Nate Hoffelder

That’s the story that’s going around, anyway.

Book agent Kristen Nelson reported in her November newsletter that St Martin’s, a Macmillan imprint, is no longer interested in negotiating deals for already successful indie titles:

For example, an attending agent highlighted that a St. Martin’s editor was willing to go on record to explain exactly why her house will no longer buy indie authors who have self-published ebooks that have gone on to be wildly successful. St. Martin’s claims their data shows that the ebook sales have already tapped out the market.

This wasn’t a surprise to me; it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. I’ve also heard that even if a publisher buys a successful indie title intending to publish a trade paperback edition, and even if they’re willing to pay bookstore co-op, booksellers are reluctant to grant that title the physical retail space. They are simply turning down the co-op offer.

This news first broke on Kboards, where Hugh Howey commented that publishers told him something similar in 2012 when he and his agent were shopping around Wool.  Howey had self-published and sold 50,000 copies, and two different publishers told him that "everyone who would ever read WOOL has already read it".

So are the publishers right?

Yes, but only in that the publishers in question have admitted that they cannot outperform a successful indie.

As a market prediction, they are almost certainly wrong, and in the case of Wool they were ridiculously wrong. Since being picked up by S&S, the Wool series has sold over two million additional copies.

While I doubt most indie titles would have that level of success if they were picked up by a major publisher, I would have thought that a publisher could boost sales through a judicious application of marketing and promotion.

And I’m not the only one. In 2012 Passive Guy commented on Amanda Hocking’s sales after signing with St Martin’s:

The publisher’s view of a finite audience is part of the outmoded scarcity model Kris Rusch has written about. One reason why some successful indie authors may not sell nearly as well with a traditional publisher is that traditional publishers are too rigid and don’t know how to sell to new online buyers.

PG thinks St. Martins has screwed up sales by charging too much for Amanda’s audience – $8.99 for the ebook. If SMP had let Amazon set the price instead of insisting on agency pricing, it would have made a lot more money.

Hocking was one of the first best-selling indie authors to sign with a major publisher, and she wrote in April 2012 that she had sold around a million copies of her Trylle series before unpublishing it when she signed with Macmillan. In comparison, she also reported that by the end of April 2012 the first book in the series was already in its fifth printing (damned good for a book published in January 2012) and that the other books were selling well.

Hocking hasn’t discussed her sales since then, but she did go on to sell another series to St Martin’s last summer.

And now St. Martin’s doesn’t think they can outsell a successful indie title? I wonder what they’re not telling us?

I doubt we’ll ever learn the real casus belli for their decision, but as Hugh Howey explained:

… just because publishers are saying something — and acting on those beliefs — doesn’t make them right. It’s just another excuse for their caution. Of course they’ve been burned by a few acquisitions. The majority of their books don’t sell well. And it’ll always be for some reason (vampires are so done; no one reads urban fantasy anymore; books this long don’t sell) when the truth is that the market is variable, no one knows why some things take off and others don’t, and publishers succeed by throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks, and reading way too much into what doesn’t.

Thoughts?

image by Secret Pilgrim

As the publishing industry continues to fragment into an increasing number of independents (and a shrinking number of giants), there’s growing opportunity in connecting those indies with the publishing pros they need to get their books to market.

Blurb is seizing on that opportunity today with the launch of a new marketplace. It’s called Dream Team, and Blurb has recruited industry veterans Molly Barton and Richard Nash to run it.

I missed out on the press briefings, but from what I can see in the coverage on TNW and Venturebeat this looks a marketplace much like the one Reedsy launched last month. TNW reports that:

The Dream Team group, operating under the Blurb aegis, is comprised of 50 creative professionals who provide expertise in copy editing, developmental editing, book design, art direction, illustration, photography, cover design, ghostwriting, ebook conversion and more. Authors and businesses can pick and choose their own custom team without having to submit to a package deal.

Team members are spread across the UK/EU, Canada, US and Australia, and are equipped to work on projects in English, French, and Dutch for both print and digital books.

Blurb won’t be taking a cut of the deals between authors and the pros, but they will be benefiting from the increased number of projects brought to fruition. Blurb’s past research has shown that projects done entirely by a single person have the lowest completion rate.

