, Patterson is offering some rich fan the opportunity to spend a lot of money to blow up a single copy of Private Vegas (and no, Patterson won’t be holding it at the time).

Why?

According to the NY Times:

Susan Holden, managing director of the promotion at the advertising agency Mother New York, said she asked Mr. Patterson that very question.

“He said to me that he wouldn’t be surprised if one in his circle of friends might be interested,” Ms. Holden said. “He’s a super down-to-earth guy, but he runs with a billion-dollar crowd, so for some person that’s a huge Patterson fan, this could be chump change and could be funny.”

Patterson is also offering a promotion for those with tamer interests. Starting Wednesday at noon,  Patterson’e website at selfdestructingbook.com has been giving away codes which will enable a limited number of fans to read for free. It’s only open to US residents, apparently, and the codes will expire after 24 hours.

Edit: A reader pointed out a connection I missed that renders this story even more absurd. As you may recall, about a month ago Patterson released this video where he uses the allegory of a book burning to represent how book culture is being killed off in the US:

And now he’s literally destroying a book. The irony is delightful, no?

image by Alexandre Dulaunoy

Over the past couple months many authors have pointed to Kindle Unlimited and complained that Amazon’s 5 month old ebook subscription service is harming their sales, but there is growing evidence that this is not the case.

Russ Grandinetti revealed at the DBW conference last week that author revenues for titles in Kindle Unlimited were up, with the combined earnings of titles in KU in the last 5 months of 2014 were "double, more than double" what they were in the same period in 2013.

And now there’s growing evidence that the decline in revenue some authors experienced in fall 2014 might be the third appearance of a market cycle which also occurred in 2013 and 2012 (and possibly even 2011).

Earlier today john Chapman tweeted a link to an author ranting about his sales declining in 2012. Blaming recent changes to Amazon’s ranking algorithms, Derek Haines noted in November 2012 that:

Judging by my own ebook sales, it has worked spectacularly well, as my unit sales have dropped off a cliff from October to November.

That sounds an awful lot like the complaints made this past fall, and the complaints made in fall 2013.

What’s more, there was also at least one comment from an author who reported that she saw a similar decline in 2011. Debra Holland went on to note that:

Last year, my great books sales started a downward slide from after Labor Day until Christmas. Many people would still envy me my (pre Christmas) December sales figures, but for me, they were way down. With rare exceptions, almost everyone in the self-publishing community said the same thing was happening for their sales. AND people who’d self-published the year before (2010) were quick to reassure us that it had happened to them in that season previously and to wait for the Christmas wave. They were right. Christmas Day my sales popped up and were great through May and ok over the summer.

Therefore, I expected to have my sales slide during this season, and that’s what has happened. Again, in comparison to many, my sales are still good, just steadily declining. However, I’m shrugging my shoulders and focusing on getting the next book out. I know the Christmas sales will pop things up again. Having a new novella will pop sales up again.

And just to remind you, some authors saw a similar decline in 2013.

In short, folks, what we have here is strong evidence of a market cycle and not, as many assumed, the impact of Kindle Unlimited, Bob Mayer’s content glut, or whatever happens to be the cause du jour.

Do we know for sure that this is the only cause of the declines in revenue? No, but I believe that it is the most likely cause. At the very least, an annual market cycle better explains why authors who weren’t in KU saw a decline this past fall along with other authors who were in KU.

It would also explain Juli Monroe’s report that she saw a decline across all markets, and not just the markets impacted by KU:

Although I was blaming KU for my sales decline last year, when I stepped back and thought about it logically, I realized there had to be another reason. My sales dropped in all countries, including the UK and DE before KU had debuted in those countries. Obviously KU hadn’t been a factor in those drops.

She is one of the authors who isn’t in KU, and yet still experienced a decline.

Do you know of a better explanation? The comments are open.

images by karen horton, Kdt.

The Association of American Publishers released its usual welter of limited and confusing book market stats today.

