Everyone from startups like Narrative Science to news orgs like the LATimes and the AP are using algorithms to automatically generate news articles, and pretty soon they’ll be able to get a bot that can write a clickbait headline.

The Stack reports that a Norwegian researcher and blogger by the name of Lars Eidnes has developed a clickbait generator by training a neural network to create sensationalist headlines.

As Eidnes explains in his blog post, he taught a recurrent neural network to create clickbait titles by feeding it a couple million headlines (scraped from Buzzfeed, Gawker, Jezebel, Huffington Post, and Upworthy) and asking it to guess the next word in the headline.

His bot got good enough that (once it also learned grammar) you could feed it a single word and have it generate multiple headlines.

The trick was in the recurrent nature of RNNs; each time the bot added a word to a headline, the new headline was fed back in to the bot as input, eventually resulting in a complete headline.

You can find the code on GitHub.

In addition to creating the bot, Eidnes has created a site as a proof of concept. Clickotron is perhaps the first "news" site where everything is written by a bot. It’s updated every 20 minutes with artificially-created news stories. Starting with the bot-generated title, the site finds a matching image by searching the Wikimedia API with the headline text, and selecting pictures that have the appropriate CC license.

The headlines are often nonsensical and the text is worse, but as a proof of concept it does work (mostly), and I think the complete lack of value may have been one of Eidnes goals.

As he explains at the end of his blog post: “In total, this gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost. If I remember correctly from economics class, this should drive the market value of useless journalism down to zero, forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else."

Joking aside, Eidnes has shown us that it’s possible to teach a bot to write particular types of headlines. And since many news sites have their own pattern for headlines, it should be possible to adapt the idea Eidnes developed for his clickbait bot and use them to suggest headlines for other less evil purposes.

image by peyri

Amazon has released the monthly stats for Kindle Unlimited, its access-based ebook service.

The total funding for September 2015 was $12 million, up slightly from August 2015. The average per-page payment was $0.00507, down ever so slightly from August 2015 ($0.0051). A total of 2.366 billion pages were read, worldwide.

Here’s the running tally of monthly funding pools:

• May 2014: $1.2 million
• June 2014: $1.2 million
• July: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August: $4.7 million
• September: $5 million
• October: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million

Thanks, Morris!

With Southwest, JetBlue, and many other airlines making ebooks available in-flight, 30,000 feet is the next-gold rush for ebook marketing, and now Lufthansa is getting involved.

Lesen.net has the scoop that the German national airline Lufthansa has partnered with the Hamburg-based social reading startup Sobooks to open an in-flight ebookstore.

Starting in 2016, readers on Lufthansa’s long-haul flights will be able to buy ebooks on their smartphones and tablets. Passengers will get destination-based recommendations, be able to read samples, and share and discuss passages online.

Passengers will be offered deals based on their destination (NYC guidebooks on a New York bound flight, for example). If a reader finds a book they like they can buy it mid-flight, but I’m not sure why they would want to. According to the press release, Sobooks platform is online-only, with the ebook readable on any Internet-enabled device (the FAQ confirms this detail).

The Sobooks platform has the convenience of working in any web browser but it also has the defect of not working offline. As a result, Sobooks and Lufthansa  customers are not only stuck with an ebook trapped in a niche platform, they’ll also have to pay for a data plan if they want to access the ebook on their trip.

Sobooks has said that they plan to release an offline reader in November, which means it should be available before the Lufthansa partnership kicks off next year. But even so, I think Lufthansa  should have found a different partner for this deal.

One of the things I like the most about Germany is that the major publishers have all opted for digital watermark DRM and thus removed one of the technical issues that sometimes trips up ebook sales.

It’s now easier than ever to sell and deliver ebooks, and Lufthansa should have found a partner who can do that in-flight, and not this half-assed online-only nonsense. A real ebook service would have been very useful to Lufthansa passengers, but instead they’ll be getting one that is recycling all the best ideas from 2012.

Oh, well. There’s always next year.

image by BriYYZ

In addition to being an audiobook distributor, Audible is also a publisher. Its burgeoning original content dept has been producing podcasts, and Audible has also produced audiobooks with radio show quality sound effects, but nothing compares to the half-hearted attempt at a virtual reality experience which was developed for Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key.

