The technical publisher O’Reilly Books is holding a sale today in honor of a feature that is being disabled tomorrow.

As of 29 September, O’Reilly will no longer be able to use email to deliver the ebooks it sells you to your Kindle account. To cushion the blow (and possibly also as an act of protest), O’Reilly is holding a 50% off all ebooks sale today. It’s good for all titles, and is only good for 28 September.

O’Reilly confirmed the news on its support pages, telling customers that:

Amazon is discontinuing the Send to Kindle feature we offer on oreilly.com at the end of September. Regrettably, they have not made an alternative process available that we can provide to you through oreilly.com. If you valued this feature you can contact Amazon and request that they either re-enable it or create an API-based solution for publishers to implement.

O’Reilly is only the latest publisher to run afoul of Amazon’s rules. Earlier this year Baen Books made a similar announcement, only to later reveal that the delivery feature wasn’t disabled so much as Amazon had imposed a cap on the number of books Baen could deliver each day.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf has also been forced to drop this feature, although they did not mention any kind of cap.

Curiously enough, Amazon is only imposing this limit on publishers, and not retailers or distributors. Smashwords, for example, can still deliver a purchased ebook via email, and so can netGalley. There are also a number of Polish retailers which offer this feature, thus making it incredibly odd that publishers are no longer allowed to support readers.

If one were sufficiently conspiracy-oriented, one would wonder if this is a negotiating tactic on the part of Amazon. Alas, there is no proof either way.

Teleread

image by miniyo73

With the new Fire tablets due to arrive in just a few days, many will soon enjoy the Word Runner speed reading feature that Amazon has bundled into a new version of the Kindle app.

Word Runner helps you read quickly by flashing words at you, one at a time, but it’s not the only app to do so (nor does it have especially unique features). A couple readers have tipped me to the fact that Word Runner’s special features, the variable speed and rewind options, were more common than I thought.

One app in particular, ReadMe, offers features similar to Word Runner, including both the variable speed and the reverse option, and what’s more the ReadMe app betters Amazon’s app by supporting Epub.

ReadMe incorporates the speed reading tech developed by Spritz. That tech didn’t look like much when Spritz launched in early 2014, but the way ReadMe uses the tech is much more impressive.

Here’s a promo video of the app in operation (the app behaved just like this when I tried it on my iPad):

I’ve  been playing with the ReadMe app today, and it really does have speed reading features very similar to what we’ve seen of Word Runner.

The ReadMe app may not support DRMed ebooks but it does let you load DRM-free Epub ebooks (according to Amazon, Word Runner only works with ebooks bought in the Kindle Store).

Loading the ebooks in the ReadMe app is a clunky process, and you have to jump through a couple hoops in order to use the speed reading feature offline, but if you want to speedily read your own ebooks then it is worth the hassle.

The ReadMe app is a free download in Google Play and iTunes.

OOO

At this point it is still too early to say whether Spritz or Word Runner is better, but Spritz has pointed out that their tech was developed to fix a problem that they identified in earlier RSVP tech, a problem that is shared by Word Runner.

If you head over to the post I wrote on Word Runner, you’ll see that WR centers the words before it flashes them at you (you can see it in the GIF at right).

According to Spritz, centering the words is the less effective approach because it makes the reader shift their eye more.

They found that a reader’s eyes naturally fixate at one point in that word, which visually triggers the brain to recognize the word and process its meaning. They call it the Optimal Recognition Position (ORP), and they’ve found that it is different for each word.

The ORP of a three-letter word is the center character, but that’s not true for longer words or for every word. As a word gets longer the ORP shifts more and more to the left.

Spritz’s speed reading tech has integrated the idea by positioning a word not so it is centered on the screen but so that each word is instead centered on the ORP for that word:

And here’s why Spritz did it:

 Each time you see text that is not centered properly on the ORP position, your eyes naturally will look for the ORP to process the word and understand its meaning. This requisite eye movement creates a “saccade”, a physical eye movement caused by your eyes taking a split second to find the proper ORP for a word. Every saccade has a penalty in both time and comprehension, especially when you start to speed up reading. Some saccades are considered by your brain to be “normal” during reading, such as when you move your eye from left to right to go from one ORP position to the next ORP position while reading a book. Other saccades are not normal to your brain during reading, such as when you move your eyes right to left to spot an ORP. This eye movement is akin to trying to read a line of text backwards.