Depending on which figure you’re looking at, the AAP reported that publisher revenues from January to October were up 4.1% (if you look at the trade market only) and that publisher revenues from January to October were up 5.5% (counting everything that the publishers are selling, including the crushed hopes and dreams of writers).

The aggregated revenues (from 1,209 publishers) for the trade book segment totaled $5.86 billion in the first ten months of the year, up 4.3% from $5.61 billion in the same period of 2014. The kids/YA category showed the most growth, increasing by 21.6%, while the adult category continued to dip by just under a percent and religious presses grew by 1%.

Within the growing kids/YA category, all formats continued to experience double-digit growth; compared to the same ten month period last year,  the greatest growers were ebooks at 47.8% and Board Books at 36.6%.

In terms of formats, paperbacks showed a surprise revival, with revenues growing by 7.2%. eBooks continued their solid albeit stolid growth, growing by 5.3% to $1.32 billion, while hardback revenues increased by 1.1%.

Our last session before lunch on this third and final day of the DBW conference was given over to what I had hoped would be a serious interview. Alas, if Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti didn’t say much during his interview yesterday, Apple’s Ken Moerer said even less today.

My notes totaled 5 lines, and aside from warm and fuzzy non-statements Moerer really only said three things, none of which were very informative.

• For example, iBooks is active in 51 countries 5 years after the April 2010 launch. (They’re not selling ebooks in all 51 countries, just present.)
• iBooks recently hit 1 billion downloads. (That’s downloads, and not sales, which probably amount to fewer than 10% of downloads.)
• And iBooks has been picking up an average of 1 million new customers a week since September. (Given that iBooks comes pre-installed on iOS8, all of the newly activated iDevices on new accounts count as new customers. How many are actually buying ebooks, we don’t know.)

All in all, that was a waste of an interview, and I blame Michael Cader for only lobbing softballs at Moerer. I agree with Len Edgerly; Shatzkin was much more challenging and intense when he grilled Grandinetti yesterday.

Update: It’s been pointed out to me on a mailing list that Apple sells considerably more than 1 million devices a week, so that "million new customers" probably does represent people who opened the app and downloaded an ebook.

When news of Sony’s new ebook DRM plans crossed my desk in late October, I wasn’t sure whether to take them seriously. The news came to me second hand and seemed focused on the idea of "used" ebook sales, which seemed like a pipe dream at best, but Sony’s focus is much broader than that.

I spent a few minutes today with Spiros Rally, the VP of DigitalWorks at Sony DADC, at DBW 2015. There wasn’t much he could say about the tech or Sony’s intentions publicly but he did share a few details.

Sony is very interested in this market (the fact they had people at DBW 2015 told us that) but they’re not directly interested in the trade ebook market, where the leading DRM suppliers are Amazon, Apple and Adobe. Instead Sony plans to focus on other markets and on developing new business models.

I was told that Sony is planning to focus on educational, corporate, and other markets. They’re also in talks with the NYPL, one of the many libraries exploring the possibility of developing and owning their own ebook platform, to provide the DRM used on that platform. (A number of libraries, including Douglas County Library in CO and Califa Library Group in CA, run their own ebook servers in addition to – in some cases – also working with library ebook vendors like OverDrive and 3M Cloud Libraries.)

And there is also a chance that Sony’s DRM might show up in the trade ebook market; as you may know Kobo, Google, Scribd, and Oyster each use their own proprietary form of DRM internally (Google Play Books and Kobo make a pretense of supporting Adobe DRM externally).

I have been told by Sony that partners will be using the new DRM by April, although they have not said who that will be. As I reported in October, details are still scarce.

While it might sound strange for Sony to get back into ebook DRM less than a year after getting out of ebook retail, they’ve actually been working on this for several years. I first caught wind of Sony’s efforts in this area in 2011, when the Marlin consortium announced plans to develop a new ebook DRM. Sony was involved, which is what caught my eye.

