Joe Wikert has recently espoused an idea well-known in certain book industry circles, that obscurity (and the challenges with being discovered) is the greater threat to authors and publishers.

Yesterday he published a post arguing that publishers should embrace (rather than fight) Google Books:

When I meet with publishers I always ask them about the biggest problems they face in today’s market. One of the most popular answers is “discoverability.” Most publishers fret about getting lost in a sea of other books and promotional campaigns.

…

That’s why I’m scratching my head about all the negative publisher and author reaction to the recent federal appeals court ruling on Google Books. If you’re not familiar with Google Books, it’s an extension of the search engine enabling discovery and sampling of digitized books. Many of those books are still protected by copyright, hence the delicate nature of the case.

…

Publishers, wake up and realize that the largest search engine on the planet offers a powerful way for your content to be discovered and purchased. Rather than getting all litigious about this, why not embrace it and find a way to fully leverage it?

The simple truth is that as technology evolves, the notion of “fair use” is also evolving. I think this is a very good thing, and not just for Google. History is littered with marketplace incumbents who crashed and burned as they tried to protect yesterday’s model. Tomorrow’s publishing leaders will be the ones who take advantage of services like Google Books, not those trying to make it go away in a courtroom.

He’s not the first to make this point about discovery; Eric Flint raised a similar issue as far back as December 2000, when he was touting free ebooks as a way to sell more books, and many authors (including Neil Gaiman) have said that they see piracy as helpful because it lets readers discover and try new authors without risk or expense.

And there are even publishers who see Google Books as a solution to the discovery problem, and are voluntarily participating in Google Books.

I know that Google Books is frequently described as a book scanning project, but there’s more to it than that. There’s also a lesser known second part to the project where authors and publishers can choose to upload their works so they can be indexed in Google’s search engine.

If you’ve ever come across a digitally perfect book in Google Books, that was probably a book which was uploaded by the copyright holder who had figured out that the books you can’t find are the books you can’t buy.

And that, in a nutshell, is the value of Google Books. It makes otherwise obscure works discoverable, and it does so at no cost to the author. It’s free advertising, and you can’t get a better deal than that.

image by Johan Larsson

Remember that bookstore that Amazon was rumored to be building in Seattle?

It officially launched today, and is opening tomorrow.

Amazon has sent out a letter to their Seattle area customers with the news that Amazon’s first bookstore, located at in the University Village shopping center at 4601 26th Ave NE, is no longer rumor or speculation (you can find the letter here).

Unlike Amazon’s past retail efforts, which focused on vending machines, delivery lockers, and pickup/dropoff unstores, the new Amazon Books has actual books in stock on its shelves, as well as Kindle ereaders, Fire tablets, and other Amazon hardware.

The Seattle Times got an early look at the store, and they report that the store won’t double as a pickup/drop-off location. It’s strictly a retail store, and according to Jennifer Cast, the VP of Amazon Books, the store won’t be stocked solely on data. "It’s data with heart,” she told ST. "We’re taking the data we have and we’re creating physical places with it."

The books carried in the 7,500 square foot store are chosen based on Amazon.com customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on Goodreads, and Amazon’s curators’ assessments. All of the books are face out on the shelf, and under each book is a presentation card with the Amazon.com customer rating and a review.

Amazon is also including a special staff favorites section that will change periodically. For the opening, the section includes a few of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ favorite books, including The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, Traps by his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, and The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.

The books will be sold at the same price as found online.

To put it simply, Amazon is taking what they’ve learned from twenty years of selling books online and is adapting it to the offline world. In a time where most bookstores arguably are no longer bookstores (just look at how much B&N floor space is devoted to toys), Amazon is going to show their competitors just how bookstores are supposed to work.

Or at least that is what Amazon is hoping; whether it will work out is a different matter.

Amazon has chosen an expensive location for its first store. University Village is an upscale shopping center that used to be the home to a Barnes & Noble store (it moved out four years ago when its lease expired and rent went up).

With the high rent, the odds are stacked against this store being a success based on the numbers, but Amazon has been known to run pilot operations before expanding.

Unfortunately for us, Cast declined to reveal Amazon’s plans, including possible locations. “We’re completely focused on this bookstore,” Cast told SA. “We hope this is not our only one. But we’ll see.”

For the past 8 months the German publisher Bastei Lübbe has been teasing that they were developing a subscription ebook service, and they formally announced that the service, oolipo, will launch in April 2016.

