Following in the footsteps of their larger competitor Wattpad, the Melbourne-based writing platform Tablo launched a new reader analytics tool today called  Scholar.

Tablo Scholar was developed to offer authors a better understanding of who their readers are and what the readers are reading. The service costs $9 or $19 a month, with the more expensive plan offering details on readers such as age, demographics, and geo-location. The lower-tier service, also known as Scribe, offers more general details on how an author’s books are being consumed.

"Tablo Scholar is a powerful analytics platform that helps you understand how people are engaging with your work," Ash Davies said in the press release. "You can gain insights like what your most gripping chapters are, where people typically stop reading and learn about the demographic of your most engaged readers."

Tracking reader behavior has been a hot topic in some segments of the publishing industry since before HipType launched in 2012 (it closed less than a year later). The late ebook retailer Bilbary planned to provide similar analytics to publishers, and Jellybooks is currently testing a platform which lets publishers give free ebooks to reader focus groups in exchange for analytics data.

And last December Wattpad also launched an analytics tool called Writer Analytics. I don’t recall this tool making its way into the news cycle at the time, but after looking at Wattpad’s announcement and one early user report, I can see that WA provides data which is similar to what authors get from Scholar – for free.

TNM

Books-A-Million has launched a publishing services site called BAM Publishing DIY where it plans to charge indie authors and publishers to create and distribute their work.

Developed in partnership with FastPencil (which is also providing all of the services), the site offers an array of services and tools for authors and publishers. ranging from DIY tools for formatting and assembling an ebook to conversion, professional editing, and print distribution.

Costs range from a basic $59 conversion service (no distribution included) to a $129 option to sell through Books-a-Million’s website. Getting your work out on the general market, including into the Kindle and other stores, costs $279 and up, and will earn you 80% (ish) net royalties.

BAM Publishing DIY also offers more expensive publishing services packages with prices ranging from $599 to $6799 as well as a la carte service including developmental editing, professional cover design, and more.

I’ve spent a couple hours digging into the site, and I can tell you that the services are provided by FastPencil under Books-a-million’s brand.

While Fast Pencil’s name is not explicitly mentioned anywhere, a FastPencil email account is listed as the contact email address to get a quote for certain services. The BAM Publishing DIY site is also built based on the same template as FastPencil’s website, and the features lists for the more expensive packages on each site are almost identical.

All in all this is a pretty looking site and at first glance it looks reasonably priced, but I don’t think this is a good value.  I’ve tested the site by uploading an ebook and creating a project in order to distribute it. The process was easy and simple,  but I would still recommend against using this site to distribute your ebooks.

I checked, and BAM Publishing DIY will only pay an author $.96 out of the $2.99 retail price for an ebook. Smashwords pays far more than that, and they don’t charge you an upfront fee. Furthermore, an author will earn almost twice as much if they deal direct with the major ebookstores (less the Amazon tax, of course).

It’s a shame that Books-a-Million offers such a terrible deal on distribution, because aside from that the site offers a smoothly functional set of tools.

P.S. If you are in need of an alternate suggestion, I would recommend finding the services you need through a services marketplace.

BAM Publishing DIY

The first Apple Watch shipments are still making their way to customers, but Apple’s wearable has already inspired its first erotic story.

A new ebook, Invaded by the iWatch, hit the Kindle Store late last month. As you can tell from the name, the book is a romantical adventure featuring the Apple Watch.

The 4,000 word short-short was published by an author writing under the pseudonym Leonard Delaney. It builds on his past success with first two tech-themed erotica e-books, Conquered by Clippy and Taken by the Tetris Blocks. (Yes, those really are the names, and if you like you can also get them in a paperback anthology.)

The plot, such as it is, focuses on a tech blogger and the erotic adventures which ensue after she receives an iWatch in the mail. The device is haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs, who develops an interest in the blogger and, well,let’s let the ebook speak for itself:

She emitted an expression of sadness, then held her wrist up. Those fierce eyes appeared on the screen.“Oh billionaire ghost watch, you know what’s going on. You have the algorithms to detect how lonely I am. You’ve shown me so much today— how this techno-infused landscape is both a dream and a nightmare. You give away my every move, my every preference, my every feeling. All you want to do is invade my privacy.”

It gets considerably more NSFW after that. There’s even a scene involving a "Stevejob", and later a "docking station of pleasure", although the author doesn’t take the later scenes any more seriously than the scene quoted above.

Fusion.net contacted the author, a Canadian consultant, who summed up his writing style as "You kind of get more and more ridiculous with it."

I can definitely see that.

Invaded by the iWatch costs $.99 in the Kindle Store.

