Whether it’s through an email list or social media following, one of the best ways for an author to pitch their next book is through direct promotion to their fans. And now Amazon has provided another way to do just that.

The retailer has quietly launched a new way for readers follow their faves. Not quite a blog’s RSS feed and not quite a social network account, Amazon Follow lets fans stay abreast of an author’s latest activity.

Readers can choose which authors to follow, and if one of those authors releases a new book (or makes it available for pre-order) the reader followers will be notified shortly thereafter. Amazon will also notify a reader if a person they follow publishes an article.

An author’s follow button can be found on their author page, and readers can manage their privacy settings as well as the authors they follow on each reader’s public profile page.

All in all, that’s not a bad tool – assuming you don’t mind that Amazon is going to have control of the connection between reader and author. That is a downside, but not everyone wants or is able to connect with author or fan via social network so it is good that Amazon is providing an additional option.

Self-Publisher Bibel

The end of DRM is nigh.

Buch Report and Lesen.net are reporting on Monday morning that the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is dropping encryption DRM from the ebooks it publishes in Germany.

Holtzbrinck is the parent company of Macmillan (which operates in the US, UK, and Australia), and in Germany it owns a number of publishers, including Droemer Knaur, Argon, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Rowohlt and S. Fischer. According to my sources, all of Holtzbrinck’s German publishers will stop using "hard" or encryption DRM in August. They will replace it with digital watermarks, or what is often called a soft or "social" DRM.

Digital watermarks is the common term for adding customer-specific information to the metadata of a file so that a pirated copy can be tracked back to the original purchaser. Some would dispute whether  watermarks count as DRM, given that they do not prevent a user from sharing or pirating a file, but it still meets many of the same requirements and is equally effective at stopping piracy as encryption DRM like that used by Amazon, Adobe, and Apple.

Holtzbrinck’s announcement follows only a few short weeks after Bonnier made a similar decision to go DRM-free, and given Holtzbrinck’s  much larger size and the Tor-Forge connection it is arguably an even bigger story.

When Tor-Forge Books (a Macmillan imprint) went DRM-free three years ago today, many pundits hoped that the move marked the imminent demise of ebook DRM for at least one major global publisher. However, despite reports of no negative impact, Macmillan and its parent Holtzbrinck had shown no sign that they were going to expand the policy company wide.

But it turns out we were right; we had simply misjudged  the glacial pace of change in the publishing industry.

I have no info as of yet on Macmillan going DRM-free, but the most likely cause for delay (besides corporate inertia) would be making sure that the distributors offer digital watermarks as a DRM option.

For example, the Kindle Store does not offer this option yet, forcing publishers to choose between no DRM and Kindle DRM (there’s a similar issue in iBooks). In the long run this could lead some to decide to go with social DRM everywhere but the Kindle Store.

image by gruntzooki

Google rolled out a new update to its Android ebook app on Thursday which delivered on new features that Google has been hinting about for the past couple months.

Google Play Books v3.5 has a whole new interface, a new book discovery page, tweaks to how your library is displayed, and more.

To start, the "read now" page is now based on a damnable carousel rather than a simple tile or list view. In order to see your ebooks, you’ll need to swipe left or right (or switch to the "my library" page). Google has also added a new prompt which asks you to "tell us what you like" so they can help you discover new works, and each book’s icon now integrates a progress bar which tells you how far along you are.

And inside the book Google has added a fit-width option for full-screen horizontal viewing, an image zoom mode, and the option to turn the page while zoomed in (useful for comics and large PDFs, I think).

And that’s not even the best part.

The new version of Google Play Books now lets you back up your annotations to Google Drive. You’ll need to first enable the option in the settings menu, but once you have done so the notes and highlights from each ebook will be saved as a Google Doc (one doc per ebook).

Here’s one example I threw together real quick just to show you that it works. As you can see, the text notes came through but the highlights did not. Each note or highlight is has a link to the page in the ebook where it was made.

It’s not clear why the highlights did not sync for that ebook, but the highlights did sync for another ebook, one which I uploaded to my Play Books account. I suspect that the publisher of the first book blocked this option behind the scenes.