Some time back Blurb conducted a survey of 40 book projects on the site, and discovered that when an expert is hired to assist on a project, the completion rate tripled to 30%. Hiring a second pro bumped the completion rate to 90%.

The Dream Team  marketplace is only in its earliest stages, and Venturebeat says that Blurb plans to let it grow based on the needs of authors:

The marketplace will eventually add new types of collaborators like ghost writers, publishing business managers, marketers, publicists, and more. The idea, Gittins said, is to slowly transform Dream Team into a platform that offers all the services of a traditional book publisher, and then some.

As the Dream Team marketplace grows it will have to outcompete other marketplaces, including the ones run by Reedsy, Bibliocrunch, and Book Machine. That last startup is focused on building an online community of publishing pros through local events in NYC, London, and elsewhere.

If there’s one thing I hate about book culture it’s when someone gets up on their high horse and tells me that I am reading the wrong books, or reading them the wrong way, or reading them in the wrong format.

Juliet Lapidos is one such person. Writing in The Atlantic, she takes the position that you should always finish all of the books you read.

I finish every single novel I start. If I happen upon the first line of a 1,000-page novel, I of course don’t feel compelled to read to the end. But as a matter of personal policy, when I decide I’m going to read a novel, I read the whole thing.

I’ve gathered over the years that my persistence—or stubbornness, depending on your point of view—is unusual. Most people I encounter think nothing of dropping a novel halfway because they find it boring or because they can see where it’s going or because they forgot it on the subway and moved on to the next thing.

This behavior, common though it may be, seems lazy to me. Wrong, even. Once you start a book, you should finish it.

This is one of the links in tomorrow’s morning coffee posts, but after having read and thought about it today I have decided to respond directly.

Lapidos presents several arguments, none of which are compelling. For example:

First: Pleasure. When you stop short, you risk missing something incredible. I can’t count how many novels have bored me for a hundred or even two hundred pages only to later amaze me with their brilliance. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers is long and dated. I quickly grew tired of Samuel Pickwick’s adventures, which were probably funny for 19th-century readers but which I found annoyingly quaint.

I don’t wish to sound like I am criticizing her reading choices, but I don’t find boredom pleasurable. It’s boring, and I don’t see why I should spend any of my limited time on this planet reading a book that is tedious. I’ve already made that mistake too many times.

Second: Fortitude. When a book makes me antsy I sometimes think of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment from the late 1960s, which found, in brief, that children who were able to wait longer before stuffing themselves tended to do better in school and have a healthier body mass index later in life.

Let me cut her off at the knees: People like her are why some kids grow up hating to read. She is the type of person who would hand a kid a boring or difficult book and tell them to finish it anyway, thus instilling in that kid a hatred for the experience of reading.

But since she also brought up willpower, I will point out that there is research to suggest that willpower is a finite resource. The more a person must force themselves to finish a book, the less willpower they have to use for other things.

Like, you know, work.

Third: Respect. …

To drop a novel after a few chapters is, then, to disregard what makes it a formal work of art rather than a heap of papers that reside in a desk drawer. Today, books and authors need all the help they can get; if you care about literature as an artistic endeavor and the people who create it, then you should do so fully.

Rebecca Schinsky tweeted a good response to this. Earlier today she asked: "Does music suffer when you change stations mid-song? Does food culture die when you don’t finish a meal?"

She’s not wrong.

***

I don’t usually pay attention to people like Lapidos, and to be honest I don’t think enough of her arguments to come up with a clever closing argument which ties this post together.

I say read however you want, whatever you want, wherever you want. And while you’re at it, please extend the same courtesy to other readers.

image by jlz

The Verge posted an interview yesterday of Oyster founder Willem Van Lancker. He makes some bold claims about the future of books, including that the phone is the future of ebooks:

Where are people reading more, tablets, phones, or on the web?

We’ve always been really big believers that the device of the future for books is the phone. That’s the first thing we went to publishers with when we started talking about the differentiation of Oyster, that we can provide the best possible mobile experience.

It’s hard to get the data on this with Android, because, what is a tablet? But between iPhone and iPad, it’s a 50 / 50 split. It might even be higher on the phone in recent months over the iPad. This is an app that people use on their phone constantly, and we see the actual activity spiking during the week at lunchtime, and through the evening and peaks around midnight, and on the weekends it’s pretty sustained. Unlike a lot of products, our biggest days are Saturdays and Sundays, but when we added the web reader, you see it spiking on weekdays because people are reading during work.