Originally published as a graphic novel series, Locke & Key is by its very nature not your average audiobook source material. In fact, one would assume that it’s impossible to turn a graphic novel into an audiobook. You would be wrong, but Audible did have its work cut out for it.

And that is why Audible partnered with digital creative agency Firstborn to create an immersive Locke & Key virtual reality experience which, according to Fast Company, was released last week during NY ComicCon and uploaded to Youtube as a 360-degree video.

Or at least that is what FC is saying; the 83-second video on Youtube doesn’t actually show much of a story. But from what I read on Techtimes, this video is exactly what was shown to the NY ComicCon attendees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF-dK8z5Dc

You can find Locke & Key as a more traditional audiobook production on Audible, where it’s free until 4 November. The audiobook is thirteen hours long.

The virtual reality experience requires an Oculus Rift or some other most of us don’t have. That pretty much torpedoed any chance Audible had of turning a profit on this project, but that hasn’t stopped them from touting the tech.

"From the beginning, Locke & Key was conceived to truly immerse listeners in the terrifying world created in the graphic novels, thanks to a cast of highly skilled actors, a soundscape that envelops you from all sides, and an original musical score, the audio drama succeeds in doing just that," Audible SVP Barbara Ward Thall told Fast Company. "Given the 360-degree sound design, we thought it only made sense to bring a scene from Locke & Key to life in VR. The fact that the audio drama was scheduled to launch the same week as NY Comic Con gave us the perfect opportunity to share this ambitious and exciting creation with some of its most ardent fans."

It doesn’t sound like Audible plans to complete the work, making this little more than a gimmick.

That is disappointing, but hey, the audiobook is free, and from the description this is one of those titles you should grab just because of the cast:

Featuring performances by Haley Joel Osment (Entourage, The Sixth Sense), Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Kate Mulgrew (Orange Is the New Black, Star Trek: Voyager), Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Stephen King (The Stand, 11-22-63), as well as a cast of more than 50 voice actors, this audio production preserves the heart-stopping impact of the graphic novel’s astounding artwork through the use of richly imagined sound design and a powerful original score.

Conventional wisdom says that Amazon has 65% of the US ebook market. The folks behind the Author Earnings Report would disagree.

For your Friday reading pleasure, the latest edition of the Author Earnings Report explores which retailers control how much of the US ebook market.

Where past reports focused solely on the Kindle Store (or offered a similar single-store snapshot of a competing store), the October report offers a cross-sectional view of the US ebook market.

It’s the first new look at the market that I have seen in (I think) over a year, and it does not paint a heart-warming picture for those who hate Amazon. The report finds that Amazon can lay claim to 74% of the units sold in the US ebook market, and 71% of the dollars spent.

Something like 99% of consumer ebook sales are made through just five major ebook retailers. Amazon accounts for the majority of those sales, with iBooks coming in second with about 10% to 12% of sales.

Barnes & Noble has somehow managed to hold on to third place, with roughly 7% to 8%, followed by Kobo with 3% to 4% of sales. And rounding out the top five is Google Play Books, with 1% to 2% of the US ebook market.

The report goes on to analyze the smaller ebookstores in terms of units sold and revenue earned. The estimates are generated based on the same methods used for the Kindle Store (the best seller lists) and they lead to some surprising conclusions.

For example, Apple’s ebookstore is dominated by the Big Five. iBooks leans heavily towards the B5 both in terms of units sold and dollars spent. Indies make up 23% of units sold, but only 9% of revenue. The Big Five, on the other hand, account for 58% of units sold and 74% of revenue.

With 54% of units sold and 69% of dollars spent going to the Big Five, the Nook Store was almost as bad as iBooks.

Kobo (not shown here) displayed a similar prevalence for Big Five sales, but Google Play did not.

The report concludes with a look at the overall ebook market, which still leans heavily towards the Big Five. You can find that data, as well as an analysis of the Kindle Store, over on the Author Earnings Report website.

Here’s an interesting follow up to the news earlier this week that every fourth German is now reading ebooks.

While the number of German readers may not have increased much in the past year, the German ebook market has grown.