In any case, Google has given us a new way to export or share our notes from ebooks in Google Play Books. That’s going to prove quite useful, don’t you think?

The app is free in Google Play.

Android Police

Everyone and their life coach has released a 6″ ereader, but 8″ models are still the rarer than hen’s teeth. I have two different large screen ereaders sitting on my desk right now, and while they have the same screen size and share certain design elements, they could not be more different.

The Inkpad was released late last year by Pocketbook, runs Linux, is little more than an ereader, and is still hard to find,; while the Onyx Boox HDML Plus has been out for just over a month, runs Android, and thus offers the possibility of doing more than just displaying ebooks.

Hardware

The i86 and the InkPad use the same 8″ Pearl E-ink screen and they have similar lopsided designs, but that is about all they have in common.

The i86 has a black shell with page turn buttons to the left of the screen and a back button below the screen. Its power button, microSD card slot, microUSB port, and headphone jack are on the lower edge. It has a rubberized rear with a slight curve on the rear edges.

As I explained in my review of the InkPad, it has a brown plastic rear shell with a black front. Its page turn buttons are to the right of the screen under a rubber strip. The rear shell has rounded edges and a rubber pad which makes it easier for me to grip the InkPad.

Of the two designs, I’d say the InkPad is prettier for the subtle details. The rubber pads make for a more pleasant feel, and the frontlight is controlled by a swipe bar over the screen.

Speaking of the frontlight, the one on the InkPad is simply better. It’s brighter, whiter, and offers finer control. The frontlight on the i86 is splotchy to the point of being ugly.

With the frontlight off, the i86’s screen (with an IR touchscreen) is slightly more gray/brown than the screen on the InkPad (which has a capacitive touchscreen).  I know that sounds contradictory but it is true.

In terms of battery life, the InkPad lasted a week and the i86 lasted a couple weeks.

Software

The InkPad runs a proprietary version of Linux, while the i86 runs Android 4.0 and comes with Google Play.  In other words, the Inkpad is limited to what it can do out of the box, while with the i86 you have the option of installing apps.

The InkPad does have a few apps of its own, including a web browser, calculator, games, and Dropbox (more details here). But the i86 has Google Play, and enogh space for 14 apps (after that you’ll need to uses the settings menu to move the apps to another part of the internal storage).

Out of the box, both devices support the same basic range of ebook formats, although the InkPad does also have limited support for office doc formats (more details here).  The i86 supports more annotation and formatting options, and they are much easier to access, but on the other hand the i86 does not have a readily accessible TOC in the stock reading app. That’s really beginning to bug me.

They both offer font sizes which range from ones too small for me to read to 72 pt font and beyond, and while they don’t offer the exact same font sizes I did note that both offered specific numbered font sizes. The second photo below shows both ereaders with the font size set to 60.

Both devices can read an ebook to you. The Inkpad sounds pretty good, but the i86 uses the stock Android TTS and sounds terrible (but you can fix that by installing an app).

In terms of page turn speed, the i86 is noticeably faster in the stock app than the InkPad, and still somewhat faster in the 3rd-party apps.

Conclusion

Now that I’ve had the i86ML for a month, I find myself growing increasingly dissatisfied with it. It is in many ways a better device than the InkPad, but as an ereader I just don’t care for it.

The i86 is a little faster at turning the page and I can install more apps, it also has a key shortcoming. The frontlight is crap. It might sound silly to hang a review on such a minor component but I’ve really come to value how a frontlight impacts my reading.

And for that reason I like the InkPad over the i86.

Boox i86 HDML Plus Specs

• 8” E-ink display
• Screen Resolution: 1600 x 1200 (250 dpi)
• Frontlight, IR touchscreen
• CPU: 1GHz
• RAM: 1GB
• Storage: 8GB internal (about 6GB available), microSD card slot
• Connectivity: Wifi, Bluetooth
• Audio: 3.5mm headphone jack
• Battery: 1.7Ah, lasts up to 2 weeks per charge
• Supported ebook formats: PDF, TXT, HTML, EPUB, CHM, PDB, MOBI (Non-DRM), FB2, DJVU
• Dimensions: 210 x 160 x 9mm
• Weight: 340 grams

