The four-month-old partnership between Opera and the literacy non-profit Worldreader is already bearing fruit.

Worldreader announced on Monday that five million readers have used the app that Opera and Worldreader developed.

This app, which is prominently featured in Opera Mini in 34 African countries, enables readers to access a free online library consisting of 28,000 ebooks. That catalog spans 43 languages and a dozen categories, and includes ebooks from US and international publishers such as Publerati, Penguin Random House, Mills & Boo, and Open Road Media.

Worldreader may have gotten its start with literacy programs focused on distributing Kindles, but it has long since adopted a more platform-agnostic view. While the non-profit was able to get Kindles in the hands of thousands of readers, switching to reading apps has enabled Worldreader to bring ebooks to millions of readers.

"We want to make sure the entire world has access to the books they need and want," said Elizabeth Hensick Wood, Managing Director for Worldreader, Europe. "Through this partnership, Opera and Worldreader aim to reach millions of people every month, across 34 African countries, through the cell phones they already have."

The app is designed to work on small screens, and supports both online and offline reading. Initially developed as a web app, Worldreader Mobile is now available in Google Play, Windows Store, the Firefox Marketplace, and the Opera Mobile Store. It’s also available online at read.worldreader.org (but only for mobile phones).

Worldreader expects to reach ten million readers by the end of the year. They say that nearly a quarter of their readers come from Ethiopia, and that two-thirds are male.

Here are a few more facts about the readers:

• Who is reading more on their mobile phones? Women. On average, women are reading 48% more than men. (Women read 11.5 minutes per session while men read 6.5 minutes per session).
• How engaged are our readers? Active readers are spending 17 minutes reading per session.
• What topics are popular with the readers? The most popular literary categories amongst these new readers are Love, Sports, Education, and Health.
• What books are most popular? Most popular books include The Art of Public Speaking(education), Nutrition & Growth (health), Milk & Honey (romance), Laubach Way to Reading(education).

InfoDocket

 EpubCheck is the industry standard tool for verifying whether Epub files meet the official spec. The new version was made available to download on Github yesterday both as source code and as a compiled JAR file.

EpubCheck 4.0 can inspect your Epub ebook and make sure it complies with the latest Epub standards, including:

• Epub 3.0.1
• Epub Dictionaries and Glossaries 1.0
• Epub Indexes 1.0
• Epub Multiple-Rendition Publications 1.0
• Epub Previews 1.0
• Epub Region-Based Navigation 1.0

It also offers an early implementation of checks for several draft specifications:

• Epub3 EDUPUB Profile
• Epub Distributable Objects 1.0
• Epub Scriptable Components Packaging and Integration 1.0

image by Johan Larsson

Between Oyster, Scribd, Epic, Meegenius, and Reading Rainbow, subscription ebook services are a dime a dozen in 2015. But eBookids thinks there’s room for one more.

Launched in mid-June, eBookids is a niche reading service focused on 3- to 9-year-old children. It offers around 350 titles in French, Spanish, and English which can be read for 2 euros per month (it’s free until 1 October).

With around 350 titles, the service has more of a Reading Rainbow style offering than Epic. Rather than sign deals with publishers, eBookids employs a team of 3 illustrators and 2 authors who create the stories from scratch (Reading Rainbow does the same). eBookids also enhances the ebooks with audio, and it has a Youtube channel where the books are read to the children.

But it does not, however, offer mobile apps. Instead, eBookids is focused on the web browser. They feel that most of their users would prefer that the service be accessible anywhere, and not just on Android and iOS, the two leading mobile platforms.

And that’s not the only detail that sets eBookids apart. According to Actualitte, eBookids also retells important current events on a level that young children can grasp. The stories are illustrated, so that even the youngest can better understand what’s going on in the world today.

IDBoox

image  by <cleverCl@i®ê>

Libraries as far apart as North Caroline, San Diego, and British Columbia are launching programs to connect their patrons with local authors.

Late last week the CBC shed light on the phenomenon when it reported on a province-wide Read Local program in Nova Scotia:

Hundreds of e-books from Atlantic Canadian authors are now available at public libraries across the province thanks to a new program called "Read Local."

The province of Nova Scotia provided $40,000 to help fund the program which is a partnership between the libraries and the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association.

So far, 12 regional publishers have signed on.

That is possibly the single largest read local effort, but it is just the tip of the iceberg.