And yes, that is the name; while Bastei Lübbe also owns the Beam ebookstore, the new service will have a new name to go with its new international focus.

According to the press release, Oolipo won’t be the promised ebook subscription service but will instead focus on "short, multimedia reading content." It goes on to add that "new, mostly exclusive content and series are being conceived for this purpose."

The website does say that oolipo is recruiting writers, and the press release mentions the boast that:

Unlike all the previous streaming services in the field of reading, oolipo will follow an entirely novel concept. The portal will focus on short-form content in portions ideally suited to mobile reading, especially on smartphones and tablets. This is how oolipo is to reach its target group worldwide.

That sounds to me like a new take on the magazine concept, or possibly a paid alternative to Wattpad. Neither is exactly a new idea, but apparently it’s enough for The Bookseller to put oolipo up for an award (Book Tech Company of the Year).

Edit: According to @Jellybooks, "there is already a German Wattpad and it’s called Inkitt, but this looks more like Byliners". (That service did offer a subscription before it was bought last year.)

Oolipo is going to launch into a beta test in April 2016 in the UK, US, and German speaking countries. It’s scheduled to open to the public in July.

Or at least that is what Bastei Lübbe is hoping; will readers really be willing to pay for what they can find for free on Wattpad and a dozen different fanfiction sites?

Granted, the writing will be better, but Bastei Lübbe will still face the same problem that took down The Magazine last year and caused Byliner to close. People were willing to pay, only not in numbers large enough to keep the digital magazine going.

Boersenblatt

SF author John Scalzi published a post on Sunday where discusses why young readers of SF, including his daughter, just aren’t getting into the decades-old SF that he loved when he was a boy:

The surprise to me is not that today’s kids have their own set of favorite authors, in genre and out of it; the surprise to me is honestly that anyone else is surprised by this. As a practical matter, classic science fiction isn’t selling where today’s kids are buying (or where they are being bought for), namely, in the YA section of the book store. See for yourself: Walk into your local bookstore, head to the YA racks and try to find a science fiction or fantasy-themed book that more than fifteen years old.  …

Mind you, generally speaking, book stores stock newer books anyway; book stores, like other entertainment venues, rely on novelty (which in our line of work is called “front list”) to get people through the doors. If you’re doing well as an author, some of your backlist is on the shelf, too. But the shelf in a physical bookstore is only so long. These days, being someone who has been in a lot of bookstores recently, I note the shelf in science fiction and fantasy is mostly skewed to living, working authors, most notably their last couple of books. Some classic (i.e., now dead) authors are there but usually represented by two or three books rather than an extensive backlist.

While all the points he made are correct, I don’t think he gets at the root cause of the shift in reading tastes.

I have trouble accepting the point that commercial availability driving demand because when I was growing up (in the 1990s) I frequented used book stores just to get those older books. I also combed through the library stacks for those three-, four-, and five-decade-old books because I liked the authors and wanted to read them. (In fact, there were a few early Heinleins that I didn’t find for the first time until the early aughts, and I still read them when I found them.)

Instead, I have to agree with the several commenters who argue that culture in the older books and the relatability of the characters have a greater impact.

To name one example, Scalzi links to an older post where he talks about his daughter trying and losing interest in Heinlein’s Starman Jones. I’m familiar with the book, and I still like it even though it’s dated, but I bet I can also tell you why his daughter did not like it.

She couldn’t relate to the characters, or the culture, in the book.

The lead character in Starman Jones is a white male teen from a rural farm, and both of the female characters (that I can recall ) were shallow caricatures.

The female characters weren’t real people, not like what we would expect today. (This brings to mind the complaints concerning Black Widow’s role in the most recent Avengers movie.) And so Scalzi’s daughter just couldn’t bring herself to finish a book recommended by her father.

And she’s not the only one to feel this way.

When I first read Scalzi’s post this morning I was reminded of a post I read about 5 months back where one reader described her teen years and why she burned out on classic SF:

 It’s like this…

You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character – because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned – and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.

But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.

…

And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.

Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.

Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”

You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.

You can read the rest of the post here. (Kudos to @diversebooks and @michelle_gaudet for helping me find the post again.)

While the above quote is a very specific example of what drives people away from older books, I still feel it falls closer to the truth than Scalzi’s explanation.