Inkpad Specs

• CPU: 1GHz
• RAM: 512MB
• Screen: 8″ Pearl E-ink display, 1,600 x 1,200 resolution
• Frontlight, Touchscreen
• Storage: 4GB internal, microSD card slot
• Connectivity: Wifi
• Battery: 2.5Ah, one month runtime
• Audio: headphone jack (TTS, MP3 supported)
• eBook Format Support (more details here): Epub, PDF, FB2, DJVu, Mobi, PRC, CHM
• Office and Other File Format Support: Doc, Docx, RTF, txt, HTML
• Weight: 350 grams
• Dimensions: 195.5 x 162.8 x 7.3 mm

The internet has been blamed for killing off any number of categories of how to categories, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering "authors" like the following.

The Hustle has a piece up today that offers a behind the scenes look at one author’s ghost-writing operation. This unnamed author started out by writing his own nonfiction books, but then hit upon a sure-fire method to write books as quickly and cheaply as possible.

He sells 6,000 books a month, and nets $150,000+ a year, by using a low-rent James Patterson method to out-source the actual writing to someone in the Philippines.

For $150 per book, I send him a 2,000 word outline and 7 days later he sends me a 20,000-word book. I spend about a week editing those 20,000 words It’s that easy.

I make (net) around $1,000 each month per book. Again, I know what you’re thinking…too easy. Plus, having a ghostwriter allows me to publish books on virtually any subject. For example, after noticing a hole in the DIY market, I wrote an outline my ghostwriter turned into a 40-page book on gardening that started selling really well.

At this point I’m an outline creator, cover designer, copywriter, internet marketer, and editor.

Do I know anything about those topics? Hell no — but I make a hell of a lot of money pretending I do. Plus, even the best “authors” use ghostwriters…it’s just one of those dirty little secrets.

I hope this guy isn’t depending on Kindle Unlimited, because he strikes me as exactly the type who will take a hit now that the payment model has shifted from loans to pages read. But that is a post for another day.

The important story today is that what we have here is an entrepreneur who has hit upon a modern-day version of the Stratemeyer syndicate.

While some might be appalled by his gaming the system, I was struck by the similarity to the model that a prolific writer named Edward Stratemeyer pioneered in 1905. Stratemeyer was the founder of the Stratemeyer syndicate, a network of freelance writers and editors which was designed to produce as many books as possible as cheaply as possible.

The Hardy boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift series were all invented by the Stratemeyer syndicate, and all the books were ghost-written (and they still are).

According to The Atlantic, the syndicate used methods very similar to the tricks mentioned in The Hustle excerpt above:

The Stratemeyer Syndicate helped prove that book packaging with ghostwriters could be incredibly profitable—for managers and owners, at least. Writers signed away their rights to royalties and bylines in exchange for a flat fee. (Early on, it was around $100 per book.) … It debuted Tom Swift in 1910, followed by The Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew in 1930. That same year, Stratemeyer died in New Jersey, by then not so much a writer as a tycoon.

The Babysitter Club, the Boxcar Children, Sweet Valley High, and many other series are published on this same model today. So while Simon & Schuster may be paying a lot more for each Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew manuscript, the only real difference between S&S and the author mentioned in The Hustle’s excerpt is scale (and also quality).

Far from being appalling, this guy is just one of the  crowd.

images by nelly!,  Kaarina Dillabough

The Association of American Publishers confirmed today that the major publishers are feeling the first stings of the mad rush back to agency pricing.

Trade sales (for the 1,200 odd publishers participating in the monthly report) were down 2.2% from the same quarter in 2014, to $1.49 billion. The adult segment rose 3.4%, to $1.05 billion, while the YA/kids segment dropped 15.9%, to $321.1 million. The religious segment dropped 5.5%, to $124.4 million.

In terms of formats, hardback sales dropped 6.7%, to $463 million. Paperback sales rose 8.6%, to $443 million, and ebooks fell 7.5%, to $374 million. Downloaded audiobooks continued its growth streak, with a 33.6% increase over the same quarter last year.  Physical audio, mass market, paperback and board book formats all experienced growth this quarter as well.