In addition to the program at the Greater Victoria Public Library (mentioned last week), I can also report that many other public libraries with Read Local program. Twenty minutes with Google has uncovered no less than six different Read Local efforts of various types.

The programs range from Madison Public Library highlighting books by local authors in its newsletter to a book fair in Durham, North Carolina. Many libraries maintain webpages dedicated to their Read Local programs, including San Diego Public Library, Johnson County Library (KS), Saint Paul Public Library, Caledon (Ontario), and of course Nova Scotia Provincial Library.

In related news, there is also Read Local BC, a campaign by the local Canadian publishers association which was intended to "celebrate the extraordinary depth of BC publishing". That campaign ran in April, so we missed it.

We also missed the Read Local book festival in Durham, North Carolina. Like the campaign in British Columbia, this festival was less a library program than one that the local library supported and helped organize.

From the News Observer:

The number of writers, illustrators, bloggers, book clubs, and even small presses that call our area home is astounding. Yet, in a city that thrives on festivals and celebrations, we haven’t come together as a town to honor our literary culture. Until now.

On May 15-17, an impressive cross section of our area’s literary minds and bookish professionals will converge on Downtown for the Read Local Book Festival, presented by Light Messages Publishing and Durham Public Library. The motive is simple: we want to raise money for Durham Library Foundation while celebrating our literary ecosystem.

The principles of a healthy ecosystem are fairly universal. To thrive, an ecosystem needs diversity with each member fulfilling a specific role. And our area’s literary ecosystem is no different. That’s why at Read Local, you’ll find self-published authors like Felicia Jamison and Leah Ward alongside emerging authors such as Elizabeth Hein, Carl Nordgren, and Samantha Bryant and household names like Jaki Shelton Greene, Monica Byrne, and Dasan Ahanu. You’ll also find your favorite local booksellers, up-and-coming illustrators, and several small presses.

So does your local public library support a Read Local program?

Mine does not, but I suspect that many do – we just have to find them. The programs mentioned above were relatively easy to find because they were all titled "Read Local", but there are bound to be more programs that are less visible.

I’m expecting that libraries with read local programs will prove much more common than libraries that offer help to local writers and authors. I only know of a few libraries with a self-pub or writer program. Seattle Public Library has one, and so does the Hartford County Library in Maryland. There’s also a multi-library program in Kentucky called ePublishOrBust.

via InfoDocket

image by EDrost88

I need to issue a correction for my prediction earlier this week that B&N would soon be launching a new Nook device.

I was wrong; Barnes & Noble will be launching two models in the next couple weeks.

A new filing on the FCC’s website has revealed that B&N has a new Nook. All the more interesting details have been concealed, but we do know that this device is clearly labeled an ereader. It has Wifi (but not BT), and from the dimensions it is also clear that this is a 6″ ereader, and not the 8″ model I reported on Sunday.

Based on the model number (BNRV510-A), this is a replacement for the Nook Glowlight, which launched in late 2013. The new model is made by Netronix (an ereader OEM and partner to Kobo). It’s going to be a little smaller than its predecessor, and that’s about all I know at this time.

In related news, the B&N website is now showing several product listings for cases for 8″ Nook devices (here, here, here). The listings lack details and images, but they do lend credence to my earlier report.

I still lack specific details on the new devices, but we won’t have to wait long. B&N is set to have the new devices in store by 3 September, so the longest we’ll have to wait is another week.

Clarification: B&N stores are scheduled for a reset on 3 September. This may or may not involve new devices.

FCC (XHHBNRV510-A)

Thanks, Dave!

Amazon is sending mixed messages of late about its hardware projects.  On the one hand, we have leaked reports of mass layoffs, while on the other hand I have also uncovered recruitment videos.

The WSJ broke the layoff news yesterday, reporting that:

flamed out with critics and consumers last year in its first attempt at a smartphone. Now, rather than forge ahead, as it has with other projects, such as its Kindle tablets, the online retailer is retrenching.

In recent weeks Amazon has dismissed dozens of engineers who worked on its Fire phone at Lab126, its secretive hardware-development center in Silicon Valley, according to people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs were the first in the division’s 11-year history, these people said. But the precise toll on its roughly 3,000-person staff couldn’t be learned, in part because Amazon typically requires employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for severance payments.

The layoffs should not be generalized to imply that all of Amazon’s hardware efforts are facing cutbacks, because Amazon is also actively recruiting employees for its other divisions.