Readers want to able to put themselves in a book, and they want to relate to the characters (hence why we need diverse books).

And if they can’t relate to the books, they’re just not going to read them.

image via Portland Mercury

It’s been just over a week since Barnes & Noble released their latest (and probably final) ereader, the Nook Glowlight Plus. As I sit here, getting ready to box it up and take it back, I thought I would bang on the keyboard for a few minutes and express my opinion.

• In spite of everything, I like this ereader.
• If it belonged to anyone other than B&N, a company which we don’t know will be in ebooks this time next year, I would keep it.
• If managing my Nook library on the device weren’t such a pain in the ass, I would keep it.

I know that the above sounds like damning with faint praise. but honest to goodness I seriously considered keeping my Glowlight Plus.

Physical Experience

With a gold colored metal rear shell and a cream-colored bezel, the Glowlight Plus doesn’t look like your average ereader (which is usually available in your choice of black, black, or black).

It runs Android 4.4 on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX6 CPU with 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage (3.1GB available to the user), and Wifi. The 6″ screen sports a resolution of 1448 x 1072 with frontlight and touchscreen.Weighing in at 195 grams, the Glowlight Plus is certified to meet the IP67 standard for water and dust proofing.

All those specs could be found in the fact sheet (PDF) or in my post on hacking the Plus, but here’s a detail that you could only see first-hand.

The Plus has the same screen resolution as the new Kindle Paperwhite, the Kobo Glo HD, and the Kindle Voyage, so you would think that (after allowing for software differences) the Plus would have about the same reading experience as the other ereaders.

But it doesn’t, and we can attribute the difference to the Plus’s unique design. Where the Kindle and other ereaders have a black shell which is intended to emphasize the white on the E-ink screen, the Plus has a cream-colored bezel which was chosen for the subtle effect it has on the E-ink screen.

The cream-colored bezel, when combined with a frontlight set to 50%, give me the feeling that I’m looking at the yellowed page of an old book. This might not appeal to you, but I love it. It makes up for the gold-colored shell, which I don’t like (I find bare metal unappealing) and it’s a trick I would like to see copied on other ereaders.

Reading Experience

When it comes to ebooks, I am not your average reader. I have been buying ebooks for long enough that I have far more ebooks that have been set free of any platform than I do in any single platform.

In fact, Barnes & Noble is the one and only ebook platform where I have a huge native library thanks to my Fictionwise purchases having been migrated to the Nook platform. I have around 450 ebooks in the Nook system, and that’s a problem for B&N because it’s made me aware of just how horrible the library management is on the Nook Glowlight Plus.

It’s not just that the software lacks basic and obvious features like only showing the ebooks on the device, but also that simple acts like downloading an ebook doesn’t move said ebook to the front of the library. As a result, the ten or fifteen ebooks I want to read are lost in a cloud of ebooks that I have no interest in.

And that’s a shame because I do want to read on the Glowlight Plus. The ebooks don’t display consistently, but they are close enough that I am fine with it – if only they were easier to find and load.

There are three options for margins and three options for line spacing, but no option for justification (the Nook iOS app has this). But on the plus side, the Plus does have typography about on par with the new "improved" typography that Amazon is only now adding to the Kindle platform. And in fact, it’s had it for some time.

Speaking of loading ebooks, there have been numerous reports concerning USB issues. The Glowlight Plus doesn’t like working with the USB port on Windows or OSX machines. Most people have been able to resolve their problems, but the sheer number of complaints is unusual.

Furthermore, the Plus does not work with Adobe DE, which means no support for library ebooks or ebooks bought elsewhere. B&N swears there is a fix in the works, but that doesn’t do us any good.

Conclusion

Do you know what I wish?

I wish the Glowlight Plus was running a Kobo firmware.  That would combine the screen I like with software features I like, and it would allay concerns that the Plus might be turned off tomorrow.

This is a far nicer looking mid-range ereader than the Kobo Glo HD, which even though it was supplied from the same Chinese OEM (Netronix) looked and felt cheap compared to the Paperwhite or the Glowlight Plus. Combining the better aspects of the Glo HD and the Plus device would be the best of all worlds, but alas it’s just not going to happen.

In August author Catherine Nichols went public with her account of sending her novel manuscript to literary agents under a male pseudonym. A writing sample sent to 50 agents in her own name resulted in only two manuscript requests. Seventeen out of 50 agents requested the same materials from “George Leyer”.