The AAP also reported today that total publisher revenues were down 6.6% in the first quarter at $2.22 billion, compared to $2.38 billion for the first quarter in 2014. That figure includes sales for all tracked categories (Trade, K-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses).

image  by miss.libertine

Authors and publishers have been selling books on Facebook for over six years now by setting up shops with 3rd-party services, and now Facebook wants to get into the act.

Buzzfeed reports that Facebook has finally woken up to the idea that commerce is possible any place where people congregate:

The company is building out shops within Facebook Pages, essentially mini e-commerce sites that give businesses a chance to set up second homes within its walls. The shops are still in the testing phase, but some already feature “buy” buttons that allow the entire shopping experience to occur within Facebook — from product discovery to checkout.

“With the shop section on the page, we’re now providing businesses with the ability to showcase their products directly on the page,” Facebook product marketing manager Emma Rodgers told BuzzFeed News.

If it works, bringing storefronts directly to Facebook Pages could have a transformative effect on online commerce, as retailers embrace the platform not just to inform their customers, but to sell directly to them.

That’s interesting, but not for the reason everyone thinks.

Facebook shops are not a new idea. As I’ve previously reported, people have been selling stuff on Facebook since at least 2009. They’ve been using services like Streetlib, Aerbook, and Gumroad to install shops on existing FB pages, and in some cases also using payment processors like Paypal to make the sale.

No one knows how much is sold on FB each year, but at this point it has to be in the tens of millions of dollars – if not more.

And now Facebook wants a cut of those sales.

The social network is under increasing pressure from stockholders to increase revenues. That’s why FB has gotten more aggressive in suppressing un-promoted posts, and why Facebook added buy buttons to updates last July.

And now Facebook has hit on the idea of becoming a marketplace portal to rival Amazon. I don’t see that happening, but more importantly Facebook is coming to the game at just the right time.

It’s 2015 and most web retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Rakuten, and even B&N, have third-party sellers listing products on their respective sites. One could look at that fact and say that Facebook is late to the game, but it’s also worth noting that a lot of those sellers have a presence on multiple sites.

It shouldn’t be hard to encourage them to also set up shop on Facebook as well.

image by ell brown

Most of the coverage of Facebook’s Instant Articles has focused on the assumption that people want to get their news through their social networks. As a recently released report from the Pew Research Center shows, that is true to some degree but it’s not the only theory going nor does it explain all the facts.

Bob Lefsetz has a new post up today that argues that the real key to the impending success of Facebook Instant Articles is not just that Facebook has all the eyeballs but also people don’t want to have to go to multiple places to get their news. Aggregation and comprehension is the key:

We live in an era of chaos.

Zuckerberg is trying to deliver comprehension.

That’s what Facebook’s news play is all about. Turns out people don’t want to go to individual news sites for information, they want it all in one place. So, the “New York Times” is hurting, even with its soft paywall. Its goal is to get those already paying to pay more, which is positively fatuous, it’s like an indie bookstore trying to get fat cats to donate to ensure their survival. You don’t bleed those already invested, you find new customers, or you pivot. Facebook has cornered the users, that’s what it’s delivering to news outlets. It’s the old portal paradigm, but with a lot less investment.

That is the better theory; it explains why Flipboard and other aggregators rose to prominence in 2010 (and why Flipboard still has a decent userbase). It also implies a point I left unstated when I reported on Feedly yesterday, which is that the demise of Google Reader left an attention vacuum for Apple News, Feedly, and others to fill.

The rise of Google Reader and Feedly, as well as the announcement of Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, all derive from people valuing aggregation and/or delivery. Convenience wins out every time, and web publishers are going to need to remember that.

It’s a shame Google didn’t figure that out in time to save Google Reader; they had all those eyeballs concentrated in one service and then turned them loose. Google’s mistake was that they thought social media was the key, so they killed Google Reader in favor of Google Plus.

And two years, later I’m glad they did.

Google Reader was free and so widely used that innovation had stalled in that market. The fact of the matter is, if Google Reader still existed then Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles would be dead in the water. You would be reading this in Google Reader, and Google would still have you by the eyeballs.

Instead we have a host of competing services, and even Facebook and Apple are throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks.

Now would be a good time to thank Google for their mistake, don’t you think?

image by troyjmorris

Judging by the media circus that just came to town, something huge is about to happen in the book world.