Over the past few months Amazon has been posting videos on Youtube which highlight the work of various parts of the company.

There’s a bunch of videos on Lab126, as well as videos for Ivona (Poland, TTS), Evi (UK, voice recognition for Alexa/Echo), and the Kindle EU team.

There was also a promo video for Amazon’s screen tech sub, Liquavista:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZUSNrS3LK4

When that video was first noticed a couple weeks back, it caused a flurry of speculation. Many at Mobileread wondered whether it was a sign that Amazon was about to do something wonderful with Liquavista screens.

Given that this is but one video in a series, I don’t think we can draw that conclusion, but it is a sign that Amazon hasn’t forgotten the screent ech company they bought in 2013.

Speaking of speculation, here’s a rumor I didn’t really expect to come true.

Buried in the WSJ story on the Fire Phone team layoffs were a couple brief mentions of other devices that Amazon has under development which Amazon may have culled along with the Fire Phone.

It seems Amazon has an iPen prototype in the works, as well as a larger tablet:

Amazon has also halted or scaled back other development projects, according to people familiar with the situation, including a smart stylus internally called Nitro, which translates a users’ scribblings into digital shopping lists; a device dubbed Shimmer for projecting images on walls and other surfaces; and a tablet code-named Project Cairo, with a 14-inch screen.

That Project Cairo tablet sounds an awful lot like the 12″ tablet rumor that Digitimes reported earlier this week. True, the screen sizes are different, but there’s a high probability that a team working on a plus-sized tablet would be experimenting with several screen sizes with the goal of shipping a single model.

Alas, it doesn’t look like we’re going to see that Project Cairo tablet any time soon.

image  by kodomut

Are you looking to hire someone to help finish your next book? Then you might be interested in Kobo’s next venture.

The ebook retailer is thinking about expanding its Writing Life publishing portal with a new section where authors and publishers could hire skilled professionals to work on a manuscript.

The new venture has only just begun:

For the moment, we’re in Phase 1 of the project: measuring your interest in each service, so we can prioritize which opportunities are most important to our authors. Please feel free to go and click on which service or opportunity you’d like to see us focus on first. Don’t see what you want? Choose “Tell Us More” and tell us all about it.

Kobo currently partners with Publishers Weekly to sell book reviews through Kobo Writing Life, but that’s just the beginning. According to the Author Services page, Kobo could end up selling ISBNs, offering a POD service, or connecting authors with a cover designer or editor. There’s also a mention of audiobook production.

Kobo hasn’t mentioned how they would provide these services, just that the Author Services section of KWL was:

… a project we’ve been working towards for several years: offering a list of recommended professional services – cover design, editorial help, print on demand, and more – that we trust and believe offer good value for independent authors. When possible, we’ll negotiate a great discount so you’ll get more for your money.

Kobo could develop "Author Services" as an internal division, or they could create a marketplace where authors would hire freelancers.

Either option is possible, and another likely option is that Kobo will outsource the work to a company like FastPencil (or one of its competitors.) As we saw with Books-a-Million’s new publishing services unit earlier this year, outsourcing the work lets a retailer like Kobo add all of the desired services quickly and efficiently.

But that’s not where Kobo is planning to go, according to Kobo Writing Life director Mark Leslie Lefebvre. He told me by email that "The services will be, in the Kobo way, about collaboration and partnerships. But what’s key is checking into services to make sure they’re author-friendly and not about exploiting authors. That’s a key driving principle for us – and one of the reasons it has taken so long to roll this out."

Kobo has wanted to offer this type of service for a while, Lefebvre said "It’s an attempt to meet the huge demand so many authors ask about, so we’re trying to provide referrals to curated trusted 3rd parties."

image by Alan_D

Only weeks after launching in Latin America, Bookmate expanded its presence in southeast Asia with a partnership with Indosat, Indonesia’s second largest telecom.

Best-known for focusing on markets rife with piracy, Bookmate’s local service is launching under the brand name Cipika Bookmate, and is available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Subscribers will be able to pay $4 a month to access a library of 250,000 titles that includes English language works as well as Bahasa Indonesian. In anticipation of the launch, Bookmate had signed deals with the leading Indonesian publishers to add 4,000 locally-published titles to its catalog.