According to what we were told in October, some of the features could include:

It remains to be seen exactly how this DRM will be used, of course.

image  by rebopper

The long, drawn out demise of screen tech pioneer Pixel Qi took a turn for the surreal last night.

On Monday a disreputable source reported that Pixel Qi was "officially out of business", but according to my new contact with the company that is not the case. Late Tuesday night I got an email from Dougald Turnbull, the Pixel Qi VP of Finance and Operations, who clarified the situation. The company is not dead (well, not yet), the products aren’t dead, and the IP is very much alive.

Turnbull confirmed initial reports that the Pixel Qi screens are still in production, and that Chungwa Picture Tubes was still a licensed manufacturer. He also confirmed my report that Tripuso was a licensed distributor (so is Arrow Electronics) and that the screen tech will continue to be available.

In fact, the tech could become even more widely available – just not from Pixel Qi.

I’ve been told (and I can confirm) that the Pixel Qi IP is now in the possession of a major stockholder, and here’s where things get surreal.

John Gilmore, activist, philanthropist, and founder of the EFF, now owns the Pixel Qi patents, and he’s reportedly released the patents under the Defensive Patent License.

Described as the patent license equivalent of the GPL, the Defensive Patent License makes all patents licensed under it free to all participating parties, with the double caveat that they can’t use the patents to sue and that they must license their patents under the DPL as well.

In short, the Pixel Qi tech can be used by any screen tech manufacturer which cares to sign up for the DPL, which means that we could see some of the ideas in Pixel Qi’s screen tech (low power, sunlight readable, etc) show up in commercially produced LCD screens.

With luck we could see screens like this from the major screen makers:

That would be a far different fate from the usual outcome when a tech company fails; in most cases the IP ends up in the hands of a creditor or investor, or possibly tied up in litigation, and in some cases a patent troll such as Intellectual Ventures gains control (sometimes they’re the highest bidder).

For example, the Dutch screen tech company IRX went bankrupt last year and its IP is still under the control of the court-appointed administrator. And in 2013 Wistron folded up Polymer Vision, the screen tech company it acquired out of bankruptcy a few years before, and then simply sat on the IP.

Admittedly, the Pixel Qi outcome is far from ideal, but with the products still in production and with the tech available for license, Pixel Qi is far close to being alive than dead.

I would not count them out just yet. Who knows, the company itself might revive and start developing new ideas again. With several key individuals, including the founder Mary Lou Jepsen gone (she’s at Google now), that is’t very likely, but it’s not impossible.

And given the tech in question, I do hope someone continues development. Pixel Qi was known for its low-power transflective LCD screen tech which offered a unique  solution to the battery issue. When viewed in full color mode, it offered an adequate viewing experience with either the frontlight on or off.  The Pixel Qi screens also offered a low-power grayscale mode which was fully visible in sunlight.

The screen tech was originally developed for the OLPC educational laptop initiative, and was spun off into an independent company in order to push research and commercial development. Pixel Qi has released several generations of screens in 7″ and 10″ screen sizes which have been used in a variety of tablets, laptops, rugged devices, and even a couple USB monitors (see Sol Computer for several examples).

At one point the tech was described as an E-ink killer. Alas, that proved to be wildly optimistic, but I was equally hopeful at that time.

The hot news tomorrow morning is going to be coming from Macmillan. The US branch of this publishing conglomerate has signed a couple deals with ebook subscription services to add 1,000 titles to Scribd and (at least) one of its competitors.

To be clear, I do know the name of the competitor, it’s just that that particular detail is still under an embargo.

Update: It’s Oyster, which now boasts over 1 million titles.

After Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, Macmillan is the third of the "Big 5" US publishers to sign with an ebook subscription service since late 2013, but if you add in publishers like HMH and Scholastic (each of which have revenues large enough to be included in the Big 5) then Macmillan is actually the 5th or 6th major US publisher to do so.