We thought about making a button you could hit that would make Oyster look like Microsoft Word like they do for March Madness. It would be funny to bring that to books.

I have long said that smartphones and tablets (and not dedicated ereaders) were the future of the ebook market, but I’m not sure Van Lancker is right in this instance to focus on just one type of device.

While we have seen evidence that smartphones are outselling tablets by a factor of five to one and are driving sales in some markets, I’m not sure that he is correct to say that they’re the future – at least, not yet.

For one thing, with 200 million iPads sold and 500 million iPhones sold in 7 years, the fact that iPads and iPhones are showing up in Oyster in equal numbers suggests  the argument that the iPad is preferred over the iPhone as a reading device. (And even if you assume that an arbitrary percentage of the units sold are no longer operational, you’re still going to have far more iPhones in use.)

But more importantly, the growth of phablet screen sizes is quickly rendering most distinctions between smartphones and tablets irrelevant. When you have 4.3″, 5″, 6″, and 7″ tablets and 5″, 6″, and 7″ smartphones available in a single market, the only way you can really distinguish between them is by the connectivity – namely, whether you can use one to make a call. And thanks to Skype, I’m not sure that’s a valid criterion either.

In short, I wouldn’t say that smartphones are the future; at this point that is an arbitrary label applied to some mobile devices. Instead, I would say that people will read on the device they have at hand. Often times that is their phone, yes, but not always.

For example, I have always carried around a 7″ tablet to read on, but lately I have started to replace it with an Android ereader. Yes, I know one shouldn’t generalize from a single example, but his argument is based on the same flaw:

Why did your gut tell you that people are going to be reading on phones in the future?

It was my own behavior. Even when I’m in bed at night, I have an iPad mini with Retina and I still use my phone. And I have an iPhone 6 now, which is even better.

Thoughts?

Germany’s biggest news publisher has just acceded to the fact that it needs Google more than Google needs it. Reuters reports that Axel Springer recently ended a two-week-long test where Springer blocked Google from using snippets of  articles from its websites noting that the test had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.

For the past two weeks Springer has blocked Google from using snippets from 4 of its most popular news sites: welt.de, computerbild.de, sportbild.de. and autobild.de. There are no publicly available details on the traffic lost during the test, but Springer did note that "traffic flowing from clicks on Google search results had fallen by 40 percent and traffic delivered via Google News had plummeted by 80 percent in the past two weeks".

Axel Springer was the last holdout of a cartel of German publishers which had been trying for years to force Google to pay for the traffic it sends them, a fight which the publishers have lost every round.

After years of yelling and threats, the publishers got a law passed in 2013 which required search engines like Google to pay for the use of snippets in search results. Google responded by requiring publishers to grant free use of the snippets under the promise of being removed from Google News (as we can see from today’s news, that is not an idle threat).

Earlier this year the publishers counter-attacked. 200 German publishers signed up with VG Media and started legal proceedings against Google, alleging that Google was violating that 2013 law. They asked to be awarded 11% of Google’s revenues based on their abilities to heft a very wide shovel.

In addition to demanding that Google pay for the use of the snippets, VG Media filed an antitrust complaint against Google. That came to naught  in August after the Bundeskartellamt declined to investigate Google’s dominance of the search engine market, noting that the  publishers had not offered sufficient basis to justify an investigation. (The fact that the Bundeskartellamt also had to investigate VG Media as a possibly illegal cartel may have influenced its decision.)

VG Media’s efforts came to an end a couple weeks ago when it announced that its members would be granting Google the use of snippets for free, and now Axel Springer is joining them. Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have "shot ourselves out of the market" had it continued to block Google.

While it is good  to read that the publishers have conceded the fight, this story is not over with yet. Spain has recently passed a law which grants publishers the inalienable right to license their content (as in it’s illegal for them to give the snippets away for free), and the EU’s new digital commissioner has stated his intentions to  push for an EU-wide Google tax.

Reuters

A new amendment to Spanish copyright law passed the upper house of Spain’s Cortes Generales today, and it is due to become law next year. El Pais reports that the amendment makes a number of revisions to existing law, including the creation of a controversial tax on news aggregators.