The book industry has kicked off a massive coordinated media campaign today. The target?

Amazon.

Lead by Authors United spokesperson David Streitfeld, multiple groups in the book industry have simultaneously decided today to send letters to the US Department of Justice, asking that the Doj investigate Amazon for being a big meanie.

Just about every group is involved. Streitfeld has posted a piece in the NYTimes on behalf of Authors United. The American Bookseller Association has sent a letter, and so has Authors United (you can find both letters on the ABA website).

Yes, Authors United has finally followed through on the promise they made last November to pursue their vengeance against Amazon to the ends of the earth. According to the ABA, Authors United is joined in their effort by the Association of Authors’ Representatives, which has sent a letter. And finally The Authors Guild has added their voice to the chorus (PDF).

Wow. Now that is what I call a circus.

I plan to spend some time over the next couple days parsing the letters sent to the DoJ (I’m also going to watch for legal experts to have a go) but for the purposes of this post I would remind you of two small details.

The first is that Amazon was investigated by the DoJ during the investigation of the Price Fix Six (the Apple ebook price-fixing conspiracy). The Justice Dept did not find anything they could prosecute.

The two letters I’ve read so far mention details and behaviors going back a decade or more, and yet the activities did not lead to prosecutions. Do you really think that some ambitious young lawyer would pass on going after Amazon, when it could make their career?

I don’t.

The second detail is a notable absence.

Where is the Association of American Publishers? Its biggest members hate Amazon as much as anyone, and yet I don’t have any news of the AAP sending a letter to the DoJ (I’m waiting for a response to my query). Why hasn’t the AAP joined the party?

Update: My contact at the AAP was unable to respond to my query. She did not have a prepared statement because the AAP isn’t part of this circus (weird, but true).

Add everything together and it makes me wonder what is really going on here.

If there’s no merit to the letters, then all we have here is a huge noisy spectacle. Surely I’m not the only one to wonder why the spectacle suddenly broke out in the middle of July, why all these groups suddenly decided to send letters all on the same day.

What are they trying to distract us from?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I do plan to start looking. Any time there is this much of a fuss about something, it’s a cover for the real story.

Any guesses what that could be?

image by RCB

This week’s news about B&N retreating from the international ebook market inspired me to make sure that all my Nook purchases are backed up in DRM-free form.

This takes very little effort, and I would recommend that you do the same. The process is more tedious than technically challenging, and if you can install an app or upgrade a piece of software then you can strip the DRM from your ebooks.

To get you started, this morning I dug out and refreshed the three posts I have written on removing DRM from Kindle, Nook, and Kobo ebooks.

• Zen and the Art of Stripping Kindle DRM
• How to rescue your Kobo ebooks
• A Look at Nook ebooks

I had already worked my way through the ebooks I bought from Amazon and Kobo, but curating my Nook library is proving to be far more work.

It’s not just that my Nook library is larger, but also that NookStudy has a broken search function and is slow to download and open ebooks. Also, its developers don’t seem to understand the concept of multi-tasking.

This is an annoying experience but at least I’ll only have to mess with it this one time.

P.S. If you happen to know of an easy way to get Nook ebooks off a Nook device so that the DRM can be removed, please leave a comment. I’ve had a couple of requests from readers who have had problems with NookStudy. Thanks!

images by plenty.r, Pitel

With Apple adding content-blockers as a core iOS 9 feature and web publishers suing ad blocking companies and acting like they’re in an arms race, 2015 is rapidly turning out to be the year that website visitors no longer have to bend over and grab their ankles.

And that’s going to be a good thing all around, as VentureBeat reported yesterday. It turns out that blocking ads doesn’t just improve your browsing experience, it can measurably improve network performance:

A recent study (.pdf) by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia has found that installing ad-blocking software reduces ordinary Web-browsing bandwidth usage by 25 percent. The reduction is even more dramatic for streaming video: blocking the ads cuts bandwidth by 40 percent.

This means that when you use an ad blocker, everyone who is on the same Wifi network as you benefits from your blocking the adverts.That almost moves ad blockers into the "good manners" category of sharing a public Wifi network, doesn’t it?