GfK has released some results from its survey of German consumers. It has found that in the first half 2015, an estimated 2.9 million Germans over the age of ten paid for an ebook. They spent a total of nearly 95 million euros. This represents an increase of 13 percent compared to the same period last year, according to GfK.

Edit: Just to put that 95 million euros in perspective, the AAP reported yesterday that US ebook revenues (for the half of US publishing industry that the AAP tracks) totaled around $730 million in the first half of 2015.  That puts the total consumer spending at $2 billion and change. With a population four times as large, the US is spending twenty times as much on ebooks.

That estimated number of readers is far smaller than the ten plus million of Germans that read ebooks, according to the Bitkom survey earlier this week. While a discrepancy between readers and buyers is to be expected (a UK survey showed a similar albeit smaller discrepancy) I have no explanation as to why the so many more Germans want to read ebooks than buy them.

Could it be the price controls in the German book market are discouraging ebook sales but not discouraging adoption?

If so, that might explain why GfK found that 1.4 million German borrowed ebooks during the first half of 2015. This includes free laons as part of a membership with online sellers, borrowing ebooks from libraries, and  monthly flat rate models (like Kindle Unlimited).

These readers were heavily focused on loans, so much so that more than half didn’t buy books (neither print or ebooks) but only borrowed them.

Boersenblatt

image by Tommy Hemmert Olesen

The Association of American Publishers just released a few dribblets of information on the US book industry. The publicly available stats are incomplete, but the news is not good for the legacy publishing industry.

Revenues for the 1,200 publishers providing monthly data to the AAP dropped 4.1% in the first six months in 2015 ($5.58 billion, vs $5.82 billion). That figure includes revenues for all categories tracked by the AAP (trade plus higher-ed, uni presses, K-12, etc).

Revenues from trade book sales were down 1.4% in the first half of the year ($3.09 billion vs $3.13 billion). Two of three trade categories were down, with kids/YA showing the steepest decline at 12.3% ($677.1 million vs $772.3 million). The adult category was up 3.1% ($2.17 billion vs $2.1 billion), while religious presses were down 5.1% ($244.5 million vs $257.8 million).

eBook revenues were down 10.4% in the first half of the year. Downloadable audiobooks were up 31%, while paperbacks were up 12.5%. Hardback books were also down (11%).

The AAP wasn’t specific as to the dollar amounts, but they did share this handy chart:

Edit: I asked and got the specific figures used in this chart. The following figures reflect the first 6 months revenues of each calendar year (hardback, paperback, ebook, All Other, and total trade).

• 2011: $941.8M, $1,291.4M, $523.0M, $155.3M, $2,911.6M
• 2012: $1,072.2M, $1,241.7M, $813.8M, $191.9M, $3,319.7M
• 2013: $1,022.0M, $1,093.6M, $752.5M, $205.8M, $3,073.8M
• 2014: $1,109.6M, $1,005.9M, $813.2M, $205.9M, $3,134.7M
• 2015: $987.2M, $1,101.1M, $729.7M, $273.4M, $3,091.4M

That chart is frustratingly nonspecific, but it offers a different perspective on the recent NYTimes story. Far from showing that ebooks have peaked and print making a resurgence, it shows that the revenues are in flux.

The hardback segment is up and down (more the latter than the former), the paperback segment is down from a peak (but might be making a comeback), and ebook revenues for the 1,200 publishers that submit monthly data to the AAP are both up and down.

The above chart shows why you should not draw a conclusion based on a single statistic (the NYTimes' first mistake). If you pick the wrong year, you could argue that your preferred format is up, only to have that format decline the following year.

With the market in flux (as it has been for the past four years), it’s hard to draw any conclusions at all.

Google’s highly-anticipated response to Facebook Instant Articles was announced today, and there’s something missing.

The WSJ, Android Police, Digiday, 9to5Google and a bunch of other sites are reporting that Google held a press event this morning to announce a new tech called Accelerated Mobile Pages.

AMP isn’t a new app like Apple News, or a distribution channel like Facebook Instant Articles. Instead it’s tech that web publishers might one day be able to integrate into their sites so they can improve your mobile browsing experience.