The new law makes many problematic changes, including requiring universities to pay fees to a collection society for digital course materials which had otherwise been released under a CC license, but the one I am most interested in today is the tax on news aggregators.  (You can find a complete breakdown on the changes on Google en Espanol.)

Colloquially known as the Google tax, the new law is intended to force Google as well as other search engines and news aggregators to pay for the use of links to news articles published elsewhere.

But it probably won’t work – at least not with Google.

The text of the changes to Spanish copyright law (PDF) is difficult to understand, but Spanish news sources say that it is actually worse than previously expected.

The law gives copyright holders the inalienable right to be paid for the use of their work – including a link. This means that they can’t decide to give away the content for free, something Google has required in Germany and elsewhere.

TBH, I’m not sure myself that the law says that links must be licensed, but the text of the law  (PDF) is convoluted enough that I am not comfortable arguing with a native speaker.

On the plus side there is an exception for excerpts used for news and entertainment purposes, which means sites like this blog are safe (social networks might also be covered), but the law is still going to compel aggregators like Reddit, Google News, and Spain’s own Menéame to pay for the use of links.

And just so we’re clear, one of the core concepts of the internet, the web link, is now considered to be copyright infringement in Spain when used by certain parties.

Please excuse while I go roll a SAN check.

It’s not clear where news sites and aggregators in Spain will be going from here, but I do know that Google has already issued a statement (originally in Spanish):

We are disappointed with the new law because we believe that services like Google News help publishers to drive traffic to their websites. As regards to the future, we will continue working with Spanish publishers to help them increase their income while we consider our options under the new regulation.

Google hasn’t said how they will respond to the changes in the law but I would bet that at a minimum Google will be delisting any site that might be covered by the new provisions. The search engine giant has taken similar steps in the past, including in Belgium and Germany, when other publishers tried to force it to pay for the free advertising it sends them.

There’s even a chance that Google might pull out of Spain entirely, but at this point that is just wild speculation.

All I know for sure today is that most if not all of the publishers who pushed for this Google tax will come to regret it in short order. It is safe to say that these sites rely on Google for anywhere between a quarter and half of their site traffic, and with Google no longer sending visitors their way the drop in traffic will quickly be felt in the pocketbook.

To be fair, some of the publishers may have already adapted their business model to depend on other sources. The UK’s Telegraph, for example,  boosted their site traffic by 20% in June by focusing on better promoting on Facebook.

I do not know that any of the Spanish publishers who backed the Google tax will be able to make similar boasts, though.

image by Tax Credits,  efile989

The American Association of Publishers released a new report today with the latest stats on the US book market. As with their past monthly reports, the AAP has released the bare statistics to the press, and from what I can see the news is generally good.

Based on the net revenues reported by 1,209 publishers, the AAP reported on Wednesday that the US trade book industry increased by 4.1% in the first 7 months of 2014 ($3.57 billion to $3.7 billion).

The adult segment showed a drop in sales of 2.2%, while the religious pressed reported an increase of 1.9%. Much of the latter could probably be attributed to an increase in the sale of religious ebooks, which saw a 25.7% increase over the same period in 2013.

The best performing segment was kids/YA, which shot up by 25.8% ($762 million to $958 million). This includes a 59% jump in YA ebook revenues, thought the specific value for that segment has not been shared.

In terms of formats, downloadable audiobooks continued to be the fastest growing format remain with a +26.2% growth over the same period in 2013. eBooks came in a distant second increasing by 7.5% ($871 million to $937 million). Hardback books dipped by a fraction of a percent, while sales of paperback book grew by a not insubstantial 5.3% ($1.08 billion to $1.13 billion).

If you’re still trying to choose between a Paperwhite and a Voyage, here’s something that might help make up your mind.

I just got an email from Kindle pr with the confirmation that the Voyage doesn’t support Kindle Active Content, and it will not be getting support any time in the future.

For those just tuning in, Kindle Active Content is the clunky name that Amazon uses to describe apps developed to run on Kindle ereaders (and to be clear: Not the Android tablets). Amazon carries about 490 apps in the Kindle store, including 20 freebies, which can be installed on a Kindle – just not on the Voyage.

