About a week and a half ago I reported on and expressed doubt about a new estimate from Nielsen Pubtrack which said that 6% fewer ebooks were sold in the US in 2014. At that time I had no evidence to prove that the Pubtrack numbers were off, but since then I have been digging into the background.

Today I can report that the Pubtrack estimate of 223 million ebooks sold in the US in 2014 (as reported by The Bookseller) was not just bad, it was completely erroneous. I have two sources which say that the US ebook market is at least twice as large as Pubtrack thinks it is.

My first source is the pseudonymous Data Guy (the one behind the Author Earnings Report). His calculations suggested that around 513 million ebooks were sold in the US ebook market last year.

And for those of you who want an official figure from a named source, my second source is the Association of American Publishers. They just released their annual estimates of the US book market, and they say that 510 million ebooks were sold in the US last year (that volume also grew by a fraction of a percent).

Yes, the AAP says that the US ebook market is over twice as large as Nielsen had claimed.

It turns out that Nielsen widely over-estimated its ability to track the US ebook market, and I can tell you why.

While Nielsen reports its Bookscan estimates of the print book market based on data from several dozen retailers, the Pubtrack ebook market estimates come from unit sales data supplied by 30 US publishers.

That is not a bad information source, if you know what you’re doing, but apparently Nielsen does not. Here’s what they told me about Pubtrack when I followed up:

PubTrack Digital is a publisher aggregated eBook sales tool in which publishers are the data suppliers who send their complete and confirmed eBook unit sales to Nielsen every month.  This eBook measurement service gathers point-of-sale data (indirectly from 40+ retailers) through a panel of over thirty US publishers – representing about 85% of the nation’s eBook sales.

Yes, Nielsen thinks the 30 publishers it tracks represent 85% of the market, when in reality they represent around half that number.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read even one Author Earnings Report, and I was tempted to make that point when I first learned about Nielsen’s error last week. But I held the story because I knew that the AAP would be releasing new data this week which would either confirm or disprove Nielsen’s figures.

And I am glad I waited, because this shows that Nielsen’s understanding of the US ebook market is about as accurate as if they had thrown darts at numbers stuck on the wall.

I reached out to Nielsen for a comment on this story. I will update this story should I receive a response.

images by Jessie Pearl, David Bergin Photography

Techcrunch reported on Tuesday that the Dutch new startup Blendle is going to have a chance to show whether micropayments work on a large scale:

Blendle, a Dutch startup that’s applying a Netflix style marketplace to journalism, has signed up the mainstay of German publishers to its pay-per-article market. It said today that all major newspapers and magazines in the country have announced they will start selling individual stories via its website. The list includes Bild, Die Welt, National, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit to name a few. 

Blendle launched its service in April 2014 in the Netherlands and now has more than 300,000 registered users, up from 130,000 last October. On the publishers side, it has signed up a total of 18 daily newspapers and 15 weeklies from 14 publishing houses — with two operational markets (Holland and Germany), and English-speaking media in the U.S. next on its hit-list.

For those just tuning in, micropayments are a particular type of paywall where a consumer pays for access to a single article rather than access to an entire website.

Micropayments have been bandied about as a business model in the news industry since 1998. Guess how many times it has been successfully tried in the past 17 years?

If you guessed zero, you would be correct.

The idea didn’t work when Kachingle (remember them? exactly) tried it in 2009. It also didn’t work during the first tech bubble when Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, BitPass, FirstVirtual, Pay2See, and many others crashed and burned (as detailed by Clay Shirky in 2003). Micropayments also didn’t work for PaperC (they sold textbooks by the page).

Nevertheless, the idea keeps coming back every few years. And just as predictably, pundits have been pointing out why the idea won’t work. (TechCrunch even weighed in back in 2009.)

I’ll boil it down for you. It all comes down to psychology.

While you could blame the tech bubble for the earliest failed attempts, the idea continues to flop not because the tech wasn’t ready or because the prices were too high but because no one has found a way to reduce the mental costs paid by the consumers.