The Indonesian expansion follows Bookmate’s debut in southeast Asia last December via a partnership with Singapore telecom StarHub. Bookmate is facing several established competitors in Indonesia, including WayangForce and Scoop.

According to Tech in Asia, Scoop may have anticipated Bookmate’s arrival when it changed its business model last month to allow people to read an unlimited number of titles for a flat fee.

"The global book publishing industry is worth $120 billion, about eight times the size of the music industry, and we are seeing an accelerating transition to digital and mobile," Andrew Baev, managing director of Bookmate, said in a statement. "Our strategy is to focus on high growth, under-served markets where readers are jumping the gap directly from paper to mobile reading. Indonesia is right in our sweet spot for offering our mix of fun, social, and on-the-go reading."

image by Johan Larsson

One Education is an Australian non-profit and OLPC partner that wants to take up where OLPC left off by developing a modular and affordable educational computer for students.

Earlier this year One Education announced  a modular laptop called the Infinity, and promised that the first prototypes would ship next spring. This week the organization started taking reservations from folks interested in buying an Infinity when it is available.

The first thousand optimists to reserve an Infinity will be given the opportunity to buy one for $249 to $299 when it’s ready some time next year.

The XO Infinity is designed to be the ultimate modular laptop where every component from the keyboard dock to the camera, CPU, and even the screen is a module that can be swapped out at will.

The core of the design is a tablet unit with an 8.9″ screen. It packs in a camera module with 2MP and 5MP cameras, a battery, and a CPU module with a quad-core 1.5GHz CPU, 2GB RAM and 24GB storage.

That’s a slightly different design from the original concept revealed 6 months ago; that earlier design also had a connectivity module (Wifi, Bluetooth, etc). and One Education also says that the new design is about 3mm thinner. They’ve also reduced both the height and width by about 1cm.

One common problem shared by modular gadget projects is how a user might go about building their own module. The much-delayed Project Ara has basically made that option impossible, but it will be relatively easy for a hardware hacker to build a custom  module for the XO Infinity.

One Education has adopted USB-C as the standard connector for all the modules. That means that even if the official project falls through, a hacker would be able to build their own module by combining a module shell and a USB connector board with a Chrombit or Raspberry Pi. They could even build their own sensor module, or rebuild the battery.

You could conceivably use a commercially available USB-C accessory with the XO Infinity. There might be an issue with drivers, but the XO Infinity does run Android (Linux and Windows firmwares are in the works) so that won’t be an insurmountable issue.

And that’s a good thing, because the official XO Infinity project isn’t drawing a lot of support. That reservation list was first announced on 2 August, and it is still open as I write this post.

Let’s hope that One Education has institutional buyers lined up, because if they’re relying on single unit sales then this project won’t get much further than the core design and a set of schematics that you can have 3d-printed.

One Education doesn’t expect to ship the XO Infinity until next year, and they don’t have a working unit yet. but they did post a series of photos on their Facebook page which shows what the latest design looks like.

One Education via Liliputing

For the past several years E-ink has been talking up possible niche uses for E-ink screens, including sunlight-readable displays for motor bikes and bicycles.

To the best of my knowledge, no gadget maker has stepped up to serve this niche market, so one hacker has developed his own solution.

David Schneider’s a bicyclist, and he was recently inspired to build a bike computer for people who don’t like to squint. He writes over at IEE Spectrum that he grew frustrated by products which either had screens to small to read or were to expensive for his tastes, so he decided to build his own.

As you can see in the following video, Schneider has combined a Kindle Touch with a Raspberry Pi to build the ultimate bike computer. The Pi reads in data from the sensors (GPS and two reed switches, crunches the numbers, and then posts the data to a webpage that the Pi serves up on a local Wifi network. The Kindle Touch access that network and displays the page in its web browser.

It’s not that simple, of course. Schneider says that he had to install a long list of software for this to work. He also had to find a way to trick the Kindle into thinking it was connected to Amazon’s servers (otherwise it refused to connect to the Pi’s Wifi network).

A Raspberry Pi is rather over-powered for a bike computer, and Schneider took full advantage of its abilities to build a device with GPS, mapping, and data logging features:

In the end, I managed to pull together a system that shows distance, instantaneous speed, average speed, cadence, elapsed time, and clock time all at once, with digits large enough to read without squinting. Swiping and pressing buttons brings up other screens that offer such goodies as real-time mapping and logging. Even if you have to buy a Kindle for this project, the cost of the hardware involved is probably less than half what you’d be paying for a commercial unit with these capabilities.