Saccades are not a serious problem when reading a block of text; as your eye scrolls over the text you will naturally find the ORP for each word and recognize the word.

And this isn’t a dire problem for speed reading either, but Spritz thinks that by fixing this issue they have optimized the reading experience and improved comprehension.

And they certainly could have done so (that’s up to researchers to argue) but at the very least we can say that the Spritz tech is more readily available than Word Runner.

And that is a recommendation all on its own.

The ReadMe app is a free download in Google Play and iTunes.

It’s that time of year again.

Starting with Nicholas Carr in 2013, it has become a biannual tradition for someone in the media to proclaim that print isn’t dead, and that ebooks are declining.

The last publication to cheer on the revival of print was The Guardian, which proclaimed in April that paper books were opening a new chapter, and now the NYTimes has picked up the standard.

Yesterday the NYTimes announced that print was far from dead and that due to declining ebook sales, the expected digital apocalypse had been indefinitely delayed.

Or at least that is what the NYTimes would have you believe; unfortunately, it’s pretty obvious that they do not understand the ebook stats they cited:

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

Yeah, those sales stats don’t mean what you think they mean.

The NYTimes is citing the AAP’s monthly sales stats. This data is collected from some 1,200 and collated each month. The stats are good and accurate, but they also come with a huge caveat:

The 1,200 publishers represent less than half of the industry’s ebook revenues.

According to the AAP’s year-end report, the 1,200 odd publishers generated $1.58 billion in ebook revenues in 2014.

That is a lot of money, but not in comparison to the AAP’s figures for 2014 ebook revenues for the trade publishing industry.

You see, the AAP collects and releases revenue data from 1,200 publishers on a monthly basis, but they also publish an annual estimate that covers the entire trade publishing industry.

That annual estimate is called Statshot Annual. According to the figures released in June 2015, the total 2014 ebook revenues for the trade publishing industry were an estimated $3.37 billion dollars.

The share represented by the 1,200 publishers comes to 46% of that $3.37 billion, in case you were wondering.

While I’m sure some readers are thinking that you can reasonably extrapolate from a limited data set to the entire market, that will not work in this case because the 1,200 publishers are not a representative sample of the market.

There’s a fundamental difference between the AAP’s data and the non-AAP industry. While the majority of the AAP monthly data about ebook revenues comes from the Big Five US trade publishers, the majority of the non-AAP ebook revenues goes to self-published ebooks and indie published ebooks.

That difference is especially important because the Big Five are the same five publishers which negotiated agency contracts last fall and spring, giving themselves more control over their ebook prices. According to the WSJ, the new contracts resulted in higher ebook prices and fewer ebooks sold.

Edit: And here’s why those publishers pushed for higher ebook prices.

And it’s not just the WSJ; there’s independent confirmation in terms of ebook sales in the Kindle Store. According to the Author Earnings report, the share of Kindle ebook unit sales represented by AAP members has dropped from 45% to 32%.

You can find more data on average ebook prices for Amazon, indie, and self-pub ebooks over on the Author Earnings website. While you’re there you should also look at the report that the Big Five have been increasing the average price of their ebook for over a year.

The data shows that the publishers sending monthly sales data to the AAP are selling fewer ebooks, so it should come as no surprise that their sales are down.

But it does not follow that the market as a whole is down.

To look at the AAP data and say that the ebook market is down is an example of wishful thinking, confirmation bias, or what have you.

But no matter what the motivations, the simple fact is the data does not support the claim.

And as for the rest of the NYTimes piece, that is just window dressing.

image by Julian Partridge

The debris from Monday’s news that Oyster will shortly be shutting down has begun to settle, but not all the conflagrations have been put out.

New info has come in since the bombshell Monday night that points to a different outcome for the beleaguered company. Far from being a straightforward acqui-hire of a failed startup, it now looks like Google may have also acquired the tech that Oyster developed over the past two plus years.

Fortune shared that tidbit Tuesday morning:

Specifically, Google has also acquired (or at least licensed) the startup’s core underlying IP (one source says Google acquired the entire company, which a Google spokeswoman denies). Moreover, most of the Oyster team will be working out of a Google Books development center in New York (unclear if this new iteration will be Google’s version of Oyster or more of a direct challenge to Amazon’s e-book retail biz, although I’d wager on the latter). No word on terms of the Oyster deal.