Nick Szabo coined the term mental transaction costs to describe the process consumers go through when they decide to whether something is worth buying or not.

Take, for example, a cheeseburger at McDonalds; is it worth $5? If I offered it to you buy one get one free, would it be worth buying then?

The time you spent contemplating the value of that cheeseburger is an example of mental transaction costs. No previous micropayment has managed to reduce this cost; instead, as Clay Shirky pointed out in 2003, the mental transaction costs increase as the price drops.

While that might sound contradictory it does explain why you might be more willing to buy a $300 gadget than pay $1 for an app (The Oatmeal’s comic is funny because it’s true), and it’s not good news for services like Blendle.

From what I read about Blendle, they have not found a way to reduce the mental transaction costs. Rather, their platform doubles the cost.

First a consumer has to decide if an article is worth paying for, and then after they’re done they will get to decide if they want to ask for a refund. While that is intended to act as a negative reinforcement feedback loop to discourage clickbait, it is also going to double the aggravations placed upon the consumer.

That added cost could cause Blendle to fail even faster, but either way I am expecting Blendle to prove once again that this idea simply won’t work.

Thoughts?

image  by photosteve101

Google Play Books might not get much love from the book publishing industry but it is proving far more popular with users.

Earlier this week the app reached a billion installs in Google Play. That’s one install  for each dollar Facebook spent on Instagram, or one install for (about) every seven people in the world.

Initially launched in late 2010, Google Play Books grew out of the Google Books book-scanning project as it slowly morphed from an effort to make all the world’s books searchable (a pre-Kindle goal) to selling those books (a post-Kindle goal). The store is now open for business in over 60 countries.

Along with Facebook and WhatsApp, Play Books is only the ninth app in Google Play to have the counter tick over into 10 digits. It passed the milestone before Games, Music, Movies, and Newsstand (which makes sense given that those other apps are considerably newer).

At this point I am sure some are remembering that Play Books comes pre-installed as part of Google’s bloatware, but I wouldn’t be so quick to discount today’s news. Google has said in the past that they don’t count pre-installed apps when reporting app downloads, and instead only count actual downloads.

On the other hand, I have found many complaints that Google’s reporting is notoriously inaccurate, so we might want to take this with a grain of salt.

That said, for the longest time I’ve been saying that Google Play Books does more business than the Nook Store. I first suggested that possibility in July 2014, and over the past 11 months Play Books installs continued to rise while Nook digital revenues continued to drop by 50% quarter after quarter (it’s down to $41 million at last report).

If that hypothesis wasn’t true in July 2014, it has to be true in June 2015. But unfortunately for me, I can’t prove it. Google still hasn’t told us how many ebooks they sell each quarter, and that leaves me in the position of having to ask a question and let you decide:

Do you think Google sold more or less than $41 million worth of ebooks in the first quarter?

With a billion installs, I don’t see how it could be less.

Android Police

image by Vala Run

The gadget maker announced on Monday that it was retiring Apple Newstand and replacing it with Apple News, a Flipboard-esque news aggregator which is likely based on the PRSS digital magazine paltform Apple acquired in September of last year (and possibly also Booklamp).

Techcrunch and Slashgear report that the new app will come bundled with iOS 9 and will ship with articles from a number of publishers, including Condé Nast properties like Vanity Fair, Vogue, and GQ, The New York Times (with thirty free articles a day), and ESPN.

News can be summarized as Flipboard with search, though I doubt that either company would be too enthused by the description. Apple’s Susan Prescott walked the audience through the app, explaining that it asks your interests to “get a sense of what you like.” The result is a personalized content feed.

Apple stressed the aesthetic of the app, noting its layout functions that help content be arranged in a pleasing fashion, and what the company called “rich typography.” The app has another key feature: Privacy. Apple said during its keynote that user data will not be shared with third-parties. The idea of data privacy was a theme of Apple’s keynote, and sat well as a direct swipe at Google, a key rival.