LibreOffice is an open source office suite for Windows, OSX, Linux, and now Android. Earlier this year Collabora and the The Document Foundation (the non-profit which supports LibreOffice) announced the development of a version of LibreOffice for Android. That very early release was buggy and unstable, and most importantly it lacked any way to actually edit files.

But development continued, and now the latest beta release supports editing documents. It also works a little better.

It still offers a far from complete suite of features and the tool can’t actually create a document from scratch, but if you download the latest development build you will find the app added some editing options to  Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress, including basic copy and past of text and images and simple text formatting (bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough).

The app also features support for opening and saving a broad range of office formats, including MS Office as well as Open Office formats (which are also used as the native for mat for LibreOffice).

The interface has also been optimized for touchscreens in general and Android in particular, which in part explains why the feature set is so limited; designing a touch interface for something as complex as an office suite is not a simple task.

that difficulty is part of the reason why Andropen Office, the Android port of Apache Open Office, still uses a desktop interface.

Andropen Office has been under development since  2013. I haven’t used it recently, but given how long it has been under development I would try this app first. It is going to be more functional and stable, and if nothing else, Andropen still looks like it is designed to work with a keyboard and mouse rather than a touchscreen. If I did a lot of office work on Android, I would be using those peripherals.

Collabora via Liliputing 

If you like listening to audiobooks then I have some good news for you.

Goodreads is in the process of adding audiobook excerpts to its website. Soon GR members will find free audio samples for 180,000 Audible titles on the book listing pages. Along with the option of reading a sample from the book, GR members can now also listen to an excerpt from the audiobook. The excerpt will (should) play in a pop up window the web browser, and if you like what you hear you can the title to your "want to read" list, or you can head over to Audible and acquire the audiobook directly.

Obviously this feature is not available for all titles listed on Goodreads, but when it is available you’ll find the listen button below the cover image on the left side of the page:

Goodreads told me that the new feature is only available on the desktop site, but not GR’s mobile site or its Android and iDevice apps.

I’ve tried a couple excerpts, and I can confirm that I could listen, pause, and resume the excerpts. Curiously, the audio excerpt doesn’t line up with the text excerpt; the latter was usually the first section of a book, while the former was chosen from some location inside the book.

I’m not convinced that was a good decision; the seemingly random excerpts  were more bewildering than intriguing. I spent more time trying to figure out what had just happened than wondering what was going to happen next.

To be fair, I generally hate dropping into the middle of a story, but if that doesn’t bother you thin I’m sure you’ll find the new excerpts very useful.

Goodreads

Kindle Unlimited adoption continued to grow last month, but unfortunately it grew faster than Amazon 's willingness to fund it.

Earlier this week Amazon released the latest statistics on KDP Select, the program used to fund indie author and publisher participation in Kindle Unlimited. Amazon reported that the pool for KDP Select for March 2015 had been increased to $9.5 million. They also announced separately that the payout for each time an ebook was read had dropped to $1.33.

Grab an envelope and crunch the numbers, and you’ll see that ebooks in KDP Select accounted for about 7.14 million reads.

That is a new record for KDP Select, and compared to January 2015 it represents an increase of about a million additional ebooks being read.

The number of ebooks read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers has continued to grow ever since the program launched last July, but unfortunately the funding for KDP Select isn’t growing quite as fast. While Amazon has increased the funding each month, the increase has been kept to a minimum. As a result, the average payout continues to stay low:

The payout per ebook read hasn’t exceeded $1.54 since Kindle Unlimited really got started in August 2014, and my current financial forecast is that Amazon is going to keep it that way.

Authors and publishers would be advised to plan on the payout staying low, and act accordingly.

Foner Books

Amazon released the first major update for their three-month-old textbook creation app today, and it’s finally getting useful.

Kindle Textbook Creator still accepts only PDF as the source file, and it’s still listed as being in beta, but now the tool lets educators embed video and audio files in the e-textbooks they make. It also now supports pop-up images.

I’ve tested the app and I can confirm that you can embed audio. The app freezes while the media is being embedded in the project ebook file (it takes a while), but then it unlocks and lets you move the audio icon or video window around. You can also change the media’s title or description (see the user manual for more info).

What’s more, KTC also gained a new option for building the table of contents. You have the option of ticking a checkbox to choose which pages are added to the e-textbook’s TOC. (Hat tip to R. Scot Johns for catching this; it wasn’t mentioned in the changelog.)

You can download the app from Amazon.

This app is still a far cry from iBooks Author, which lets you embed custom fonts, equations, media, quizzes, and html and Keynote widgets, but KTC has a couple advantages of its own.