It’s not clear how Google will use Oyster’s tech, but we do know that Google has bought ebook startups before. For example, they bought ETI in early 2011 and then folded that company’s staff and tech into Google’s ebook efforts.

Oyster will likely have the same fate, but at this point it is still too early to say. We don’t even know when the company will be shutting down, and according to Smashwords CEO Mark Coker it won’t be soon:

I received an update from our friends at Oyster this morning.  Here’s the scoop:  Oyster has been acquired by Google.  The Oyster service will continue to operate as normal until sometime in early 2016, at which point it will shut down and cease to exist.

Between now and the ultimate closing (exact date TBD), Smashwords will continue to deliver new books and updates to Oyster, and Oyster will continue their great work generating readers and income for our authors.

All we do know right now is that Nieman Journalism Lab says that Google bought the tech, acqui-hired the staff, but did not get the contracts with publishers.

This precludes keeping Oyster’s subscription service open, but of course there’s nothing to stop Google from negotiating their own contracts with publishers and launching their own access-based subscription ebook service.

But why would they want to?

Sure, anyone in digital publishing could give you a half-dozen good arguments in favor of that idea, but are any of those arguments valid for a tech company as large and diverse as Google?

I think not. As Laura Owens reiterated over at Nieman JL, ebooks are becoming just another type of content to Google, but I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s always been that way.

Google cares more about having a diverse offering of content than any single type of content.

This is why they’ve only put minimal effort into developing their ebook publisher portal (the admin pages are confusing, and the system behaves unpredictably), and it is also why you should not expect Google to do something amazing like launch an access-based subscription ebook service.

The world’s most popular English-language song is (possibly) still under copyright, only now we don’t know who owns the rights.

Earlier today US District Court Judge George King issued a ruling granting summary judgement to the film maker who had sued Warner/Chappell over its claim to own the copyright on the song, Happy Birthday, writing in part that "Because Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics, Defendants, as Summy Co.’s purported successors-in-interest, do not own a valid copyright in the Happy Birthday lyrics."

While some sites are reporting that the song is out of copyright and into the public domain, that is not what the judge wrote.

According to copyright attorney Naomi Jane Gray, the ruling did not say that the lyrics were in the public domain:

.@eriqgardner Careful there. The ruling doesn’t say the song is in the public domain. It says Warner-Chappel doesn’t own copyright in it.

— Naomi Jane Gray (@ShadesofGrayLaw) September 23, 2015

And FYI: I got my copy of the ruling from Gray’s website.

What the ruling (PDF) says is that Warner/Chappell does not own the lyrics to Happy Birthday. The lyrics had supposedly been written by sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill, but the ruling voided their claim (and named a couple other possible copyright holders).

What the ruling does not say is exactly who owns the copyright on the lyrics to Happy Birthday. That is still up in the air.

And while we’re on the topic, the melody for the song Happy Birthday went out of copyright in 1949. That copyright can be traced back to a song called Good Morning to all, which was written in 1893 by sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill. The copyright expired at the end of the second 28 year term.

According to today’s ruling, the alternate set of lyrics that make up Happy Birthday were created at a later date by someone other than the Hill sisters, which means that they never had the copyright and thus could not transfer the copyright to anyone.

So what does this mean?

The short version is that if you want to hum the tune, play it on a nose harp, or arrange it for the koto, you’re fine.

But if you recite, publish, or perform the lyrics, you could be violating someone’s copyright.

To be clear, you are probably not violating someone’s copyright; as this is almost certainly a pre-1923 work, the copyright has expired.

But we don’t know that with absolute certainty, and that is why Happy Birthday has gone from being the most popular English language song to being the best-known example of an Orphan Work. Someone could own the copyright, only we don’t know who.

Orphan works are a known problem, and it one that the US Copyright Office is trying to solve. The USCO has recently proposed a solution which would resolve today’s issue by enabling those who wish to use an orphan work to register and pay a fee.

But that is only a proposed solution, so it matters less today than the fact that Warner/Chappell has been collecting license fees on a copyright which it did not own or control.

That copyright was worth $2 million a year, according to estimates floating around. That is of course a wild guess; Warner/Chappell hasn’t said how much they earn from the Happy Birthday copyright, but we’re going to find out eventually.

The LATimes reports that the plaintiff’s attorneys  "will move next to qualify the lawsuit as a class-action, in an effort to recoup millions of dollars in royalties that Warner/Chappell has collected on the tune over the years".