There was also a report from early this morning that Apple would have advertising inside the app and offer publishers terms similar to the terms for Facebook Instant Articles. I don’t see any details like that being reported in the official announcement, so I guess it turned out not to be true. but I did just read a tweet which appears to confirm the report. Update: The news is confirmed on the Apple News developer page.

***

So Apple has launched a Flipboard competitor. Interesting.Do you suppose they’ll repeat their past bullying?

Apple has been known to make life difficult for competitors by playing games with said competitors' iOS apps. This includes ebook apps, web browsers, and (most recently) iOS companion apps for the Pebble smartwatch.

Do you suppose Apple is going to play similar games with Flipboard once Apple News launches?

Thanks, Jiminy!

image via Techcrunch

The UK Publishers Association released a new report this week which summarizes a recent pilot study of library ebook lending. The pilot program looked at the effect of remote library ebook lending on library visits, bookstore traffic, etc, but I’m not sure that it actually tells us anything.

You can find the report and the related press release on the UK Publishers Association website, but the tl;dr version is that the pilot was conducted on such a small scale that I’m not sure whether the study actually failed to find an impact or simply wasn’t big enough for the impact to be measured.

Here’s the background:

• the pilot added 893 (out of a planned 1,000) front list titles to 4 participating libraries' catalogs (Peterborough, Newcastle, Derbyshire, and the London suburb Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead – a suburb of London)
• the new titles represented a huge addition to these libraries digital catalogs and loans (few front list titles had been previously available)
• the ebooks were loaned under the standard terms from OverDrive

When I first covered this pilot last spring, I thought it could find a way forward for libraries in the UK, which typically had (have?) an anemic supply of ebooks that was far more limited than the selection available in the US.

But now that I have the report I have to wonder how this was worth spending £40,000.

The pilot purports to test the impact of remote e-lending, a fancy name for borrowing ebooks from the comfort of your own home. Given that UK library patrons can already borrow ebooks from home (just like in the US), I don’t see why this would need a pilot rather than a monthly survey.

But never mind that; let’s look at the impact.

• eBook loans increased significantly, for obvious reasons (adding new titles would attract new interest). But loans also declined from the beginning of the pilot, suggesting that adding a mere 873 titles was not enough to keep patrons coming back.
• There was no impact on commercial ebook sales, but that could just as likely be due to the small size of the pilot and limited number of titles rather than stand as proof that library ebooks don’t hurt trade sales.
• The pilot had also previously failed to show whether e-lending could drive sales, but as I pointed out last fall the pilot was not set up to actually measure how one could affect the other.

So there was no impact, but at least we have a survey report to show for the £40,000 spent on this pilot.

Library patrons who checked out ebooks were polled on how a larger ebook catalog might affect their buying habits:

Those are good questions to ask, but I think the survey is missing several questions which would have better shed light on patrons' buying behavior.

Had I been asked I would have said that a larger ebook collection would not impact my buying habits because a limited collection would push me to borrow the book in paper form. Unfortunately that is not an option on this survey, because apparently they forgot to take paper books into account.

***

All in all, folks, if this report wasn’t a complete waste of time then I don’t know what is.

Between the stuff that could not be measured at all, the metrics which weren’t measured correctly, the questions not asked, and the overall tiny sample size, I don’t see the value of this report.

images by Thomas Leuthard,  mlibrarianus

With four of the five major publishers going back to agency, ebook prices are bound to remain high and will continue to incite arguments between readers, publishers, and authors as to the best price for an ebook.

This is a debate which will never end, but in the interests of moving it forward I would like to address one argument I hear, namely that traditional publishers have to price their ebooks higher because they have more overhead.