Were the agents exhibiting a subconscious gender bias that assumes the superiority of male authors? Or were they responding to the practicalities of a reviewing culture and audience that can overlook or even reject women’s literature?

Women’s fiction is reviewed less often than men’s in major publications. Even though women buy two-thirds of all books sold in the UK, they are much less likely to be reviewing books in male-dominated literary magazines.

And some audiences, such as young boys, are presumed to be entirely unwilling to read books written by women. J.K. Rowling’s publisher felt that an obviously female name like “Joanne” would dissuade boys from reading the debut Harry Potter novel.

The unpublished Rowling was simply happy to be published and said in an interview that “they could have called me Enid Snodgrass”. But Enid Snodgrass would have had the same sales handicap as Joanne Rowling—a woman’s name.

Most discussions of contemporary women writers who have adopted male pseudonyms or initials to mask their sex draw connections between these writers and a long line of literary women, such as the Bronte sisters and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who have published under assumed names.

What is less recognised is that the cultural reasons behind women writers concealing their names have shifted dramatically since the nineteenth century.

Today female names vanish to avoid industry and reader perceptions of what women’s fiction is like. Historically, in the British tradition, female names were hidden because of the perceived inappropriateness of women writing novels. To understand this difference, it is important to know that the very act of reading novels was heavily policed for girls and women in the nineteenth century.

In The Woman Reader, Kate Flint shows how girls’ and women’s reading, especially of material deemed frivolous or escapist, was a subject of great public concern and debate. Any novel reading that might detract from a woman’s role as a wife and mother within the home was perceived as a threat to the very foundation of society.

Likewise, women authors challenged expectations of women’s domestic and maternal roles. Budding writer Charlotte Brontë received the following comments in a discouraging letter from English poet laureate Robert Southey in 1837:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.

Jane Austen published her first novel in 1811. The four novels that were published during her lifetime appeared anonymously, as were those of many early women writers. Although women who wrote educative or didactic fiction, such as Maria Edgeworth, or less respected genres such as the Gothic romance, as in the case of Ann Radcliffe, were not similarly compelled to hide their gender or identity.

From the twentieth century onwards, women novelists’ use of pseudonyms seems to have acquired a more focused purpose: to avoid pre-judgement of women’s fiction as inferior. V.S. Naipaul has embarrassingly said that no woman writer is his equal and that “within a paragraph or two” he knows whether a work “is by a woman or not”.

Naipaul might have found a friend in Henry Lawson. Lawson read Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career in manuscript form and wrote to Franklin eagerly: “Will you write and tell me what you really are? Man or woman?” When the novel was published in 1901, in his preface Lawson rewrites history: “I hadn’t read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once — that the story had been written by a girl”.

The most enduring fictions of literary history hold that a woman writer’s voice is readily detectable and less perceptive and sophisticated than a man’s. These ideas buttress more recent views about narratives by women about girls’ and women being of interest to female readers only.

The use of a male pseudonym or ambiguous initials removes the gender prejudiced lens through which much women’s fiction is viewed. Yet it does not help to transform that prejudice as it is exhibited in literary magazines and reader “preferences” in certain genres of fiction.

As the majority of books are read by women, there must be a way for us to influence the publishing industry and reviewing practices that shape literary culture.

Reposted from The Conversation under a CC license

For as long as Amazon has been paying Kindle Unlimited publishers and authors from a pool of money, they’ve always paid the same no matter where the book was read.

Even after launching a discounted Kindle Unlimited service in India in September, Amazon still paid the same rate. But now that is going to change.

Amazon has sent out an email with the news that they’re changing the rules again in November:

As we’ve expanded KU to more countries, a number of the program’s elements – such as exchange rates, customer reading behavior, and local subscription pricing – now vary substantially by marketplace, making it clear that a ‘one size fits all’ approach won’t work. As just one example, we recently launched KU in India with a local subscription price of 199 rupees ($3.00) per month. As a result, starting with the November fund, we will work to take these marketplace differences into account and payouts per country will differ based on local country factors.

You will be able to see the amount you have earned in each country in your royalty report. Our long-term goal, as always, is to build a service that rewards authors for their valuable work, attracts readers around the world, and encourages them to read more and more often.

This isn’t the first time that Amazon has arbitrarily altered the payment terms for Kindle Unlimited.