Copyright law has a statute of limitations that lasts three years, which (assuming that the law blogs I checked were correct) means that everyone who just learned that they can sue Warner/Chappell now has three years to file that suit.

Warner/Chappell is looking at paying back tens of millions of dollars in license fees, if not more.

Of course, those fees might eventually have to be paid to someone else, but that is a concern for tomorrow. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

image by melenita2012

With textbook prices rising faster than inflation, more and more universities (and even state-wide university systems) are adopting free and open-source textbooks. And now the idea has taken hold in Canada.

Earlier this month the province of Manitoba announced its new Open Textbook Initiative, a program to provide freely licensed OER textbooks to college students.

OER (open educational resource) textbooks are licensed under CC and open copyright licenses and made available online for students, teachers and members of the public. Through this new initiative, faculty members at colleges and universities in Manitoba will be able to offer content in the highest-enrolled academic subject areas.

"Textbooks are one of the biggest costs faced by post-secondary students,” said Education and Advanced Learning Minister James Allum. "While we work hard to keep tuition fees among the lowest in Canada, this new initiative will save students money by giving them free online access to the reading material they need to achieve academically."

The initiative is delivered by Campus Manitoba, and currently uses works developed for the open textbook project that British Columbia started in 2013.

The textbooks can be found on the BCcampus website. Around 80 titles are available now, and the catalog is expected to expand by another 50 volumes this fall (to late for the fall semester, but still in time for next spring).

While this doesn’t mark the death of the college textbook market, it is one more nail in the coffin. This market is dying off, which leaves the lucrative K-12 textbook market. That market is focused on district- and state-wide purchases rather than student purchases, so it is more resistant to price pressures, but I still expect that market to follow the same path.

As districts realize that they can save huge sums by using OER textbooks they will switch over in droves.  Funds are tight everywhere, and the idea that a district can save money on textbooks and use those funds to buy equipment will prove too tempting to ignore.

image by spakattacks

Any hope that streaming ebook services could be a serious alternative to Amazon were dashed today.

Oyster has announced that it is celebrating the two-year anniversary of launching its service by shutting down said service. It has quietly updated a two-month-old post ( seriously) on its blog with the announcement that it is winding down operations and that:

… we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months. If you are an Oyster reader you will receive an email personally regarding your account in the next few weeks. We look forward to sharing more details soon, but rest assured, your account will continue to operate normally in the meantime.

Oyster had offered an unlimited reading service that cost $10 a month and offered access to a catalog of a million ebooks which could be read in Oyster’s apps for Android, iOS, or in your web browser.

Of the three subscription ebook services focused on the consumer ebook market, Oyster was the smallest. It had raised close to $20 million in the past couple years, but was never able to generate the same buzz as Kindle Unlimited or Scribd.

And now it’s gone.

Edit: And the team is gone as well. Re/code reports that the Oyster team is heading to Google, and they have confirmation from a Google rep:

A rep for the search giant confirmed that “a portion” of the Oyster team has joined Google Play Books, its online store for books. People familiar with the company say that CEO Eric Stromberg and co-founders Andrew Brown and Willem Van Lancker are part of the team joining Google.

Huh. I thought this would be a cloud tech acqui-hire, not ebooks. Looks like I got that one wrong.

Oyster’s shutdown notice follows a couple reports of cutbacks by its competitor Scribd, so it really comes as no surprise. In June Scribd culled its romance selection, and then in August it cut back its audiobook offering.

And now Oyster has run up against the same limitation faced by Scribd. Both companies were trying to pay their suppliers the wholesale price each time a book is loaned while at the same time charging their customers a flat monthly fee. As anyone could see years ago, the finances just didn’t add up.

With that in mind, the only thing surprising about today’s news was the timing, and not the event itself.

P.S. Rumors are going around that the company has been sold to an unnamed buyer who is closing down the company, but at this point all we have are rumors. I have queried Oyster and will expand on this post if I get a reply.

image by EEPaul

On Sunday morning we were reminded that, contrary to current cosmological theory, the world really revolves around an inconspicuous data center in Virginia.

A server fault in an Amazon data center in Virginia earlier this morning took down many Amazon services and many popular websites. Amazon Web Services is the Amazon division responsible for hosting web and mobile apps. It’s distributed across multiple locations, and supports websites all over the world.