For example, author Jody Hedlund posted this argument on her blog yesterday:

Traditionally published books have more people involved in the publication process, thus need to generate more revenue in order to pay everyone who had a hand in the book: two or more editors, office staff, the cover design team, the cover model, photographer, the marketing staff, publicist, sales representatives, and more. And let’s not forget, the author also has to be paid! No, Ebooks may not require the same "print" costs that a hard copy or paperback may incur, but as you can see, the costs of traditional publication go beyond the price tag of paper and ink.

While this might have some weight on the publisher side of the debate, it is viewed with contempt from the reader side – and with good reason.

It asks the reader to offer our charitable support to multi-national, billion dollar a year publishing conglomerates (Hedlund has books with HarperCollins and Penguin Random House). We’re asked to make up for a publisher’s poor business decisions, including the decisions to:

• buy and maintain Manhattan offices,
• hire too many people, and
• grow beyond any reasonable scale.

When you put it that way, the conclusion is obvious. Readers have no moral or financial obligation to support a publisher’s bad decisions  or flawed business model.

Publishers don’t have to be based in Manhattan, they don’t have to hire huge staffs, and they don’t have to operate inefficiently.

The fact of the matter is, folks, books simply don’t cost that much to produce. Much of what is spent at the major publishers goes to overhead costs, including Hachette’s open floor plan office and the Big Five’s candlelit dinners at expensive Manhattan restaurants, to name a couple examples.

Strip away the inefficiencies and you’ll discover that the actual cost of producing a book is a lot lower than you might think. And it’s not just indie authors saying that; there are publishing startups saying the same thing.

Last week at BEA 2015 I sat down with Enrique Parrilla, the CEO of Pentian, and discussed that startup’s crowd-funded business model. Pentian invites readers to back a book, and once it is funded Pentian publishes the book both as an ebook and as a print book (also, sometimes, an audiobook).

Pentian’s ebooks are priced between $5 and $9 in the Kindle Store. Of that $9, 10% goes to Pentian, 40% goes to the author, and 50% goes to backers.

Here’s the fun part: Pentian’s production costs are usually in the range of $3,000 to $10,000 per book (an audiobook costs around $6,000).

Yes, Pentian, which lacks the overhead of the legacy publishers, can publish a book for under $10,000 and still pay authors a better royalty than just about any major publisher.

Could someone tell me again why I should pay for the bloat and inefficiencies of a major publisher?

I don’t get it.

image by Philip Taylor PT

About four months ago Amazon started pitching a new advertising service to authors and publishers who distributed ebooks through KDP Select. Indies can pay anywhere from 2 cents to a buck CPC to get their book advertised on Amazon’s website. With a minimum ad buy budget of $100 and the option to suspend an ad campaign at any time, Amazon’s AMS program (Amazon Marketing Services) is within the reach of the average indie.

So how well does it work?

It’s hard to say. Aside from some early reports on KBoard, no first-hand accounts crossed my radar for nearly four months (did I miss something?), but then last week a new post crossed my desk.

Chris McMullen is an indie author, and he published an in-depth report on his experiences in advertising through Amazon. You may have noticed that I included Chris’s post in a morning coffee post last week. I was too busy at the time to call it out with the attention it deserved, so today I pulled it out of the pile and reread Chris’s post.

It’s a great primer on the topic. Chris lays out the benefits:

• Prime real estate. Your ad shows directly on Amazon product pages, where customers are already shopping for books. You’re not trying to make people leave one site to visit another.

Challenges:

• Stoppage. Your AMS can actually be stopped due to low relevance by Amazon. Low relevance is either a sign of poor targeting, or a product page that has room for improvement (cover, blurb, Look Inside, even the book idea comes into play here). Your ad is likely to be stopped due to low relevance if your CTR is well under 0.1%. If only 1 out of 3000 people who see your ad click on it, there is a good chance that your ad will be stopped. If your ad is stopped, you can create a new ad, but be sure to strive for more relevant targeting.

And unexpected side effects:

Another thing that I’ve seen are indirect benefits. Many other authors have seen similar indirect benefits. Several authors have seen an increase in borrows. A couple authors reported an increase in borrows, then a decrease in both sales and borrows when the ad stopped, and a return when a new ad was run. A few series authors have reported improvement in other books in the series. But not all authors have seen such improvements; indirect benefits are not guaranteed.