I think so.

The simple fact is, far too many websites are bloated embarrassments which take a ridiculously long time to load. Dean Murphy proved that point a few weeks ago when he quickly slapped together an ad-blocking extension for Safari. (We all know that ad blocking is nothing new, but the changes Apple is making to iOS 9 has inspired iOS developers to demonstrate the benefits.)

Murphy picked a popular Apple blog, iMore, and applied his filter. He noticed that the mobile version of the site was immediately more usable:

He also noted that iMore’s homepage was a mess that used more resources than I would have believed possible:

With no content blocked, there are 38 3rd party scripts  (scripts not hosted on the host domain) running when the homepage is opened, which takes a total of 11 seconds. Some of these scripts are hosted by companies I know, Google, Amazon, Twitter and lots from companies I don’t know. Most of which I assume are used to display adverts or track my activity, as the network activity was still active after a minute of leaving the page dormant. I decided to turn them all off all 3rd party scripts and see what would happen.

In comparison, this blog has about a third as many scripts as iMore. The average webpage measures on this site about 1.5MB, while an article page on iMore can be more than 14MB in size, according to Nick Heer.

I’ve worked really hard to keep this site lean and fast because I know that faster is better. Murphy proved that point when he enabled his ad blocker. Murphy also confirmed Venture Beat’s report of reduced network traffic:

After turning off all 3rd party scripts, the homepage took 2 seconds to load, down from 11 seconds. Also, the network activity stopped as soon as the page loaded so it should be less strain on the battery.

This, in a nutshell, is why Apple is building the content-blocking features into iOS 9. It’s a battery booster, a performance enhancer, and a bandwidth fix all rolled into one.

Web publishers should be taking this seriously, but something tells the worst offenders are going to develop pronounced cases of cranium rectumitis.

The Next Web, for example, has taken the position that ad blocking is immoral; this site is also the purveyor of what is arguably the worst advert idea on the internet (it’s like the rolled pop ups, auto-play videos, and the blink tag into a single advert). Similarly, PC Magazine has come out against the changes in iOS 9, while at the same time their website is again a stinking pile of manure.

And then there’s iMore. That blog responded to the news that their site was a resource hog with a post which admitted that yes, their website sucked, but there wasn’t much they could do about it.

That we haven’t made it further, faster is an indication of how hard it is when you’re talking about websites visited by tens of millions of people, and companies that employ more than a dozen writers. Of course, everyone here is going to continue working to find better, smarter ways of solving the problem, because that’s our jobs. I’m sure other large websites are doing likewise.

That may be true, folks, but as I have previously pointed out, if they can’t solve the ad problem then they need to find another business model.

Attitudes like the ones at iMore, PC MAgazine, and The Next Web are why I am convinced that 2015 is going to be the year that ad blocking is recognized not as a problem for websites but will instead be seen for what it truly is: a disruptive innovation.

And I mean that in the classic meaning of the word:

Disruptive Innovation: A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technologyy. (Wikipedia)

Railroads killed the canal system.

Cars killed the horse.

Highways killed the passenger train.

Downloads killed record stores.

The internet is killing the newspaper.

And finally, CraigsList killed the want ad.

And now ad blockers are about to kill a lot of sites that had grown fat and happy by abusing their visitors.

It can’t happen soon enough, in my opinion.

image by docentjoyce

Over the past month B&N has been making us wonder whether it was committed to ebooks. First B&N closed its office in Luxembourg, then it relaunched its website with a borked Nook area, and today B&N has removed all doubt.

Barnes & Noble is sending out emails to customers in Europe, sharing the news that they will soon be ex-customers.

You can find the email at the end of this post (translated from Dutch; Thanks, Martjin!) but the short version is that B&N has reiterated the announcement they made last month when they said the Nook Windows 8 app would no longer be available internationally.

B&N is abandoning most of its international customers on 7 August 2015.

The Nook Store had been available in 40 countries, including Australia, much of Europe, Canada, the UK, and the US; on 8 August the Nook Store will only be available in the US and UK (this was confirmed by B&N).

This really comes as no surprise; B&N had only announced its international expansion plans following the 2012 partnership with Microsoft. Outside of the US and UK, the Nook store was only available via the Windows 8 app (which is why I joked that the international store really belonged to Microsoft).