.

According to Google’s blog post, AMP is a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages. It simplifies the HTML code for mobile Web content so that speed is prioritized over other functions. It also integrates caching tech that would show readers the latest updates of developing stories instead of older versions. Google said it would make its cloud service available for AMP caching.

AMP is launching today with 30 partner sites, and Google has said that Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics, and LinkedIn have already signed up to participate.

You can read more about it on Google’s blog post, and you can also find the code on GitHub.

And if you’d like to try AMP, Google has (theoretically) made a demo available through Google search. I describe it as being theoretically available because I still haven’t seen it yet on any of my mobile devices.

I also haven’t seen it on my non-mobile devices, which to me is the more important issue.

While it’s great that Google is doing something about the mobile browsing experience, I think they’ve overlooked the fact that half of all web browsing is not on mobile devices. The non-mobile browsing experience isn’t too great either (this is why so many of us use black adverts and tracking scripts) and it could really benefit from any tricks to streamline pages and reduce loading time.

Sure, all the blame for bloated webpages falls on web publishers, but a lot of us are actively trying to fix the problem. We’d love to get another tool which could improve the browsing experience on our sites.

As I predicted last week, B&N’s new tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab E Nook 9.6″ Tablet. The retailer has just sent out a press release email, announcing that the new tablet is available now for $249 (less if you take B&N up on its trade-in offer).

The Samsung Galaxy Tab E Nook sports a 9.6″ screen, just like earlier spec sheets said, but it’s not quite the tablet I lead you to expect. While many of the details I reported last week are correct, B&N is showing that the new tablet runs on a Qualcomm CPU, and not the cheaper Spreadtrum CPU used in previous variations of the Samsung Galaxy Tab E.

This tablet runs Android 5.1.1 on a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 CPU with 16GB of storage (plus 128GB microSD card support),  and two cameras (2MP and 5MP). Its 9.6″ display has a resolution of 1,280 x 800.

This tablet has Wifi, GPS, and an accelerometer. According to B&N it weighs 547 grams, and comes with a battery which specced for up to 12 hours of video.

B&N hasn’t stated the amount of RAM, dimensions, battery spec, or whether the tablet has Bluetooth, but aside from that this is a better model than the unit I detailed last week.

It runs the same Samsung-flavored Android with a dash of B&N mixed in on much better hardware than I was expecting. It costs only $5 more than the Fire HD 10, it’s most visible competition, and bests that tablet in the CPU and OS categories.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab E Nook is available in stores today and on the Barnes & Noble website. It’s going to be kept as the larger but cheaper complement to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 Nook, which retails for $399.

image by JeepersMedia

The last-minute rescue of crowd-funding site PubSlush has fallen through at the last second, and the site will be closing at the end of the week.

About two months ago PubSlush abruptly announced that it was closing, followed a week later by the news that the platform was being acquired by Colborne Communications, a Toronto-based editorial services firm that planned to keep PubSlush open and later turn it into a services marketplace.

That deal has through, and PubSlush will be shutting down in three days.

Authors who want to crowd-fund their next work should turn their attention to  crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Pozible, or maybe even Inkshares or Pentian (two crowd-funded publishers).

And if authors aren’t in a hurry, they could also wait for the launch of PubLaunch in February 2016.

Greg Ioannou, president and founder of Colborne, isn’t giving up on the idea of providing a crowd-funding service to authors. He’s moved on from his plans to acquire PubSlush, and he now plans to start a new crowd-funding site.

PubLaunch will fill the same needs as PubSlush, and it will also do so much more. From the website:

PubLaunch will be far more than a crowdfunding site. It will become THE hub that connects readers, writers and trusted industry professionals with the people and services they need to get books published.

PubLaunch has only one goal: getting books published.

PubLaunch does this in two ways:

• Crowdfunding for books.
• Connecting people: Putting writers in touch with professionals they can trust to produce their books, and connecting the professionals with each other.

Basically, PubLaunch will fill all the same roles that Ioannou planned to add to PubSlush after he bought it. In addition to crowd-funding, it will be a services marketplace where authors can hire the services they need to bring their manuscript to market.

image by Sundve

With Oyster walking away and Scribd scaling back, it would be easy to assume that the future of streaming ebook services is Kindle Unlimited, but Bonnier would disagree.