The apps vary from simple games like dots and boxes to more complex apps like the choose your own adventure type of book like Dusk World (or Coliloquy’s apps), crosswords,utilities, and there are even test prep apps.

None of which will run on Amazon’s flagship ereader, the Kindle Voyage.

The lack of app support was first noticed on MobileRead over the weekend, but at that time it wasn’t clear whether this was a new policy or perhaps the result of technical issues. The Voyage does have a higher resolution screen which could have affected the apps running on it, but it turns out that is not the case.

I was told by Amazon spokesperson Kinley Pearsall that app support would not be coming in the future, and that:

You’re correct that these apps are not supported on Kindle Voyage. We’ve heard from customers that they generally prefer apps on their phones and tablets, so our focus is on building the best purpose-built reading devices.

On a related note, rumors circulated last year that Amazon was going to shut down this program. It looks like that rumor may have been at least half true; the last new Kindle Active Content was added in late 2012 (according to the listed publication dates).

But the program isn’t entirely dead; I have been told that existing Kindle models, including the Paperwhite, will continue to support Kindle Active Content indefinitely.  Of course, that is no guarantee that a future update won’t break support for a specific app but I won’t assume the worst, either.

While we’re on the topic of apps on ereaders, Amazon is not the only one to come up with this idea. The Ukrainian ereader maker Pocketbook has a well developed catalog of apps for its ereaders, and there are also a couple Android based ereaders with E-ink screens. You can install Android apps on the Onyx T68 Lynx and the Icarus Illumina. Both run an open version of Android.

I never really liked the idea of running apps on my Kindle, but I do like how I can extend the abilities of my Illumina by installing Android apps. This is also one of the reasons why the T68 Lynx compared well to the Kindle Voyage in my review last week.

Alas, Amazon doesn’t think this feature is as important as I do.

What do you think? Will this affect your decision to buy a Voyage?

Adobe rolled out a new update for their Digital Editions Epub app today, and I have good news, bad news, and okay news.

This is a relatively minor update to the month-old Epub app, and the good news is that it adds a full text search option as well as a new display window for search results.

The bad news is that we don’t know for sure whether Adobe is still spying on users, because (and here’s the okay news) they say that they are now encrypting the data uploaded to their servers. According to the changelog posted by Adobe, one of the new features is:

Enhanced security for transmitting rights management and licensing validation information. With this latest version of Digital Editions 4.0.1, the data is sent to Adobe in a secure transmission (using HTTPS).

I got the tip from Adobe a couple hours ago, after having run several tests I can confirm that the data uploaded to Adobe’s servers is no longer being sent in clear text.

I can’t speak as to the quality of the encryption or what data Adobe is collecting, but at least they have taken the basic step of making it difficult for everyone in the world to listen in when that data is sent to Adobe’s servers.

Update: I’ve heard from another tester who identified that Adobe was using SSL, and that it didn’t appear to be sending any data at all (for DRM-free ebooks). But if you activate a DRMed ebook Adobe does send a lot of encrypted information. Removing that DRMed ebook stopped the app from sending info.  Thanks, Michael!

Second Update: I have an independent confirmation that Adobe only uploads data after a DRMed ebook has been activated.

For those just tuning in, earlier this month I broke the news that Adobe’s newest ebook app was logging users' reading habits and scanning the storage of any attached ereader and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers in the clear.

After my initial report was confirmed by Ars Technica, the shit hit the fan. Following criticism from the EFF and from librarians, leading to a partial admission from Adobe that they had been collecting data "in accordance with their privacy policies" (which just goes to show that Techdirt is right; such policies are a joke).

You can find a timeline of events on my original post.

My report has sparked a debate in the ebook world over just what activities are acceptable. Some took the position that Adobe’s actions were similar to the conveniences that we take for granted with the major ebook platforms (and web services in general). That would be a good point if not for the fact that Adobe was not providing me with any service which would require collecting that data, much less uploading to their servers.

The best you can say for Adobe is that they might have been intending to provide a syncing service in the future, possibly as part of the iPad app which I have been told is in the works, or as part of the ebook platform which they license to other companies (Kobo, B&N, Pocketbook, and so on). That could be true, but again Adobe was not providing that service and thus did not need to collect the data, much less upload it.