If you’re an indie author and haven’t read Chris’s report, you should. He’s basically written the book on AMS, and if not that then he’s written a new chapter of a book on how indie authors can use advertising to promote sales.

That’s not a new topic, I know. Authors and publishers have been using email blasts like BookBub to promote their books with some success, it’s just that indies now have a new option.

Chris McMullen

~~~

So tell me, have you used AMS yet? What did you think? Did it work for you?

image by woodleywonderworks

Nielsen has just given us a great example of why one should always take publicly announced stats with a grain of salt.

The Bookseller caught up with a story from Book Expo America this morning. Sarah Shaffi reports that reps from Nielsen gave a presentation and shared bad news about the US ebook market:

E-book sales in the US declined by 6% in 2014 compared to the year before, statistics released by Nielsen show.

Information presented at BookExpo America and derived from PubTrack Digital, which collects e-book sales data from more than 30 of the largest publishers in the US, showed that in 2014 just under 223 million e-books were sold in America, down from almost 240 million units in 2013. E-books made up 26% of all book sales in 2014, down from 28% in 2013.

Update: The numbers are complete and utter nonsense.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say the numbers are bunk, I do wonder about their validity. I don’t know whether The Bookseller made a mistake in their reporting or whether Nielsen’s statistic model is off, but something looks wrong here.

To put it simply, Nielsen took revenue data from a few dozen publishers and derived market statistics for consumer ebook purchases in the US in 2014. While you can sometimes use this trick to find interesting data, in this case I think Nielsen used a survey group which was too small.

I have revenue stats from the American Association of Publishers in front of me, and they paint a different picture. The AAP collects revenue data from 1,209 publishers, and its data showed that publishers' ebook revenues were up 4.7% in 2014, to $1.6 billion.

I don’t know about you but I have trouble accepting extrapolated market stats from such a small survey group when we have readily available data from a larger survey group which appears to contradict it.

Sure, it is entirely possible that both could be correct; the AAP’s publishers could have gained market share in a down market. But the more likely possibility, in my mind, is that Nielsen’s model was wrong.

Or did I miss something?

image by LendingMemo

Several days ago Amazon released a new version of the Kindle app for iPad and iPhone which added a new font (Bookerly), hyphenation, and all around better text rendering.

To hear some tell it, this is the best thing to happen to ebooks since the Kindle Store opened. Fast Company gushed at length about the change, calling it "digital typography that doesn’t suck".

Those of us who have tried to see the new typography before rendering an opinion are less than enthused. While the new text rendering is very pretty, it is also rather difficult to find.

You can see the new typography on the Fire tablet and in the Kindle iOS app, but only if you buy one of a handful of ebooks in the Kindle Store. You cannot, for example, upload your own ebooks and let Amazon add the new features; instead you have to buy one of the titles with the new feature built in. Amazon has named a few you can try:

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
• Stephen King’s Revival
• Veronica Roth’s Insurgent
• Abigail Strom’s Almost Like Love

Amazon is currently listing 58 titles with the new features. Edit: Not all of which have the new features.

After noting that Juli Monroe (and a bunch of people on Twitter) had trouble finding books in their libraries which had the new feature, I bought a copy of Insurgent and sent it to my iPad.

As you can see, the new hyphenation isn’t a myth, nor is the new kerning:

Alas, I didn’t think to take a before screenshot. But I did find the same hyphenation on my Fire HD:

I’ve double checked, and the personal ebooks I uploaded to the Kindle Cloud today and downloaded again don’t show hyphenation.

All in all, this is a nice improvement, but until it is more widely available, I am unable to get excited.

Amazon says that the new typography is used in "hundreds of thousands of books", but there are how many titles in the Kindle Store?

Millions, and that’s not counting the effectively infinite titles which are either sideloaded on to Kindles or uploaded to the Kindle Cloud.

I can’t tell you why the new feature isn’t working everywhere, but I have my suspicions. I am still waiting to hear back from some experts who have looked under the hood of the new ebooks, and if they see what I am expecting then this story will prove to be a lot bigger than just new typography.