This publishing conglomerate has just started developing a subscription ebook and audiobook service in its native Sweden.

Bookbeat is not yet open to the public and is in fact still recruiting staff, so there’s not much to say at this time, but I can report that the website is describing it as a flat rate service like Scribd or KU which will let users read as much as they want. The site is promising audiobooks and ebooks, including both backlist and the latest titles.

The service is still only taking emails from interested readers, but it is promising that subscribers will be offered personal and personalized recommendations for what they should listen to or read next.

And here’s how the service is being pitched to potential employees:

Book Beat is a digital subscription service for audio and ebooks and a new and important strategic investment in Bonnier. The goal is to create and successfully operate the future digital consumer service for books, both nationally and internationally.

Judging by the number of job listings (which just started appearing last week) and the fact the site only went live this morning, Bookbeat is still in the early stages of development. We don’t know when it will launch, but I have been told that Bookbeat is planning a soft launch by the end of the year, and then going broader in the start of 2016.

When it does go live, Bookbeat will be competing with Bookmate (out of Russia), Mofibo (out of Denmark), and Fabula (out of Latvia). Two of the three already offer service in Sweden. That would give them the advantage – if not for the fact that Bonnier is backing Bookbeat as a "strategic investment".

This is one of the major publishers in Sweden, and it will be making its titles available to Bookbeat. That will give the service an advantage.

This is a bold wager on the part of Bonnier.

Given the terms promised to subscribers, Bookbeat is going to have to pay publishers based on shares of a pool of money for each book loaned to a subscriber, rather than pay publishers based on the retail price.

Many publishers have balked at that idea (see Steven Zacharius in yesterday’s post, to name one example) and yet Bonnier is forging ahead. And that makes sense; there’s simply no other viable option for offering an unlimited service at a flat costs.

IDBoox

image by ActuaLitté

With Kindle Unlimited funding continuing to grow month after month and Amazon maintaining its dominance of the ebook market, authors are faced with a quandary:

Do they give up in the rest of the market and go exclusive with Amazon, or do they go wide and sell their ebooks in as many bookstores as possible?

Lindsay Buroker published a post today that asks this very question:

When I uploaded my first book, The Emperor’s Edge, in December of 2010, it was a foregone conclusion that I would put it out there everywhere I could, in the hope that new readers would stumble across it and give it a try. Then, a couple of years later, Amazon introduced KDP Select, a program for self-publishers that requires exclusivity.

Right off the bat, Amazon introduced a couple of promotional tactics that are still available to those who are enrolled. Eventually, Kindle Unlimited and the ability to be paid for borrows also came along.

…

Obviously, if you’re exclusive with Amazon, you can’t receive ebook income from the other stores. Let me emphasize that we’re only talking about ebook income, as you can still have audiobooks in iTunes and paperbacks in Barnes & Noble and elsewhere. But, as you probably already know, ebook income is huge for self-published authors. Even though I’m working on getting more audiobooks out there, and I’ve done paperbacks for most of my novels, ebooks easily account for 95% of my income.

Are you wide or in Select?

Before I go further, I should disclose that I am not in KDP Select with any of the books under my name, but that my pen name is currently “all in” with KDP Select. I started the pen name books there, to take advantage of the sales ranking/visibility boost from Kindle Unlimited, and I returned them to KDP Select this August, after not gaining much headway in the other stores and after Amazon switched to Kindle Unlimited 2.0, a system that rewards novelists by paying based on total pages read.

I won’t take a position either way on this topic (I stopped railing against Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity requirement for the same reason I stopped yelling about authors signing their rights away to publishers), but I do have something to add.

Indie authors aren’t the only ones doing the maths and trying to decide whether going all-in on Kindle Unlimited is worth it. Publishers are also eyeing Amazon and asking whether they would earn more if they stopped selling elsewhere.

And some have found that the answer is yes.

And just to be clear, I’m not talking about publishers which are in Kindle Unlimited at Amazon’s whim and are being paid wholesale each time one of their books is loaned; there are also publishers who have decided to take Amazon up on the offer of being paid for each page read by a Kindle Unlimited subscriber (and all of the restrictions that entails).