In June Amazon abruptly announced that it would no longer pay authors and publishers for each time a book was loaned in Kindle Unlimited, but would instead pay based on the number of pages read. In spite of the uproar, that ultimately proved a popular move, so much so that publishers are signing under the same terms offered to authors.

But will this move prove equally beneficial? That remains to be proven.

What we do know is that Kindle Unlimited is now offered in ten countries with subscribers paying in seven currencies (US, UK, Italy, Spain, Brazil, France, Mexico, Canada, Germany, and India).

Depending on how you split things up, those ten countries are at least six different markets with different price expectations and different pressures, which is why Amazon wants to adjust prices to match local conditions.

So how will they respond to the markets?

We don’t know. I have queried Amazon and have yet to get a response, so the only advice I have is that authors who do not approve of the change should contact KDP support and see if you can use this as a reason to withdraw from Kindle Unlimited.

Thanks, Morris!

The right to resell ebooks has broad support from activists, the Dutch courts, and German regulators, but publishers aren’t so happy.

Boersenverein, the German book industry trade group, has officially responded to the news that earlier this week that a German consumer protection ministry wants consumers to have the right to resell ebooks they buy.

Alexander Skipis , CEO of Boersenverein, told Actualitte:

It would be a blow to all cultural and creative industries if allowed by law to sell or move to other digital content 'used'. Digital books can be almost infinitely reproduced and distributed without ever wear. The primary market for e-books and audio books would be completely destroyed if there were a legal market opportunity. For publishers and distributors would be impossible to continue working together on sustainable downloading models and customer-friendly. This would mostly cultural offer and therefore consumers will suffer.

Apparently the CEO of Boersenverein thinks that the ebooks have no long-term value to readers, and that the readers will immediately sell an ebook once they finish reading it.

Or perhaps I am misinterpreting the translated text; maybe Skipis thinks that readers will pirate their ebooks and sell multiple copies. While that is possible, I would remind you that ebook piracy already exists and it has not yet killed off the ebook market.

Also, the used paper book market has been around for, what, a few centuries now? Do you know if it has killed off the publishing industry yet?

Frankly, the objections are absurd, and in a way that is good news. If this doom-and-gloom is the best argument that publishers can come up with then there is no good reason that consumers should not have the right to resell their ebooks.

image by J. Tegnerud

Do you know that report about ebook subscription services doing great in Germany? I think we need to take it with a grain of salt (also a couple shots of gin).

The news won’t be officially announced until tomorrow, but word has already leaked out on Twitter that a Berlin-based ebook subscription service is going belly up. Blloon subscribers are reporting and a rep has confirmed that Blloon, the subscription ebook service that spun off of txtr in 2014, is shutting down.

Edit: The official word, as of Friday, is that the service is on hiatus.

Blloon reps aren’t answering any questions at this time, so we are left with more questions than answers at this time, but we do know that:

Blloon launched last year with a limited ebook subscription service that more closely resembled buying credits at Audible than Scribd or Kindle Unlimited. Readers could pay so many pounds and get a credit that would let them read a book (this was not a sale – that would be Entitle). Subscribers could also earn additional credits through engaging with Blloon on social networks.

Update: But apparently that model didn’t work. The Bookseller reports that "in June this year Blloon moved to an unlimited model, allowing customers to read an unlimited number of books for £7.99 a month". That cost Blloon a couple publishers, which likely contributed to the decline.

Initially available in the UK, Blloon was supposed to expand into Germany and the US early this year. I can’t find any evidence that expansion occurred, which helps explain why Blloon is shutting down.

It just didn’t have enough customers to keep going. Even though it did get some coverage both in the digital publishing press and on tech blogs,Blloon just couldn’t attract enough attention.

Blloon was launched by the same folks that launched txtr in 2009 only to abandon txtr when it was in the early stages of bankruptcy last year. (Txtr went bankrupt in January 2015, and was acquired by a German media retailer in April 2015.)

There’s no news yet on what’s going to happen to Blloon. While there is a chance that it could be acquired like Oyster was by Google, it’s far more likely that the service will simply shut down.

Stay tuned.

lesen.net

image by Mount Rainier NPS

This blogger has been saying since 2013 that smartphones and tablets would drive consumer ebook sales, a trend that the WSJ confirmed earlier this year.

And now we learn that consumers aren’t just shifting their reading habits; they’re leaving ereaders behind. The Pew Research Center has a new report on device ownership in the US out today which tells us that ereader adoption hasn’t just leveled off; it’s cratering.