Stay tuned.

Book Expo America 2015 was a three-day whirlwind of conference sessions, mad dashes across the show floor, and swag (bags are my thing, baby).

I’m still recovering from the conference, and as I sit here zoning out over going through my notes I can see that there are a bunch of exhibitors who offer services and tools that authors might want to use. Some were new, some were established names, and there were even a few existing companies which were new to me.

To start, there’s Piracy Trace and Bublish, both of which have been covered elsewhere on this blog, and Bookbub, which is so well-known that it does not need a blurb.

And in no particular order …

Dropcards offers a digital download gift card service similar to Enthrill, only Dropcards is focused on promotion and not sales while Enthrill is more of a commercial offering. It doesn’t support DRM but does let authors give away just about any file type they like, including MP3 and ebooks. This company hasn’t gotten as much press as Enthrill but it does have customers both in music and book publishing, including several exhibitors at BEA 2015.

Slicebooks is the only company I know of that has managed to turn selling excerpts and chapters into a viable business. This company offers a service which authors and publishers can use to remix their own content and sell it direct to readers. All the power is in the hands of the creator, and not the reader, and guess who pays to keep the service running?

Momentum applies the concept of crowd-funding to social media campaign. Authors and publishers can use its paid service to run social media campaigns and give away freebies to anyone who shares a mention of the campaign. The catch is that the content is only unlocked if a campaign reaches a minimum number of participants.

Or at least that is what PW is saying; I can’t find a website to link to. Yes, this company offers a marketing platform and yet somehow forgot to cover one of the basic steps involved in promoting their platform.

BookGrabbr is another social marketing platform for authors. Readers who share about a book or other work being promoted (tweet, FB post, etc) can get the content as a free download. Unlike Momentum, there’s no minimum threshold.

BooksILove is more of a Goodreads competitor than a marketing platform, but it was being pitched at BEA 2015 as a place where authors can promote themselves. It is a book-focused social network, but it also offers authors the chance to announce a book launch or other event with Happenings, or share a book excerpt with BookSnips.

BookHive wants to answer that age-old question: What do readers think of my work? It lets authors rent out a focus group of 8 to 10 beta readers (from a pool of 750 readers). The survey groups are asked to read a work and fill out a questionnaire.  Authors can submit questions, and when the surveys are collected the authors receive both the raw data and a summary generated bt BookHive.

FindMyAudience asks a similar question: Where are my readers? This startup helps authors target their marketing efforts by identifying places and people who are likely to be interested. It is something of a market research firm, only it’s focused on social media. Authors can type in their book’s name, genre, and keywords, add similar titles, and based on that criteria FindMyAudience will return a list of social media accounts, forum topics, and hashtags.

The beta will launch in June.

image by mripp

The Authors Guild is turning over a new leaf this week. Along with a new initiative to educate authors on publishing contracts, The Authors Guild also announced a new deal with Open Road Media yesterday to help TAG members get their out-of-print backlist titles into the market.

Today, the Authors Guild and Open Road Integrated Media announced a new partnership for the Authors Guild’s Back in Print program, one of the Guild’s most popular services. Through Open Road, Authors Guild members will be able to distribute print-on-demand, e-book, and audiobook editions of their out-of-print titles. The e-books and audio book options are new to the program.

While that deal doesn’t sound like a new leaf, David Gaughran points out that the partnership with Open Road Media replaces a deal between The Authors Guild and the noted vanity press operator Author Solutions.

Yes, the same company which is owned by Penguin Random House and is the subject of multiple class action lawsuits.

According to David:

The announcement was made yesterday at Book Expo America, but the Authors Guild decided to bury its own lede. No mention is made of Author Solutions, just a brief mention of the subsidiary which the Authors Guild was partnered with: iUniverse. If I hadn’t been waiting for this announcement, I would have missed it.