There’s always been two classes of publishers in Kindle Unlimited (and before that, Kindle Owner’s Lending Library). Some were in Kindle Unlimited at the discretion of Amazon, while others joined the service under the same terms offered to indie authors.

Speaking of which, a story’s been going around these past few weeks that Amazon has been pulling traditionally publishing ebooks from Kindle Unlimited.  All the versions of the story I’ve encountered led back to a comment Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius left on Mike Shatzkin’s blog.

I reached out to Zacharius by email, and he confirmed the comment. He said that Kensington titles had been removed from Kindle Unlimited by Amazon, and that he "can’t discuss terms but anything other than a full royalty for the authors was unacceptable for me and would also create an accounting nightmare".

I also have independent confirmation that Amazon is removing trad pub ebooks from Kindle Unlimited. For example, these titles from Skyhorse were some of the trad pub titles removed this year:

• A Hunter’s Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds, & Guns
• The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians
• Horses Never Lie: The Heart of Passive Leadership
• Ibn Saud: The Desert Warrior Who Created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

According to Skyhorse, Amazon both added and removed the ebooks at its discretion. “Amazon decides what to include in Kindle Unlimited. They pay us as the publisher per our agreement with them whether or not they sell the ebook or give it away," Bill Wolfsthal, the director of sales at Skyhorse, told me. "It’s their choice on what to charge their customers."

Amazon was paying Skyhorse under terms similar to the ones that Scholastic was being paid when Kindle Unlimited launched. The publishers get a full royalty each time one of their ebooks was read in Kindle Unlimited. The same goes for all the other ebooks Amazon has decided to add to Kindle Unlimited.

Speaking of adding trad pub titles, in the past 6 months Amazon has also added titles from traditional publishers to Kindle Unlimited. For example, I’ve got a long list of some five or six dozen titles from F+W Media which Amazon added to Kindle Unlimited some time this year.

I won’t list all the ebooks here, but I have checked and I can still find the ebooks in other stores. (I’ll explain how I know these ebooks were added to KU in a postscript.) So Amazon is removing titles, and they’re adding titles, but that’s not the most interesting story here.

While I was confirming that those Skyhorse titles and F+W Media titles were available elsewhere, I also identified several publishers that had titles in Kindle Unlimited which could not be found in other bookstores.

Two of the publishers, the UK-based Thistle Publishing and the US-based Limitless Publishing, did not respond to my queries but I am reasonably certain that these publishers have gone exclusive with Amazon in order to take advantage of Kindle Unlimited.

Edit: Just to be clear, I’m talking about an exclusive on digital titles. The publishers still distributed their print editions widely.

I spot-checked a half-dozen ebooks from each publisher (their catalogs number in the hundreds of titles), and cannot find their books in other ebookstores. The publishers also didn’t show up when I searched for them by name, but without explicit confirmation there’s a chance I could be wrong.

Fortunately, I am far more certain about the third publisher. Ed Renehan, the publisher at New Street Communications, confirmed that he’s gone exclusive with Amazon.

He’s told me that 56 of the 57 titles published by New Street are exclusive to Kindle Unlimited (the holdout is not exclusive at the request of the author). "For what it is worth, we at New Street have done VERY WELL thus far re: total compensation from per-page reads," Renehan said.

Renehan is seeing the benefit from exclusivity which Hugh Howey identified in August:

You can sometimes reach more readers by making your products available with fewer vendors. By concentrating sales in one location, sales rank gets a boost and more reader reviews are compiled in a single place. This means more visibility and more word-of-mouth sales. It can also mean more readers.

I know that runs counter to conventional wisdom (see John Scalzi for more on this), but Renehan had found that conventional methods just don’t work for him.

"We are not distributing anything on Kobo or Nook or any other platform. We’ve tried & it just does not pay," he told me. "Whereas KU has offered us results we’ve tracked and found to bring in increased ancillary revenue."

Obviously Renehan’s choice won’t be acceptable to all (see Zacharius, above) or even a workable option for some, but what does this says about the ebook market?