The survey found only 19% of respondents owned an ereader, down from 32% last year. Game console, PC, and mp3 player ownership also dropped, although not to the same degree.

Looking at ereading devices, we can see in the above chart that tablet ownership continues to grow slightly as it catches up to smartphone ownership. With 68% of respondents owning a smartphone, that category continues to outpace the adoption rate of any other mobile device, which makes sense given that smartphones (and to a lesser degree, tablets) have replaced your mp3 player, camera, and gaming device, and for some people serve as their primary source of web access.

This is especially true for younger adults, who are more likely to have a smartphone than a computer:

With 86% of this age group owning a smartphone, that category has effectively reach the saturation point and it won’t grow much further. But overall smartphone adoption will continue to grow as this age group grows older.

And from the looks of things, so will tablet adoption. eReaders, on the other hand, are yesterday’s news.

You can find the complete report, including data which breaks down along income, education, and gender lines, on the Pew Research Center website.

image by miniyo73

Not only are EU member nations questioning why ebooks are taxed at a higher rate than paper books, they’re also starting to ask why consumers don’t have the same rights over print and digital.

Buchreport.de  reports that Consumer Protection Ministry for the German state of Baden-Württemberg is now calling for consumers to have the right to resell the ebooks they buy.

The way things work right now is that consumers don’t buy an ebook so much as the buy a license to use the ebook. That license is defined at the whim of the ebook retailer, and often excludes the possibility that the consumer owns the file or can resell it (this, even though ebooks routinely cost more than paper books).

With a few exceptions, that practice holds true in most countries. (The exceptions include the Netherlands, where consumers won the right to resell ebooks in a court case this spring, and a few niche ebook retailers like O’Reilly which sell under a more permissive license.)

But the Verbraucherschutzministerium Baden-Württemberg wants to change that. They are proposing that the principle of exhaustion be applied to ebooks just like it is with books.

The exhaustion doctrine (as it is also known) is a limit on IP rights that basically says that an IP holder’s control ends when an item like a book is sold. That doctrine is why you can resell a paper book, and activists have long argued it should apply to digital content as well.

As you may recall from the Oracle v Usedsoft decision, we’ve had some luck in that direction. Consumers in Europe do have the right to resell software. With ebooks, on the other hand, German courts have said that retailers can make consumers give up the resale right when they agree to a license to buy the ebook.

You will find that clause in the ToS for many ebookstores, and you’ll find similar clauses in software licenses (said clauses aren’t valid in Europe, obviously). And now the Consumer Protection Ministry is arguing that consumers can’t be forced to give up the right to resell ebooks.

They have affirmed a legal opinion to that effect. It’s not legally binding until someone takes a case to court, but it does set a precedent and it moves us one step closer to the day one when German consumers can resell ebooks.

Buchreport.de

image by ButterflySha

Copyright was originally born as a way to give creators a financial incentive to make more works, but over the centuries it has metastasized and grown into a very different beast.

Cartoonist and filmmaker Nina Paley gave a talk at TEDx Maastricht earlier this month where she described her experiences with securing licenses for the music she used in the 2008 film Sita Sings the Blues. She found that kafka-esque system she had to navigate to secure the licenses was far less successful at rewarding creators than it was at censorship – preventing ideas from being shared.

This lead Paley to liken the impact of copyright on society and the free flow of ideas to brain damage. (If people are neurons, then ideas flowing from one person to the next are neural impulses, and when copyright stops that flow it is causing damage.)

Paley isn’t the only one to have problems traversing the copyright licensing system.

Earlier today author David Hewson published a post on Medium where he details a similar experience when trying to license song lyrics so he could use them in his first novel.

His account proves Paley’s point about copyright’s main function is to stop the free flow of ideas.

Some copyright holders didn’t want to know at any price. Others just wanted a small fortune. A few settled for a few hundred quid and they were the ones I used. But it was a terribly slow process, and I was lucky that charming lady in Oxford didn’t charge half as much for her time as rock stars and their representatives wanted for six words, perhaps written in a drug-fuelled haze, twenty years before.

Hewson had a similar experience with another novel a few years later:

A few years later I wrote a standalone called The Promised Land which just begged for two little quotes, one from Fleetwood Mac, the other from a Bruce Hornsby song.