It’s almost as if the Authors Guild is trying to airbrush its partnership with Author Solutions from the history books. As if it was all just a bad dream.

I will admit, I missed the connection.

The Authors Guild had been partnered with iUniverse since 1999, long before iUniverse had been absorbed into Author Solutions (in 2007). That contract had been renewed (in 2008 and in 2011) even though the quality of the customer service plummeted once Author Solutions bought iUniverse.

David goes into the former partnership in some detail, but now that it is over I care less about the nuances of how authors were cheated than I do about the program being dead.

Yes, The Authors Guild was in bed with Author Solutions, and yes, The Authors Guild was raking in a 10% cut of revenues from that deal, but I’m more interested in the news that the deal is dead.

As anyone who has read this blog for a while can tell you, I like to bash The Authors Guild for acting against the interests of authors. I thought this group was basically a puppet for publishers, and referred to them as such.

But over the past day I have reported on two stories which suggest that The Authors Guild has changed its tune, and that is the far more interesting story.

Something tells me that The Authors Guild is going to be quite the different entity under Roxana Robinson. She was elected president of The Authors Guild in March 2014, and replaced Scott Turow. While Robinson doesn’t like Amazon any more than Turow did, her administration is evidently a lot more pro-author than that of her predecessor. (And yes, I do realize the ridiculousness of that statement.)

Edit: A reader reminds me that The Authors Guild also has a new executive director. Mary Rasenberger replaced Paul Aiken in October 2014. Thanks, Anne!

The second coming of Readmill has been quite popular since it launched last November, but it was missing something: support for Android.

That changed today. Glose has launched a new Android app which brings its social reading platform to Android. The app features all the same great shared reading experience which iPad and iPhone users have enjoyed for the past 7 months, and it also has access to Glose’s 600,000 title strong ebookstore.

You can find the app in Google Play.

In related news, Glose has also added excerpts to its ebookstore, which brings me to the bigger story today.

Glose might not have the largest ebookstore but they do offer a feature which the Kindle Store lacks: seamless excerpts.

If you download an excerpt from Glose’s ebookstore, you can read it, annotate and share, etc, and if you decide to buy the ebook the excerpts will be transferred over from the excerpt to the paid ebook.

"We are launching the biggest freemium offer on the book market," co-founder and CEO Nicolas Princen told TechCrunch. "We will let you read the first 10 percent of any book for free. We are different from Amazon as you only download a single file. You can download an excerpt and do everything you would do in Glose, and you will keep everything."

He’s not wrong. I just checked, and the Kindle Store didn’t offer this feature (not for either of the two ebooks I bought). For some reason I thought Amazon was already doing this, but I guess I was wrong.

That puts Glose one step ahead of the Kindle platform, which does offer a similar (but more limited) shared annotations feature called "Popular Notes and Highlights".

TechCrunch

The Authors Guild frequently gets called a puppet of the major publishers, and now they have a chance to prove just how wrong that label is.

They’ve just announced a new educational initiative which will focus on dissecting the boilerplate terms common to standard book publishing contracts and (I hope) detail which terms are appropriate, exploitative, or negotiable.

To coincide with this year’s conference, we’re announcing the rollout of the Authors Guild Fair Contract Initiative, a series of commentaries we will publish in the coming months to take a fresh look at the standard book publishing contract. Our guiding principle for this new initiative is to restore balance to the author-publisher relationship and help authors achieve a fair return for the efforts they contribute to the joint venture of book publication.

The commentaries will be published on The Authors Guild’s website, authorsguild.org over the next few months. Until then, all we have is the launch statement (PDF) that The Authors Guild released in addition to the blog post announcing the new initiative.

***

I don’t know that I will be covering the commentaries myself, but I will be following a couple other blogs: The Passive Voice and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. One blog is run by an IP lawyer who negotiates this type of contract, while the other is the blog of an author who knows almost as much about contracts as Passive Guy.