Kindle Textbook Creator runs on Windows and OSX, and it creates ebooks which can be read in the Kindle apps for Android, iOS, PC, and OSX as well as Fire tablets. It is specific to the Kindle platform, but at least it offers more hardware choices.

And now it offers more media options.

When Kindle Textbook Creator launched in January many bloggers thought that this was the start of a textbook war between Amazon and Apple. I still don’t see that particular conflict happening, for obvious reasons, but Amazon is clearly more interested in e-textbooks than I had previously expected.

Amazon already sold digital textbooks, and now they are also making it easier for educators to publisher their own textbooks on the Kindle platform. It’s hard to say  what is coming next, but I think we can expect Amazon to make a play for schools and the curricula market.

In 2012 Amazon released WhisperCast, a tool for managing content on a fleet of Kindles and Fire tablets. And then in 2013 Amazon acquired TenMarks, an edtech startup which developed a math curriculum.

Would anyone care to guess what their next step will be?

Scribd’s deal with Penguin Random House may be getting much of the attention today but they’re not the only subscription service to sign a new publisher.

Playster announced on Tuesday that it had signed deals with S&S and Harlequin to add additional titles to its subscription platform. The deal includes works from Jennifer L. Armentrout, Robyn Carr, B.J. Daniels, Jeannette Walls, Cassandra Clare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Doris Kean Goodwin.

Like their deals with Oyster and Scribd, Simon & Schuster’s contract only covers its backlist, so it is limited to past best sellers like The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Harlequin and S&S mark the second and third major publishers to sign with Playster, following the deal Playster signed last month with HarperCollins. All told, Playster now offers 100,000 books.

That is a decent track record for a subscription service which has so far managed to fly under the radar.

When it officially launches later this year, Playster will offer a streaming media service which will serve up movies, music, books, and games under a single subscription. Sixteen dollars a months will buy you unlimited access to a cornucopia of content which Playster says will be accessible on virtually any mobile device and web browser.

The service is in beta right now, and I’ve been playing with it for most of the afternoon. I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the selection in any single category, but I am beginning to like the diversity. Unlike most subscription services, Playster covers multiple types of content. Netflix does video, Scribd does books (3 types of books, but still books) but Playster offers video, books, and more.

I have the feeling, as I sit here writing this post, that the diversity of the content is more likely going to keep me coming back to Playster than to other services. On days where my attention span measures at "Squirrel!", I can flit from one Playster category to another without getting bored. That feels like it has more value than competing services which offer a better selection in any single category.

That said, the service is not without its problems. It’s still in beta, and some things don’t work (for example, I can’t stream movies). There’s also no iOS app (although there is an Android app in Google Play), and a lot of the games I am interested in trying require that I install Playster’s app on my PC (the install process failed).

To be fair, Playster is in beta, so they’re still working out the bugs before the planned launch this summer. No one could reasonably expect them to have a flawless platform at this point, which is why I plan to circle around and reevaluate the service as the launch day approaches.

When Huawei launched the P8 yesterday, they made it clear that this would be their flagship phone and that it would have accessories to match. That includes cases.

One of the many custom cases announced with the 5.2″ P8 smartphone yesterday was a model which adds a 4.3″ E-ink screen to the rear of the phone. This case is an optional aftermarket part which is intended to turn the P8 into a plus-sized Yotaphone 2:

There aren’t many details available at the moment (I can’t even tell you the name), but I do know the manufacturer.

Update: GizmoChina got their hands on the P8’s new case, and they revealed that the name of the case is InkCase (yes, just like the other smartphone cases developed by Oaxis).

This case was made by Oaxis/Gajah, the same consumer electronics company which developed the InkCase Plus. This connection has not been officially announced, but Oaxis inadvertently revealed the relationship on its support forum.

Like Oaxis’s other case, the P8’s new case pairs with the P8 over Bluetooth. It has its own battery and charging port.

I’m still waiting to hear back from Oaxis with more details on the features, but at this time I can report that Huawei said that it will work as an ebook reader and display your schedule, weather info, or a clock.

It sounds like the new case has the same features as the Inkcase Plus I reviewed last year, which is disappointing. The Inkcase Plus looked neat but it couldn’t do very much. The software was and is lacking, and if the P8’s new case is similarly limited then it won’t be worth buying.

The same goes for the Inkcase i6, which was developed for the iPhone 6.

AnandTech

Thanks, jjj!

Apple has been selling audiobooks for far longer than they’ve sold ebooks, but in all that time the two book formats have been divided between iBooks and iTunes. But with the next iOS update, that could change.

Apple Insider reports that with the iOS 8.4 beta release, readers will find audiobooks accessible from inside the iBooks app.