And it crashed hard on Sunday. There are numerous reports on Twitter that a surprising number of web services ranging from Netflix to Medium and Nest to Buffer and Pocket all became unavailable on Sunday morning.

The Sunday morning crash also shut down Echo, Amazon Instant Video, the retail functions of Amazon.com, IMDb, Createspace, Mayday, and the Kindle Store were all affected.

Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles reported several of the downed services on Twitter this morning. He said that he couldn’t order a Fire tablet, or use his Fire Stick to stream video (curiously, I had no trouble with Amazon Video during that period).

For the most part only customers in the Northeastern US were affected, but I also have reports from Germany that the Kindle Store on Amazon.de was down, and so was Createspace. Another German Amazon customer reported that her Fire Stick stopped functioning at about the same time.

According to The Independent, other affected services include Tinder, Product Hunt, SocialFlow, GroupMe, Viber, and Mediacom.

Far more services were affected in the Sunday morning crash than the last time AWS crashed, in 2013. Techcrunch reported at the time that the crash took IFTTT, AirBnB, Vine, Netflix, and Instagram offline.

That 2013 crash also happened on a Sunday, and it also involved an Amazon data center in Virginia. That crash lasted less than two hours before most of the services were back online.

Today’s crash ran past the four-hour mark before Amazon’s services were restored, and according to the AWS Health Dashboard the system is operating normally again.

image by versageek

Amazon’s bid to launch a streaming audiobook service in Germany has run afoul of book publishers.

Heise and Spiegel report that Boersenverein, the German book industry trade group, has filed a complaint with German authorities and asked that Audible be investigated for possible violations of German antitrust law.

Boersenverein accuses Audible of using its 90% share of the German downloadable audiobook market to pressure German publishers into accepting life-threatening contract terms. (Amazon’s subsidiary has an effective monopoly on downloadable audiobook in Germany, but with physical audiobooks still making up 80% of the market, according to GfK, it’s not much of a monopoly.)

Similar reports surfaced earlier this year that Amazon was pressuring German book publishers into agreeing to a flat-rate audiobook service. Nothing came of those reports, but a similar service did launch in Japan in July 2015. That service, which I have dubbed Audible Unlimited, let subscribers listen to as many audiobooks as they like for only 1,500 yen (~$12.20) per month.

No specific details have been released or leaked concerning the contract terms that Audible is demanding of German publishers, but there have been several reports that publishers who declined the new terms have been removed from Audible’s catalog.

In all honesty, folks, there is so little public info available that it is impossible to say exactly what is going on. All we really know is that Audible is somehow in conflict with German publishers.

What are the actual terms under dispute? Is Audible planning a new service?

We don’t know, nor do we know whether this a real and valid antitrust complaint or whether it falls into the same category as Authors United’s publicity stunt. (And given how often Boersenverein refers Amazon for antitrust violations, it’s easy to beleive that this is another bogus complaint.)

Stay tuned; I will be keeping an eye on this story and plan to follow up.

Update: BuchReport.de got to the story on Sunday. They don’t have much additional detail to share, nor any insider info.

image by AtulSrivastava

After it was released on Wednesday, Marco Arment’s ad-blocking app for iOS quickly rose to be the most popular paid app in the US iTunes. And now, less than 48 hours later, the app is gone.

Arment has pulled the app. Citing a guilty conscience, Arment writes on his blog that:

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

Peace required that all ads be treated the same — all-or-nothing enforcement for decisions that aren’t black and white. This approach is too blunt, and Ghostery and I have both decided that it doesn’t serve our goals or beliefs well enough. If we’re going to effect positive change overall, a more nuanced, complex approach is required than what I can bring in a simple iOS app.

He goes on to add that he still believes in ad blockers and will continue to use one, only he’s just not going to continue to develop Peace for iOS.

It’s worth noting that Peace was a paid utility, meaning that users were paying for the privilege of viewing already free content on the web while cutting off creators from a revenue stream. According to Quartz, the $3 app had sold 12,000 copies in less than a day, amounting to almost $36,000 in sales (with 30% going to Apple). With the app no longer supported, Arment is recommending customers get a refund from Apple.

While I had not predicted that Arment would pull his app, I’m not surprised that someone has pulled out.

The ethics of charging a user money so that user could go on to not pay another creator would bother me, too. I could possibly have been okay with giving away an app like Peace, but charge for it?