These two have the requisite knowledge to critique the commentaries and tell us whether The Authors Guild is accurately pointing out the worst flaws in publishing contracts, and not just publishing shallow overviews.

This blogger thinks that The Authors Guild is more likely to publish the latter than the former, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

The Authors Guild via PW

image by NobMouse

So Apple just failed in their latest attempt to get the court-appointed antitrust monitor fired. Fortune reports that the appeals court wasn’t too happy with Micheal Bromwich but did not go so far as to remove him:

In a ruling published on Thursday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the conduct of the monitor, Michael Bromwich, gave “pause” and was “the opposite of best practice” but nonetheless refused to grant Apple’s request to remove Bromwich from his position.

Bromwich took up the role of monitor at the behest of U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who ruled in 2013 that Apple had been the mastermind of an ebook price-fixing conspiracy. The judge appointed Bromwich to assess Apple’s compliance with a court-ordered antitrust program. Bromwich’s behavior, however, soon enraged Apple.

You can find the ruling on Scribd, and for additional coverage head on over to the WSJ, and Reuters.

Frankly, I’m not surprised by today’s ruling. While Apple and its partisans weren’t happy about Bromwich’s conduct, I  wasn’t convinced that he had done anything truly horrible enough to merit an appeals court intervening. Had that been the case, Apple would have succeeded in getting Judge Cote to set him aside or rein him in a long time ago.

Remember, Apple did try just that early last year, to no avail, and when Judge Cote ruled against them Apple then appealed to the 2nd Circuit Court, but that went nowhere.

And now Apple has failed again.

It looks like Apple’s only hope is that the appeal court overturns the case either in whole or in part, but just about the only people who think that has a chance in hell are Apple partisans.

image by tuukkar

Having bought Zite and outlived several competitors, Flipboard is now the Youtube of news aggregators. And now there’s talk that the company is going to be acquired.

Re/code reports that Twitter is in talks to buy Flipboard in a stock swap which would value the news aggregator at one billion dollars: The talks are not going well:

Those discussions, which have been pushed by Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, have been taking place since the beginning of the year, said sources, as the social communications giant has faced increasing pressure from Wall Street to grow its audience and innovate its products. But despite a flurry of activity more recently, sources said these talks between Twitter and Flipboard — who are partners on a number of different fronts — seem to be currently stalled.

Still, the concept behind the acquisition are intriguing on all kinds of levels. For Twitter, it would bring an experienced product team — headed by well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue — to the company.

When I first heard about this story I was surprised that the buyer wasn’t Dropbox. That cloud storage company has been acqui-hiring cloud services startups left and right, and while Flipboard would be a larger acquisition than average it would not be a crazy idea (too expensive, perhaps, but not crazy).

But now that I’ve thought it through, I think Twitter makes more sense as a potential buyer for Flipboard. These two companies  have very similar tech and have partnered in the past, but more importantly the services they offer to consumers are complimentary.

Twitter lets its 300 million users send small pieces of text, images, links, etc, while Flipboard distributes whole articles to its 100 million users. Put the two together and you have a service not unlike Facebook Instant Articles.

Twitter already hosts some content; it displays images from some platforms in line with tweets, and it also embeds Youtube videos, Amazon listings, and excerpts from blog posts. But if Twitter swallowed Flipboard, the combined company could host and distribute a broader range of content.

I think this would be a great match, but is it worth a billion dollars in stock?

That I am not so sure.

While Twitter has found a way to sell ads on its site and in its apps, Flipboard has not. The latter company has a billion dollar evaluation and no clear idea on how it is going to generate revenue much less turn a profit.

Sure, Twitter could sell adverts against the embedded articles, but if that were all they wanted then Twitter could develop similar tech for a lot less than a billion dollars.

And that is probably why the deal is stalled.