You can find more details over at the IEE Spectrum site.

Hackaday

When Scribd culled its romance catalog a couple months back, I predicted that the ever-popular SF&F category would be the next to go under the knife. I was wrong.

Scribd quietly announced on its blog late Friday night that it is imposing a quota on audiobooks. Starting 20 September, subscribers will be limited to listening to a single audiobook per month, and they will also have the option of buying additional audiobook credits for $8.99.

Scribd also promises that they will offer "a rotating catalog of thousands of audiobooks for unlimited listening" which "are being made available through special arrangements with publishing partners".

The subscription cost will remain $9 a month, and the ebook access is not being curtailed at this time. Scribd is merely taking steps to make their audiobook catalog less attractive to subscribers. (Scribd wants subscribers to pay $9 to listen to a second audiobook, when you can often buy an ebook+audiobook bundle in the Kindle Store for not much more.)

This is the second time that Scribd has cut back its service in the last couple months, and it is also the second time that one of Scribd’s bold moves has backfired.

Scribd’s first mistake was in signing an exclusive deal with Harlequin and then actively recruiting romance readers in late 2014, only to discover in June 2015 that romance readers inhaled so many novels that they were draining Scribd’s coffers.

Scribd’s second mistake was when they signed a deal in November 2014 with Findaway to add 30,000 audiobook titles to Scribd’s catalog. To give you an idea of how bold that was, Kindle Unlimited had around 2,300 audiobook titles at the time (4,500 now).

As I suggested at the time, KU carried fewer audiobooks because they had a higher unit cost:

I would bet that Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited with only 2,300 audiobook titles because audiobooks usually cost 4 times or more than the price of an ebook. This suggests that an unlimited audiobook subscription plan is simply unsustainable at Scribd’s $9 a month or the KU’s $10 a month.

Both of Scribd’s bold moves made the service attractive to potential subscribers, but they came at too high of a price. Rather than just draw in paying customers, Scribd attracted the type of customer it does not want – those who would use the service as it was intended by consuming as much content as they can.

And that’s a problem for Scribd, because it has committed to paying its suppliers (authors and publishers alike) a cut of the retail price each time a book is loaned.

That is simply an unsustainable model for access-based services of any type, beit ebook, music, or video.

At this point it’s clear that there are two sustainable payment models for access-based services. The first is to pay suppliers a tiny fraction of the retail price, and the other is to limit payments to a finite pool.

Pandora and other streaming music services have gone with the first model, and so has Germany’s Skoobe. (According to Matthias Matting of Self-PublisherBibel.de, Skoobe pays indie authors between 20 cents and 60 cents per loan.)

Amazon, on the other hand, has been using a funding pool to pay authors and publishers ever since Kindle Owner’s Lending Library launched in late 2011.

In light of today’s news, that doesn’t seem like such a bad model, does it?

I mean, on one side we have a service that paid out more than $33 million to authors and publishers in the past three months and generated more income for authors than they earned from the Nook Store.

On the other side we have a service that has had to cut back its offering twice in the past two months.

That’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

images by Shermeee, Stephen Cummings

When Random House Germany announced earlier this week that it was softening its stance on DRM by adopting digital watermark DRM, many erroneously reported that the German ebook market had gone DRM-free.

The forecast isn’t quite so rosy, but this does present a great opportunity for German ebook retailers to start actively competing with Amazon for the euros spent by Kindle users.

As of 1 October, the majority of ebooks published in Germany will be available (outside the Kindle Store) with only minimal DRM. This means that a tech-savvy consumer can buy one of those Epub ebooks, download and convert the ebook to Kindle format, and then load the ebook on to their Kindle.

It also means that a retailer can launch a feature which does this on behalf of the consumer.

It’s technically feasible for ebook retailers to automatically convert the ebook and email the ebook to a customer’s Kindle account. This feature isn’t common in all markets, but several publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks direct to consumers, including Baen Books and O’Reilly, have offered this option almost since the day the Kindle Store launched, and Hachette intended to offer it in the ebookstore they didn’t launched last year.

Hachette’s ebookstore, eBooksForAll, was going to use digital watermarks so that the publisher could sell to Kindle owners. Now German ebook retailers have the option to follow the same path, but will they?

One would think that the retailers would take the obvious step, but that’s no guarantee that they will.