That is too close to profiting off of another’s destruction to suit me.

image by Pascale PirateChickan

RSVP speed reading tech (like that used by Spritz) has been around for close to three decades, but in all that time it has had two problems: it causes headaches in some users, and there are many reports of reading comprehension issues.

We don’t know if Amazon has solved the former issue, but it looks like they have a solution to the latter.

Earlier today Amazon unveiled their new tablets and other hardware, as well as the new Fire OS 5 Bellini. One of the new software features Amazon mentioned in relation was Word Runner, a speed reading option for the new tablets' Kindle app.

Word Runner is designed to help improve your reading speed by flashing one word at a time in the center of the screen. That is exactly what Spritz and other RSVP apps do, but Amazon has added a couple nuances that I have not seen before.

Update: That doesn’t mean, of course, that those features haven’t been used elsewhere. The ReadMe app can match Word Runner feature for feature, and it works with Epub.

As you can see in the GIF above, Word Runner slows down the flashing when it comes to the more difficult words, or as Amazon said, it  "automatically and algorithmically slows down for punctuation, paragraph breaks, and difficult words".

They’re calling that feature Dynamic Pacing, and it really is a feature that I haven’t seen before.

Amazon also mentions on the Word Runner page a feature called Brake. If you miss a word you can just tap and hold the screen to activate the Brake. This instantly pauses Word Runner, and lets you scroll back and pick up wherever you’d like.

I haven’t seen either feature myself, but I do have a video below to share with you. Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles scored an invite to the press briefing in SF, and he got to play with the new Fire tablet.

Word Runner is coming soon to the Kindle Android app, as well as other Fire tablets, but like the new typography Word Runner is not available for all ebooks (nor personal documents).

That’s a downer, but I’m still looking forward to seeing this in person.

lead image via Cnet

The Pew Research Center released a new report on the state of the American library user. The report is based on a survey conducted in March and April of this year, and while it is far too long to be summarized in a blog post few details jumped out at me.

For one thing, there’s growing support for the type of book-less library made prominent by Bexar County in Texas and adopted in growing numbers by college libraries.

Pew asked its survey group whether they thought that libraries should  move some print books and stacks out of public locations to free up more space for such things as tech centers, reading rooms, meeting rooms and cultural events.

Some 30% of respondents thought it was a great idea (up from 20% in 2012), while 40% thought that libraries should “maybe” do that, and 25% were opposed to the idea (down from 36% in 2012).

This is a sign of the growing appreciation that books aren’t quite so important as they used to be. They’re a means to an end (disseminating knowledge), and thanks to new tech books are now just one of many ways for libraries to inform their patrons.

Libraries also, for example, have ebooks. The American Library Association says that 90% of public libraries in the US, but sadly most patrons aren’t aware of that fact:

Pew’s survey found that:

People are increasingly aware that they can borrow e-books at their public library. Some 38% say their public library has e-books, compared with 31% who said this in 2012. Those more likely to be aware that their library has e-books are college graduates (52% say they are aware of e-book lending), parents (44%) and those in homes where the annual income is over $75,000 (44%).

Only 16% of the 38% have checked out a library ebook, which means that only 6% of library patrons are making use of a service that many libraries offer.

Even accounting for those who don’t have the tech required to check out ebooks, that is a disappointingly low number.

And that goes double when you consider that 66% of those who visited a library in the past 12 months said that they checked out a paper book. Sure, the paper book collection is larger at most libraries, but you would think that all the attention generated by the Kindle would have resulted in higher library ebook use.

You can find the complete report on the Pew website.

image by state_libraryofohio

Amazon’s PR campaign for its next tablets entered the nmext stage today with the planned release of a "leaked" image and hardware specs.

That ten inch Fire tablet which was hinted at by WSJ and then showed up on the FCC website has just made its first public appearance. Even Blass tweeted a product image for the tablet. Blass has a near-perfect record for accuracy, so it’s safe to say that this is the real thing:

In related news, Amazon has also leaked the specs for this tablet, and the 8″ model we were expecting.

According to the benchmarks over on GFXBench, both the 10″ and the 8″ models will have screen resolutions of 1280 x 800. They’ll run Amazon’s custom version of Android on a quad-core MediaTek MT8135 CPU with PowerVR Rogue G6200 graphics.