Fleetwood Mac eventually came back and said that while three of the band were cool with the idea one of them wasn’t and would never allow her words to be quoted in any book or movie under any circumstances ever. Her choice. I should point out however that is totally inaccurate to claim that thunder only happens when it’s raining. Quite often it’s not raining at all.

And he’s not the only one.

Techdirt has long been documenting the same problems in our modern copyright system that Hewson and Paley described above. They attribute the root of the problem to permission culture.

According to Wikipedia, permission culture is a "term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased".

I have to disagree with that definition; I see permission culture less as pervasive copyright enforcement than as the _assumption_ that all uses of a work have to be licensed when in reality the fair use clause of US copyright law would cover nearly all situations.

But no matter how you describe it, it is a problem and Paley is right when she describes copyright as brain damage. As each new creation wiped from existence, or dies still born in the mind of an artist, society as a whole is diminished.

Our collective IQ drops with each lost work, leaving us all a little dumber with each blow.

P.S. In the second half of her talk, Paley describes how she’s training herself to break the permissive culture conditioning that we have all absorbed as part of modern culture. She also talks about her current project, Seder-Masochism, an animated video intended to serve a dual-purpose both as a movie and as a commentary on permission culture.

Barnes & Noble’s latest ereader is less than two days old and it is already being hacked.

A Glowlight Plus owner over at XDA Forums has revealed that she has gained control of her Nook. She hasn’t rooted it yet, though.

The first step involved prying the back off of her unit. The front panel is simply glued into the rear metal shell, and it can be pried off – if you have the guts:

As you can see in the photo, the CPU is a Freescale i.MX6L, a single-core CPU intended for simple uses like ereaders. The hacker also confirmed that this Nook does run Android 4.4, and she told us that the Glowlight Plus had only 512MB RAM, and no Bluetooth.

That is disappointing news for those of us who were hoping it could be hacked and turned into an open Android ereader. Even if someone does develop an easy hack, the limited hardware (no card slot, limited RAM, slow CPU) would keep us from doing much with it.

As I pointed out on Wednesday night, there are better options for Android ereaders. They don’t have the 300ppi screen like the Glowlight Plus, but they make up for it in other ways. Icarus, for example, has 6″ ereaders which will let you install Android apps (no hacking required).

The defamation lawsuit that romance publisher Ellora’s Cave filed against the Dear Author book blog has come to a quiet end on Thursday.

Deirdre Saoirse Moen reports that a settlement has been reached this year-old case.  The details are obviously confidential (and so we’ll probably never find out what the settlement terms were) but Saoirse Moen did mention the settlement in her index for the case, and she quoted this email from Ellora’s Cave CEO Patty Marks:

We are pleased to announce that we have reached a settlement with Dear Author. The terms are confidential, so we will not be discussing that. We are very happy though to now put all of our time and efforts into Ellora’s Cave, the authors and staff without further distraction.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Patty Marks

To recap, in September 2014 the romance publisher Ellora’s Cave sued Jennifer Gerrish-Lampe, owner of the Dear Author book blog and the blogger we all know as Jane Litte. Ellora’s Cave alleged that Dear Author’s reporting on EC’s worsening financial state amounted to defamation. (Here’s the post in question.)

A year’s worth of legal maneuvers followed, ending today with a settlement.

You can find a complete rundown of the case on Saoirse Moen’s blog or on Courtney Milan’s blog; both have been following this case far more closely than I, although I have been listening closely enough to know that the story isn’t finished.

This case may be over, but Ellora’s Cave’s dire financial state persists. Authors and staff say that they’re still not getting paid, which means we could soon be hearing of a new lawsuit, bankruptcy, or both.

In fact, the situation is so bad that Ellora’s Cave is neglecting to pay their counsel. Or so a footnote in one of the filing suggests:

Further, Ellora’s may be planning for bankruptcy even at this time–but have refrained from doing so in the hopes that this SLAPP suit will bear fruit. In fact, Ellora’s counsel has reported to the undersigned on numerous occasions that Ellora’s has failed to pay his bills.

Saoirse Moen also noted that Ellora’s Cave is not in good standing with the RWA because it wasn’t paying its authors, and the tweets of numerous authors who say that they are only now getting their February 2015 royalty checks confirm the financial issues.

Ellora’s Cave still had (as of Tuesday) over 800 authors, so if they are all in that state then they have the makings of a class action lawsuit.

image by mrbill