Here’s what I see:

For one thing, there are all sorts of assumptions about Kindle Unlimited which need to be discarded. It’s not as terrible for authors and publishers as its detractors say. Renehan has accepted the terms that DBW said treated some authors like second-class citizens, and he’s found that to be the more remunerative option that dealing with all the other bookstores.

What conclusions would you draw from this?

OOO

P.S. I know that some titles were removed or added to Kindle Unlimited because they were listed in the raw data for two or more Author Earnings Reports, and that status changed between one report and the next.

P.P.S. I would like to thank Data Guy, Steven Zacharius, Maria Schneider, Ed Renehan, and everyone else for helping with this post by answering my questions.

image by markus spiske

A judge in the Netherlands has ordered Google to hand over the account info for the ebook pirate behind the Flâmanca Hollanda account.

About three weeks ago Google was sued by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit Brein. Brein was seeking the contact info for one of the many ebook pirates that had set up shop in Google Play Books earlier this year. This particular pirate had been uploading Dutch-language titles to GPB under the author name Flâmanca Hollanda, and was only stopped when Dutch publishers protested loudly and sicced Brein on the problem.

Brein pressured Google into closing the pirate’s account in May, and they also asked for the account info so that Brein could pursue legal action against the pirate.

Google refused, so Brein filed a lawsuit and won. Google has three weeks to give Brein the IP address, mailing address, bank account number and first and last name belonging to the Google account that uploaded the pirated ebooks. Even if the person is outside the EU, Google must hand over the data.

That three-week period includes a fortnight where the account holder can lodge a protest and try to prevent their info from being released. The protest would be anonymously handled through Google and forwarded to the judge, but stands little chance of success.

There’s no word yet on how Google pans to proceed, and whether they plan to continue to fight the case in court. Google was contacted for this piece, but has not responded.

Tweakers

image by pasukaru76

Amazon’s Fire tablets have many things going for it, but they also have at least one shortcoming: they don’t come with Google Play.

While the Amazon Appstore does have most of the apps one might want, there are some apps (like reading apps that compete with the Kindle app) that Amazon won’t let us install on a Fire tablet.

Luckily there are several workarounds. The more complicated solutions involve installing Google Play on your Fire tablet (this is also the most efficient and effective) but there is also a trick that requires a lot less work.

A friend recently asked about this trick (he’s a new Fire owner), so I thought it would be worth sharing with everyone.

Here’s the short version.

TL;DR

After identifying the free app in Google Play you want to download, go to a site like Evozi’s APK Downloader and use its download tool to get the app. Transfer it to your Fire tablet, and install it.

And here’s the longer version.

How To

First things first: Turn on your Fire tablet, and go to the Amazon Appstore. Search for and install a file manager like "ES File Explorer".

Next, go to the Settings menu on your Fire tablet. Open the Security submenu, and check the option to allow installation of apps from unknown sources:

Nowurn back to your computer. You probably have a web browser open right now, so go ahead and open two more tabs.

• In the first tab, navigate to the Apps section of Google Play.
• Open Evozi’s APK downloader in the second tab.

The trick for getting free apps is to search for the app, copy the URL for the app listing, and then paste the URL into the Evozi APK downloader and clicking the button.

Evozi will get the app for you, and let you download it to your computer. (Or at least that is how it is supposed to work; sometimes the service is overloaded.)

Once you’ve downloaded the apps you want, you can transfer them to your Fire tablet over a USB cable. Copy the apps to a folder on your Fire tablet, and then unplug the tablet from your computer.

Installing the apps is as simple as using the file manager to open the folder with the apps, select an app, and then select the option to install the app.

Addendum

• This trick won’t work with paid apps or with apps that depend on in-app purchases (those additional sales depend on Google tech) but it’s good for like 90% of the apps I have needed.
• This won’t work with all apps; some just aren’t compatible and sometimes the process simply won’t work. But this is the trick I use when I want to assemble a suite of apps so I can test compatibility.
• Do let me know in the comments if this doesn’t work for you or if parts are unclear.
• And if you want to go the hard route, you can install Google Play on the Fire tablet. It’s a lot more work, but it can be done.

image by trophygeek