DeBunking

Authors, Don’t Be Taken in by the Blockchain/Bitcoin Hype

4 June, 2018 // 5 Comments

If you have been following tech news then you've probably heard the term blockchain mentioned more than once. This word is rarely explained in non-technical terms, but it is thrown around a lot by [Read More ...]

Cockygate: Faleena Hopkins Has Registered a Trademark on Cocky, and is Using it to Threaten Other Romance Authors

5 May, 2018 // 81 Comments

Trademark bullying is a pox on industries ranging from breweries to whatever over-priced junk Monster Cable is making this week. A trademark bully's ostensible goal is to keep consumers from getting [Read More ...]

Amazon to Spend a Billion Dollars to License “The Three-Body Problem”?

28 March, 2018 // 8 Comments

The Three-Body Problem is one of those books that many people have heard of but few have read. Originally published in Chinese, the English translation of this SF novel won a Hugo in 2015. Now the [Read More ...]

Major UK Booksellers Throw Up Their Hands When Accused of Selling Far-Right Titles

21 March, 2018 // 5 Comments

Remember last year when everyone wrung their hands over Amazon selling Holocaust denial books and completely ignored the fact that you could find those same books in just about every other [Read More ...]

If eReaders Are Dead Then So Are Film Cameras. And Horse Riding. And Fountain Pens. And Digital Cameras. And Lots of Other Stuff

27 February, 2018 // 11 Comments

Last week Tom's Hardware published a piece which used flawed assumptions to ask whether the ereader was dead: Yes, reading now is a little bit different than it was even a decade ago. While print [Read More ...]

Updated: eBooks are a Stupid Product, and Other Blinkered Ramblings

19 February, 2018 // 31 Comments

Lagardère Publishing CEO Arnaud Nourry gave an interview to Scroll.in this weekend that showed both that he was remarkably ignorant about his products as well as how and why consumers value his [Read More ...]

EFF Launches DRM-Bashing “Catalog of Missing Devices” With Devices That Aren’t Technically Missing

5 February, 2018 // 1 Comment

With the best of intentions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new section of its website that is intended to highlight services and software features that consumers are denied [Read More ...]

Edmonton Airport Wastes Money on a Short Story Printer

16 January, 2018 // 4 Comments

So the latest hot and trendy bookish gimmick is a receipt printer that has been gussied up as a "vending machine" that prints short stories. This fad is the work of a French startup called First [Read More ...]

No One Wants to Buy LitFic Anymore, So a UK Arts Council is Going to Waste Taxpayer Funds On It

17 December, 2017 // 8 Comments

A new report from the Arts Council England has confirmed what everyone already knew: people aren't buying nearly as much literary fiction as before. Don't ask me why, but for some reason this is [Read More ...]

No One Knows Exactly How Many eBooks Indie Authors Published Last Year, Much Less ISBNs

23 October, 2017 // 2 Comments

In our next trip behind the publishing industry curtain, we are going to take a look at Bowker's annual report on ISBN registrations and discuss how everyone is still misunderstanding the annual [Read More ...]

The Publishing Industry Thinks Facebook and Netflix Are Doomed

12 October, 2017 // 14 Comments

The legacy publishing industry keeps bleating about "screen fatigue" as the cause of why people are buying fewer of their ebooks (because it could not possibly be that Big 5 ebooks cost too much, oh [Read More ...]

Lies, Damn Lies, and Book People Statistics

21 September, 2017 // 8 Comments

When Mark Twain popularized the phrase "lies, damn lies, and statistics", he was referring to the way that one can selectively report statistics and tell just about any narrative desired. We see this [Read More ...]

Children Turn Their Backs on eBooks as ‘Screen Fatigue’ Takes Hold, And Other Fictions

10 September, 2017 // 5 Comments

As I am sure many people know, The Guardian takes every opportunity - and sometimes invents those opportunities - to proclaim that ebooks are dying and print books are killing them off. For example, [Read More ...]

Correcting the Record – Amazon’s Naggar Tells Publishers to Slash eBook Prices … to Help Unknown Authors

5 September, 2017 // 7 Comments

There's a story going around this week that the Amazon VP of Kindle Content, David Naggar, advised publishers to slash their ebook prices to boost sales. The story, as originally reported in the [Read More ...]

No, Amazon ISN’T Teasing Alexa on Kindles

27 August, 2017 // 9 Comments

The usual disreputable source is making stuff up again. In the past they've claimed that sources told them that Amazon would release a Kindle with a Liquavista screen (an outright fiction), or that [Read More ...]

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