And what with B&N  buying out Microsoft’s share of Nook Media in December, it’s not like we didn’t see this coming.

The next question, of course, is where does B&N go from here?

With Nook revenues having fallen to half that of the previous fiscal year ($264 million) and expected to continue declining (authors are already reporting that the malfunctioning website has killed their sales) the odds are very good that B&N is going to throw in the towel on their ebook money pit.

Should that happen, the only question will be whether they will sell the Nook platform or simply shutter their ebook operation.

If Nook users are lucky, B&N will find a buyer. Kobo, for example, could take over the customer accounts just like they did when Sony pulled out of the ebook market last year.

But B&N could still simply close the Nook Store, and there is a chance that incoming B&N CEO Ron Boire might pull a rabbit out of his hat and save the Nook.

Dear Customer,

We recently announced that Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have agreed to terminate their commercial partnership. As a result, payments through your Microsoft account no longer supported. In addition, the NOOK App for Windows will from August 7, 2015 are no longer available outside the United States. This means that your NOOK content can no longer open on a Windows platform.

Our records indicate that you are outside the United States and that you are using your Microsoft account as a payment method in your NOOK App for Windows account. Therefore, you may be eligible for a refund from Microsoft for any purchases you have made with your Microsoft account.

image by JeepersMedia

The Bookseller (paywall’d) reports that Alexander Kidd, formerly of Picador and formerly a literary agent, is showing off a new book discovery app called Alexi.

This iPhone app is currently in beta, but when it launches this autumn Alexi will let readers follow well-known literary authors and get their recommendations on books worth reading, and read the ebooks inside the app. (At the moment, all you can do is read the blurbs and add them to your reading list.)

Rather than offer the huge catalog found in most ebookstores, Alexi is going to focus on the ebooks curated by the authors. It has not yet been decided how you’re going to pay for the ebooks or how much they’ll cost; in fact, Alexi has yet to close deals with publishers. All we know at this time is that The Bookseller reports that Kidd said that the terms would be "fair" to authors, and that the weekly cost of the app would be "less than a Sunday newspaper or a cup of coffee".

The current plan is to offer lists of recommendations that will be posted for a month and then removed. During that one-month period, readers can add recommended titles  to their reading lists to read in full without paying extra.

So it’s going to be a subscription type of service, only without a large selection. That reminds me somewhat of Rooster, an iPhone app which launched early last year. Rooster offers a $5 a month service which sends users daily snippets from a book, enabling them to read the book bit by bit.

Both Rooster and Alexi curated your next read, but the latter wants to offer readers more options than just a single title.

But not too much more. Alexi wants to split the difference between Scribd and Rooster. "Subscription is an interesting experiment in digitizing content and it makes sense that people would attempt to build a Spotify for books," said Kidd. "Book subscription services are vast digital libraries. From a reader’s point of view that is just presenting them with another problem, rather than a solution [to what they should read next]. We have turned that on its head."

I’ve tried the app. (It is currently invite-only, but I waited only about half an hour before I got the invite.)  It looks very pretty and offers some intriguing recommendations by literary authors.

Julian Barnes' "Four Great Novels that don’t look like novels" features public domain works, while Alan Johnson has chosen five political biographies and Bret Easton Ellis has assembled a list of "Great LA novels".

Those suggestions won’t appeal to all but there are readers who will be interested.  If this app gets enough attention (and if it gets the investment required to go to the next stage) then it could find a niche market .

Alexi is currently available for the iPhone; iPad and Android apps are planned for later this year.

iTunes

Buyer Beware.

A "publisher" by the name of Forgotten Books has just gave us another reminder that there is enough money in ebooks to attract scammers.

Forgotten Books supports a website where it claims to publish public domain works. It then puts adverts up next to the (poor quality) ebooks, and tries to entice you into signing up for a paid membership. While FB claims to have a half million titles in its catalog, there’s nothing here worth paying for.

If you haven’t heard of this "publisher" before (I had not), Forgotten Books says that it was founded in 2007 with the goal of "rediscovering and republishing formerly out of print books" (it’s rediscovered 484,473 titles so far, and plans to discover another half million).