The specifics of Macmillan’s deal are not know at this time, but Macmillan CEO Jon Sargent did state last month that he intended to pursue deals with "companies offer “pay per read” plans that offer favorable economic terms". Both Scribd and Oyster offer this type of deal to publishers (Scribd also offers it to ebooks distributed through Smashwords).

Scribd currently boasts 500,000 titles, including 30,000 audiobook titles licensed through Findaway World. They boast 80 million monthly users, with some unknown number paying $8.99 a month to access the ebook subscription service.

Scribd hasn’t revealed the number of paying subscribers, but they did recently pick up another $22 million in capital. That suggests that the VCs who invested are satisfied with Scribd’s growth.

There’s a story going around this morning that Pixel Qi, makers of a novel dual-mode LCD screen tech, was officially out of business.

According to my sources, that both is and isn’t true.

I just got off the phone with Chris Swanner, owner of Sol Computers. This Calif.-based retailer is one of Pixel Qi’s partners (the only one in the US, so far as I know) and he confirmed that Pixel Qi the company was indeed dead.

He also told me that the IP and products were not.

Sol Computers sells several products based on Pixel Qi screens, including a laptop, USB monitor, and a tablet, and this retailer plans to continue to do so. Chris told me that he’s not shutting down or finding a different line of products to sell; it’s just that in the future Chris will be sourcing Pixel Qi screens from Tripuso Display Solutions. Chris told me that firm now owns the Pixel Qi IP and will continue to make the screens.

Update: Dave Nelson of Tripuso confirmed the news and clarified his relationship to the Pixel Qi IP in a statement:

The IP is now owned by the original investor of Pixel Qi. We will need to wait for Pixel Qi formal announcement for the details. Tripuso Display Solutions has the right to manufacture Pixel Qi technology by contract. We are still producing the 7” product as we speak and have some availability to stock of 10.1”.

The 7” Pixel Qi product (PQ070WS01) is available and should remain in production for a few more years.

Thanks to a handful of loyal customers, we have been able to keep Pixel Qi technology alive. There is an absolute need for niche markets to have both sunlight readability and low power. The technology may not take over the world but I believe there is enough demand to keep it going for special niche markets.

We can also develop new sizes with adequate volume.

For some reason that name is familiar, although I can’t place it. But I do see from LinkedIn that Tripuso was co-founded by Dave Nelson, whose profile says that he was the director of sales at Pixel Qi until April 2013 (he founded Tripuso in December 2013).

It looks to me like Nelson saw the end of Pixel Qi coming in advance, and formed a new startup in order to buy the IP and continue to sell the tech. It’s not clear at this time whether Tripuso will be able to continue development of the screen tech, but I would not say that Pixel Qi is completely dead so long as the tech continues to live on with a new owner.

But at this point it is really too early to say.

Originally developed as a spin off from the OLPC project, Pixel Qi was the brainchild of Mary Lou Jepsen. She led the team which developed a unique dual-mode LCD screen tech which offered a screen which gracefully faded from full-color (when viewed inside) to grayscale (when viewed in full sunlight).

The screen doesn’t offer particularly good color quality, but it did have relatively low power requirements when it was first developed (I’m not so sure that is true any more) and does offer a unique and workable solution to the sunlight issue.

Pixel Qi’s screen tech was originally developed for the OLPC low-cost educational laptop project. This was the only screen used on the XO laptop, and I have no reports that it will not continue to be used on future deployed laptops.

I am of course still waiting for confirmation of that and other details.

I have to say that I was surprised by the change in status of Pixel Qi; I’m tied into a couple different channels which use Pixel Qi screens, and I had not seen any of the usual talk which this type of disruption would cause.

That leads me to think (well, hope) that the disruption will be minimal.

Pixel Qi is the second screen tech company to pass into the great nether in 2014, but it’s not quite as thoroughly dead as IRX. Instead, Pixel Qi is mostly dead:

And as anyone can tell you, mostly dead is slightly alive.