This is less a case of a company screwing up in supporting users than it is one of a major tech company grabbing more user info than is required and then, when they are caught, trying to write it off with a "My bad" and a promise to add encryption.

That is entirely the wrong response. What they should have said was that they would stop the spying, not that they would make it more difficult for the world to listen in.

Unfortunately there’s not much that users stop Adobe. This company is too central to the ebook world and that means that we will have to do business with them at some point.

The best the average user can do is to use a firewall or other utility to block Adobe’s apps from accessing the web, or possibly use one of the older versions of Adobe DE (which to the best of my knowledge does not collect user data).

Or we could always flee into the welcome embrace of Amazon, but many in the ebook world would call that a fate worse than death. Plus, there is no guarantee that Amazon is not collecting similar data on users.

If anything, this ensuing story has reminded us that there are maony circumstances where privacy is more of a figleaf than a reality. The best we can really hope for is that the services we use won’t blab our person details to the world.

image by Soctech

Google’s 4-month-long fight with German news publishers over license fees for search result snippets came to a close today when the publishers threw in the towel.

VG Media, the rights management firm which 200 German publishers had intended to use to collect the fees, announced on Wednesday that they would be granting Google a free license to use the snippets, saying that they were "forced to this extraordinary step, given the overwhelming market power of Google".

In short, this latest effort to force Google to pay for the privilege of sending web traffic to other websites failed as completely as past attempts. This both is and isn’t a surprise in that for once the publishers had the law on their side, but given Google’s past refusal to pay similar fees (they’d rather remove links from search results) I am not surprised that Google prevailed again.

This fight started in June of this year when VG Media started legal proceedings against Google, alleging that Google was violating German law. They asked to be awarded 11% of Google’s revenues based on, well, I’m not quite what they were smoking.

But I do know that VG Media had based its claim on a law passed in Germany in August 2013, which had been written to cover pretty much this situation. It explicitly granted publishers the right to license their content or parts thereof, except in the case of single words or very small text snippets.

Unfortunately for the publishers, German regulators didn’t see things the same way. In August the Bundeskartellamt rejected the antitrust complaint filed by VG Media, and while at first it looked like VG Media would win on the license front earlier this month Google announced that they would stop using excerpts from the websites belonging to the publishers behind VG Media.

To be clear, Google would still link to the sites, but it would not use snippets. This puts the publishers at a disadvantage compared to other news sites in the search results.

While VG Media might have a legal right to demand the license fees, they didn’t have any way to force Google to use the snippets (that is what the antitrust complaint was supposed to accomplish, I kid you not). And without that, the publishers have two choices: either give up the free traffic Google sends them or let Google use the snippets for free.

VG Media chose the latter option, just like I predicted. This is not the first time that a European publisher has tried to get Google to pay for the use of snippets, for the most part Google came out ahead each time.

Even when Google initially lost, as in the case of the copyright infringement suit filed against  Google in Belgium, the search engine giant came out ahead. In that case, after Google complied with the ruling and delisted the websites which had sued Google, it was then accused of punishing the sites by no longer sending them web traffic.

Eventually the Belgian sites had to agree to let Google list them for free – which is exactly what VG Media did today.

When I first reported on the new Kindle Voyage earlier this week I mentioned that the Voyage was running the same software as the Paperwhite. It turns out that is not entirely correct. While the two Kindles use what looks like the same web browser, the software running underneath the UI is not even close to being the same.

At the request of a reader, I spent some time yesterday playing with both Kindles, testing the web browsers, and I can report that the Voyage has the much better web browser. It’s enough better that I sincerely hope that the Paperwhite gets it in an update otherwise this could be a strong selling point for the Voyage.

While the web browsers look the same, offer the same features (like article mode), and are about equally fast at loading a page, there are ways that they differ.

For example, the Voyage loads the settings menu faster, but the Paperwhite responds faster when you scroll the page. I played with both web browsers, and I visited websites like Google, Boing Boing, Techcrunch, and this blog. I noticed that simple things like website menus opened faster on the Paperwhite.

I also found that the web browser on the Voyage is more stable.  It didn’t crash, while the web browser on the Paperwhite crashed a bunch of times – and it also froze when I tried to plug it in to the USB cable. This necessitated a holding down the power button to force a reboot.