To put it another way, Forgotten Books scrapes books uploaded to Project Gutenberg, and titles posted to Google Books, and republishes them under its own imprint.

FB is not the only ones to do that; many sites, including Feedbooks and MobileRead forums, host collections of public domain titles. Few sites, however, charge you to download those ebooks or can claim to produce such abysmally poor ebooks.

While other sites make efforts to create legible ebooks, Forgotten Books has hit upon the easy way to publish half a million books with no effort.

I spent a few hours browsing the Forgotten Books website this morning and I can report that none of the ebooks on that site would meet most people’s definitions of ebooks – they would not even be allowed in the Kindle Store.

The titles I saw were made from the scanned print editions (like what you might find in Google Books) and did not contain text. The books were marginally readable at best; most had artifacts from the scanning process blurring the text on one page or another. And to top things off, Forgotten Books also slaps adverts inside the ebooks they "publish".

But hey, Forgotten Books has published a half million of them, and is working on putting out another half million. Who cares that the ebooks are crap?

Clearly Forgotten Books does not, and they’re hoping they can find readers who don’t know any better.

FB will let you read the ebooks online, but if you want to download one of the books you will need to sign up for an account. Also, if you want to read without adverts you will need to get a paid membership for the site.

Yes. Forgotten Books is offering a paid membership to read the same ebooks you can find elsewhere for free. They want $9 a month for access to this crap.

On second thought, I may have mischaracterized Forgotten Books; it is not a spam publisher so much as it is a scam publisher.

They’re charging readers for access to free content?

That is a scam, folks. It’s not the first one I’ve seen and it won’t be the last, but it is most definitely a scam.

Buyer beware.

image by jepoirrier

It’s that time again.

Every couple years some outsider comes up with the brilliant idea of reinventing ebooks. If it’s not Vook, it’s Atavist. If it’s not Inkling, it’s Colliloquy. If it’s not Byliner, it’s Atavist. And if it’s not Atavist, just wait 15 minutes and I’m sure another startup will be launched.

This time around the reinventor is London-based Visual Editions, which wants to "reimagine what the ebook can be from the ground up". VE announced in April that:

The realm of making digital books that are as playful and immersive as printed books are, is something we’ve been thinking about for a little while now. And we’re ridiculously excited to tell you, at long last, about our latest project Editions at Play, working with Universal Everything and Google’s Creative Lab to create a new space for digital books that couldn’t possibly live in print.

Visual Edition plans to work with Google to launch a new part of the Google Play Store called Editions at Play. It’s expected to launch sometime this fall, and will be "a place to showcase, celebrate, and bring out digital books that are immersive and were written and developed with the idea of being digital".

They don’t have anything to show yet, but they are talking about their goals in lofty terms like their hope that "Editions at Play will have a URL that transports readers to a digital location or even into the real world (well why not?), or chase you across the internet; we imagine digital literature that has no beginning or no end, or landscapes that can travel in any direction or have any number of characters, plots, side plots and inventions".

In short, Visual Editions has discovered the idea of enhanced ebooks, and they plan to fling all sorts of ideas at the wall and see what sticks.

From what I have read VE hasn’t proposed anything that could be called a new idea; it’s all been done before in either enhanced ebooks, apps, websites, games, ebook apps, or some combination thereof, only now the ideas are being flung in the name of improving ebooks.

Sigh. Why do so many outsiders think that ebooks are a broken or incomplete art form?

I am all for someone developing a new way to tell stories; this has led to better story-telling in games and other media. But what I don’t understand is why people keep insisting that their new art form has to replace ebooks.

It’s not just that I like ebooks the way they are, but also that every past effort to reinvent them has failed utterly for the simple reason that readers don’t want something different. They want ebooks as they are.

You can’t fix what isn’t broken, and yet so many people keep trying.

Okay, you can actually do that, but it requires genius on the level of Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos (surrounded by a lot of other really smart people), and judging by their user-unfriendly and visually ugly website it is clear that the folks at Visual Editions aren’t that smart.

But hey, at least the new attempt will have a pretty logo. (It’s an animated Gif, which by itself is enough to tell you where this project is headed.)