Take, for example, the Dutch ebook market. Publishers in the Netherlands wholeheartedly adopted digital watermark DRM several years ago, and so did the ebook retailers.

Those retailers have every opportunity to support Kindle owners with a conversion+email service, and yet Timo Boezeman of CB Logistics informs me that retailers like eBook.nl and Bol.com do not offer this option.

I’ve never been able to find out why the Dutch ebook retailers don’t better support Kindle users; as we can see in the Polish ebook market, there’s no technical reason that this can’t be done.

Poland’s ebook market exists in the shadow of the Amazon ever since the German Kindle Store launched in 2011, and that shadow has shaped the market.

Polish consumers have bought Kindles, and then turned to local ebookstores to buy the Polish-language ebooks that Amazon would not sell. This forced the local ebookstores to adapt and sell ebooks that could be read on a Kindle.

Many now offer to send ebooks directly to a customer’s Kindle account, including:

• Publio.pl
• Nexto.pl
• eBookPoint.pl
• Virtualo.pl

In short, the Polish ebook market is, in many ways, the ideal market that we all want. There’s just enough DRM to satisfy publishers, but not enough to annoy consumers or create walled gardens. It’s a market where Amazon’s customers are fair game for its competitors.

So do you think German retailers will head down that path?

image by kodomut

Many stories focus on fictional people and places, but sometimes the most colorful part of a story is when the setting, ie the plants surrounding the main character, have a key role to play.

The following infographic details eighty fictional plants  that can be found in books, comics, games, and movies. Besides Audrey Jr, the Mandrake, and the Whomping Willow, you will find both obscure and well-known plants from The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Pokémon, Star Wars, and other sources. If you would like a more complete list, try Wikipedia.

Which of these plants would you like to grow in your home?

eBookFriendly

One of the earliest (publisher-sponsored) author communities will be closing at the end of the month.

HarperCollins has announced on the Authonomy blog on Wednesday that "Unfortunately in recent years publishing of titles from the site has slowed as we have opened other submissions channels, and the community has become smaller, so the decision to close Authonomy has been made."

like BookCountry and many other writing communities, Authonomy worked by letting authors submit their manuscripts. The works were publicly critiqued and raked by other users, with some of the better works optioned by HarperCollins. The Bookseller notes that Miranda Dickinson, Steven Dunne, and Kat French had been recruited through the site.

A grand total of 47 HarperCollins titles had been sourced through Authonomy since it launched in 2008. An unknown (but almost certainly larger) number went on to be independently published by the authors.

In comparison, Amazon’s Kindle Scout program has optioned 74 titles in less than ten months. (While Kindle Scout has a very different design and also works differently from Authonomy, the latter’s website suggests that they had a similar purpose.)

What with the multitude of online writing communities, it’s to be expected that some would close, but the biggest reason for Authonomy’s decline is that it launched in a different era. In 2008 an author’s best chance for getting published was to sign with a major publisher, but that stopped being true from about 2011.

The promise that "every month, five Authonomy manuscripts are selected to be reviewed by HC editors for possible publication" just isn’t as attractive to authors as it used to be, not when they can publish on their own, make money today, and maybe get an offer tomorrow.

The Bookseller

image  by streetwrk.com

As everyone who has been following the news over the past few days can tell you, many people both inside and outside of Amazon are not happy with the company.

The same can’t be said for Amazon’s robots. The retailer has long pursued capital investments as a way of reducing its operating costs, and nowhere is that more true than in Amazon’s warehouses. The Dallas Morning News recently took a tour of one of the warehouses in Texas, and they found a bustling workplace that has looks like it has nearly as many robots as people.

According to press reports, Amazon now uses over 10,000 mobile robots in its warehouses (this doesn’t count the stationary units like the label sticker), so clearly that impression is a gross exaggeration, but still.

The robots range from massive hydraulic arms to the smaller 700 pound forklift bots from Kiva Systems. They’re complex devices, and that includes the stationary units:

At the point when the machine applies the mailing label on with a gentle poof of air, it’s also weighing the box faster than you can notice whether Amazon’s logo is facing up in a smile and not upside down in a frown. If the box weighs more or less than it should, based on what the scanner just read is inside, it’s sent on a side track over to humans. Yes, this technology can detect even if the wrong Harry Potter book was packed

You can see this for yourself. First up is the guided tour, and after that is some raw footage of the robots at work.