They’ll have 1GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, a pair of cameras (5MP and 1MP), Bluetooth, and Wifi. In terms of sensors, the tablets will have an accelerometer, pedometer, and a gyroscope. There could be more but that’s all that is listed in the benchmark.

Those are considerably better specs than the ones Amazon leaked last week for the six inch tablet. That tablet had a much weaker CPU and GPU, as well as a rumored $50 price tag.

Without knowing the price, it’s hard to say whether the larger tablets are a good value. But I can add that they have the same screen resolution, RAM, CPU, GPU, and storage as on last year’s Fire HD 7.

The only real difference is the size of the screens, and the cameras (last year’s tablet had VGA and 2MP cameras). So if you’re looking to upgrade, you should ask whether the larger tablets are really worth it.

I just got a Fire HD 7, and I am relieved to know that I didn’t make the wrong decision. I am not tempted by either the budget-priced 6″ model or the larger screens on the 8″ and 10″ models.

But YMMV.

• GFXBench (Amazon KFTBWI)
• GFXBench (Amazon KFMEWI)

Amazon has released the monthly stats on its streaming ebook service, Kindle Unlimited.

The retailer hasn’t told us the number of subscribers, but we do know that in August 2015 publishers and authors were paid from a pool worth $11.8 million.

According to the two authors who (quietly) sent me info, Amazon paid authors about $0.0051 per page read. That is down from the $0.0058 that Amazon paid authors in July 2015, with the decline due to the sharp increase in the number of pages read (2.23 billion, up from 2 billion pages read last month).

There is little commentary on the news just yet, but I do have one interesting datum for you: In terms of revenue paid to authors and publishers, Kindle Unlimited is now larger than the Nook Store.

B&N’s latest quarterly report revealed last week just how far B&N’s ebook empire has fallen. Not only were B&N digital revenues smaller last quarter than they had ever been before, the share paid to authors and publishers were also smaller than the amount Amazon paid out for Kindle Unlimited.

B&N sold $37 million worth of digital content in the May-July fiscal quarter, while Amazon paid $33.6 million to authors and publishers who had in Kindle Unlimited.

It’s past time to call it; Kindle Unlimited is one of the world’s largest ebook services.

So where do you think KU ranks on the list, before or after Kobo and Google Play Books?

P.S. The previous monthly pools were worth:

• 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

When Patti Brassard Jefferson opened Gulf Coast Books in April of this year, it occupied a space that more closely resembled a cubby than a retail store, and it only had room for a few dozen indie authors.

Five months have passed since then, and everything has changed.

Children’s author and illustrator Patti Brassard Jefferson has announced that next month she plans to open a new larger bookstore called PJ Boox.  The new store will fill a 1,700 square foot store front in Fort Myer’s, Florida, and carry ten times as many books as its predecessor, Gulf Coast Books.

PJ Boox will be many multiple’s the size of its predecessor, and it will also be about six times the size of Local Editions, another indie-focused bookstore which launched in Colorado last month.

The books will still be stocked face out, but there will be room for more than books by more than 500 indie authors from across the US. PJ Boox will keep to the original ideal of Gulf Coast Books, which has proven immensely popular with authors:

But it’s not just Brassard who has been excited by Gulf Coast’s launch. Of the 54 authors who signed up to be featured at Gulf Coast with their own bookshelf, 48 opted to renew after the first three months. According to Brassard, the vacancies were filled from the waiting list in less than 15 minutes. She also heard from nearly 200 authors who aren’t local, who wanted to be represented in a similar bookstore, which is what prompted her to start P.J. Boox.

The store will operate on a consignment model, with each shelf rented to authors.

Edit: This is similar to the coop fees publishers pay chain bookstores for placement, only on a smaller scale.

As at Gulf Coast Books, authors will be paid monthly and get 100% of net revenues (minus credit card fees) for books sold in store. They will also receive 80% of revenues for books sold through the store’s website.

Brassard is also planning to maintain an active events schedule with in-person author events as well as virtual visits via Skype. There’s space to comfortably seat 20 people for readings and book clubs, and PW reports that the mall can accommodate larger crowds.

PJ Boox is the third domino in a chain that will only get longer and wider as time goes by. As I pointed out last month when I wrote about Colorado Springs-based Local Editions, indie authors are responding to being shut out of bookstores by routing around the problem. They’re launching their own stores so they can sell to the public.

This is only the beginning.