Update: At the request of another reader, I tried Dropbox and the Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon.com. Those crashed on the Paperwhite, and they also crashed the Voyage’s web browser.

All in all, the Voyage has the better web browser, but rather than laud it I am going to sit back and hope that the Paperwhite gets the improved web browser in an update. I for one would rather browse the web on the Paperwhite’s lower resolution screen.

This might sound counter-intuitive, but the higher resolution screen on the Voyage might not actually be a good thing when it comes to web browsing. Because the resolution was so high (1080 pixels wide), websites with responsive layouts served up the full desktop webpage to the Voyage. The Paperwhite with a screen width of 758 pixels, on the other hand, was served a mobile version of the same website.

The latter was IMO much easier to use on a 6″ screen.

As you can see in the screenshots below, the Voyage packs more content into a single screen image. This gives you smaller text and more ads.

To be fair, I’m sure you would appreciate the higher resolution of the Voyage’s screen more when reading in article mode, but getting there is another matter. Much to my surprise, we’ve found an example of where more is not necessarily better.

But that’s just my opinion, and as I read it again I think it might be a minority opinion. What do you think?

As predicted by this blogger a couple weeks ago, Barnes & Noble officially launched the 10″ version of their co-branded Galaxy Tab 4 Nook. The new Android tablet is available today in B&N stores and on Nook.com, where it is selling for a retail of $299. 

According to the specs B&N posted on the Nook developer pages and then confirmed on the product listing for the new tablet, the co-branded Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 10.1 runs Samsung’s flavor of Android 4.4 KitKat on a quad-core 1.2GHz Marvell CPU with 1.5GB RAM and 16GB internal storage.

This tablet has a 10.1″ display has a screen resolution of 1,280 x 800, and it also has Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, a pair of cameras (1.3MP and 3MP), and a microSD card slot. Weighing in at 487 grams, the new Tab Nook measure 8mm thin and has a 6.8Ah battery which is specced for 10 hours of web browsing.

I haven’t had a chance to get my hands on one of the 10″ Tab Nooks yet, but its smaller sibling is in all the important ways a Samsung Galaxy Tab, with additional Nook software. That model launched just over 2 months ago.

I am pointing out the close similarity between the Samsung branded unit and the co-branded unit because the high retail price offers a strong incentive to shop around. Amazon, for example, is selling the Samsung galaxy Tab 4 10.1 for $279 today. That is $20 you can spend elsewhere.

To be fair, B&N is boasting that their 10″ tablet comes with $200 in content, but Samsung makes a similar claim ($300 in products and services, in fact). What’s more, much of the dollar value of what B&N is giving away comes in the form of 3 single tv episodes and a double handful of single magazine issues.

Given the tight price competition in the larger tablet market, I have to wonder if B&N may have made a mistake in taking on a 10″ tablet in addition to the 7″ Galaxy Tab 4 Nook. B&N is committed to selling a million of the co-branded tablets, but I don’t think savvy shoppers will be buying very many.

Amazon’s crowd-sourcing program opened its doors to authors last week, and a new report tells me that it will soon be open to readers as well.

Benjamin Sobieck wrote on his blog earlier today that his latest crime novel, The Invisible Hand, was accepted into the Kindle Scout program today. He reports that it took Amazon less than 24 hours to accept his work and assign a start date for his campaign. The Invisible Hand will be posted for readers to rate and review on 28 October.

For those just tuning in, Kindle Scout is a new hybrid publishing program from Amazon. Authors can submit a work (including a completed manuscript, cover, author bio, and description), and if accepted into the Kindle Scout it is posted for public review. Readers will have 30 days to read the excerpt and comment on it, and well, it’s not clear what will happen next.

Theoretically, Amazon’s newest publishing imprint, Kindle Press, will take reader nominations into account and (assuming a work passes muster) offer the author a 5 year publishing contract with an advance.

But this program is still so new that I don’t know if we can say for sure whether it will work. I would bet that there won’t be a shortage of authors signing up, but I still don’t know whether enough readers will participate or if they will be able pick good books.

But even with the unanswered questions, this program is still worth a shot. As Sobieck explains, the potential upside is significant and if worst comes to worst all he lost was a 6 week exclusive:

Writers can see the specifics of how this works here, but I won’t bore anyone with that. I wanted to take a swing at Kindle Scout because a) being picked up by Kindle Press offers a good chance of making bank on sales, since Amazon’s marketing knows how to target and sell e-books within its ecosystem; and b) it’s a 45-day turnaround, which is much faster than slogging through the submission process I just don’t have time for right now.

If Kindle Press does choose to publish Sobieck’s book, he’ll be signing over ebook and audiobook rights (but not paper) in exchange for a $1,500 advance and royalty rates better than what can be found in most publishing contracts (more details here).

Kindle Scout is one of two programs for authors which Amazon has launched recently. The other is Write On, a writing community designed along the lines of Wattpad. Write On has been under development since April of this year, but was only publicly unveiled earlier this month. (It’s still invite only, so let me know if you want one.)

P.S. If you have a book about to go through Kindle Scout, please let me know. I’d like to know what Kindle Scout is like from the inside, and I’d be happy to accept a guest post with a first hand account.

When Bilbary burst on to the digital publishing scene in late 2011 it got a lot of attention for its novel ideas, including plans for a rental ebook platform. Sadly, it now seems novel ideas were all the company had going for it, which could explain why the company quietly went bankrupt earlier this year.

The Bookseller reported today that Bilbary, once the shining light of indie ebook startups, is out of business. The company actually shut down in May or June of this year, but it wasn’t until last week that someone noticed it was gone. (Andrew Rhomberg of JellyBooks gets credit for that.)

Bilbary had been shedding senior management since at least March of this year, and they had been shedding real estate since last September, when they closed their London office.

The company had raised around 2 million pounds in its early days, but was not able to either generate enough revenue to support itself or enough growth or forward momentum to interest investors and soon ran out of money.

As the old saying goes, the main reason startups die is that someone launched them in the first place.

But if you ask Bilbary founder Tim Coates, Bilbary was caught between Amazon and publishers. Coates told The Bookseller: "The dispute between Amazon and publishers on e-book pricing [and the agency model] makes it impossible to invest. We are in a situation where investors are terrified of risking a new venture because no-one knows what the pricing structure will be. As long as the argument has been going on, any investor says, 'What is the pricing model?' and you can’t answer them. Bilbary was caught in the crossfire from the industry dispute and we weren’t alone."

I think that explanation is nonsense; the truth is a lot more complex and less palatable. The fact of the matter is, the odds are stacked against publishing industry startups in the first place.

I haven’t had a reason to report on it much, but I tend to listen when people like Andrew Rhomberg of JellyBooks and Micah Bowers of Bluefire talk on Twitter about the resistance they have faced in getting the major publishers, all of whom are very conservative, to try some thing new. (This is to some degree confirmed in the administrator’s report.)

For example, Bilbary originally launched in very late 2011 with the idea of offering an ebook rental service. This fell through when none of the majors went for the idea –  a detail which Tim Coates should have been able to predict based on his years as the managing director of the UK bookstore chain Waterstones.

The problems publishing startups have encountered help explain why, for example, Booklamp sold out to Apple and Readmill sold out to Dropbox. it’s not just that the tech companies had the money; they were also willing to spend it.

But I am not sure that it would explain Bilbary. I have my own sources on this story, but I was asked not to share the details about financial mismanagement.

But I can share that I was told that Tim Coates bailed on Bilbary months before the company shuttered. He’d already registered his new startup, Freckles, in March without telling anyone else at Bilbary.

According to Coates, Freckles is going to focus on the library ebook market:

What I’ve suggested is we bridge that gap between publishers and libraries – and the place to bridge it is the library management system. If a publisher produces a print book, it goes to Baker & Taylor, to YBP, to Ebrary – and then the information is placed on a library management system, a catalogue. The reader looks at the catalogue and says, 'Ah, they have this book.' What I suggest is that with e-books, you don’t have to do that, you can take the complete output of publishers and place it on the catalogue and readers can make the choice. There’s no reason why every library can’t offer every e-book in the world.

In short, Freckles is going to compete with OverDrive. Considering that this is one of the things Bilbary tried and failed to do, I’m not sure that Freckles will have much greater success.

On the one side Freckles will still have to work with publishers, while on the other side they will have to compete with OD, a company with deep pockets and the demonstrated ability to adapt to offer the same services as their competitors.