Within the iBooks app itself on an iPhone or iPad, audiobooks occupy their own unique collection, accessible from the pull-down menu at the top of the screen. Notably listeners can open a selectable tracklist for each book, and fast-forward or fast-rewind through a title by tapping and dragging the cover art.

I don’t have the update and can’t confirm the news, but I did note that the current dropdown menu lets you chose between books and PDFs. I could see where Apple might add audiobooks as an option:

To be clear, all we know at this time is that you will be able to listen to audiobooks from inside iBooks; we don’t know whether the audiobook section of iTunes will also be shifted over to the iBooks app.

That would not be a bad idea, I think. Right now I can buy audiobooks (and play them) through the Music button on my iPad. That path doesn’t make any more sense than buying the audiobooks through the iBooks app, so it would be a good idea to reorganize and shift the content from one app to the other.

In related news, the iOS8.4 update will also give CarPlay users a new Audiobooks app. According to AI, It’s going to have the iBooks icon.

iOS8.4 is in beta, and it isn’t expected before Apple’s WWDC event in June.

image  by ActuaLitté

The Kobo Glo HD may be the most anticipated ereader to launch this year but it is not the only one to ship in the next few weeks. A leaked product listing has revealed that Pocketbook has a new 6″ ebook reader in the works.

The Touch Lux 3 sports a 6″ Carta E-ink screen. It’s up for pre-order on Mein-eReader.de with a retail price of €111 and an expected ship date of two weeks.

Weighing in at 208 grams, the Touch Lux 3 runs Pocketbook’s software on a 1GHz CPU with 256MB RAM. It has 4GB internal storage, a microSD card slot, Wifi, but no audio. The screen has a resolution of 1024 x 758, and as you could guess from the name this model has both a frontlight and a touchscreen (capacitive).

All in all there’s not much here to surprise us. The Touch Lux 3 looks like a slight update to the existing model, and not the monumental upgrade that the Kindle Voyage was last year, or that I’m hoping the Kobo Glo HD will be this year.

It looks like Pocketbook is playing it much safer this year than last. In 2014, the company released two novel designs: the Inkpad, an 8″ ereader, and the Ultra, a 6″ ereader with a Carta E-ink screen and an 5MP camera. One was great while the other was crap, but both were more interesting than the Touch Lux 3.

Let’s hope Pocketbook’s next device does something new, but if it doesn’t then there is always the CAD Reader, the 13.3″ ereader Pocketbook has been working on since December 2013.

AlleseBook.de

The months-long contract negotiation between HarperCollins and its biggest customer came to an abrupt end today with the news that the two parties had signed a multi-year contract.

Few details are available at this time, but we do know that a HarperCollins spokesperson said in a statement that "HarperCollins has reached an agreement with Amazon. Our books will continue to be available on the Amazon print and digital platforms".

The WSJ is speculating that this means that the contract calls for HarperCollins to set the retail prices of its ebooks, with incentives for HarperCollins to provide lower prices to consumers. That’s more or less what was whispered about the contracts Amazon signed with Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster last year, so it is probably true.

Last October, Amazon reached an agreement with Simon & Schuster which covered both ebooks and paper books. A few weeks later Amazon came to terms with Hachette Book Group, followed in December by a contract with Macmillan.

And now Amazon has a deal with HarperCollins, putting an end to the speculation that the two were approaching a showdown.

While we don’t have specifics on any of the contracts, we do know that the earlier contracts were referred to as agency lite. But I’m not so sure that term is accurate.

Given the price tags the 3 publishers were hanging on their ebooks when I checked in late March, I don’t think we should use the term "lite" as an adjective. I think they should simply be called agency contracts, because as far as a consumer is concerned there is nothing "lite" about them.

They are straight up agency contracts, and that means that there are now 4 publishers whose ebooks I will not be buying. It’s not just that I have a philosophical objection to agency pricing, but also that the prices are higher than I am willing to pay.

image by Philip Taylor PT

The US ebook market has shown every sign of having gotten boring but other markets are still much more active. CB Logistics, the leading ebook distributor in the Netherlands, just released a new infographic which reveals that Dutch ebook sales are growing by leaps and bounds.

Dutch publishers now distribute 37,190 titles, up from 33 thousand last July.  The majority of the titles (85%) are sold as Epub, with PDF (13%) coming in a distant second place. (Kindle format sales aren’t being tracked at this time).

Two-thirds of the ebook sales being tracked involved either no DRM or minimal DRM (digital watermarks). The remaining third of sales were handled through ecosystems, which in this case means Kobo and Tolino (also Apple, Amazon, Google, and Nook). Kobo had formed a partnership with Bol.com last fall, and Tolino recruited a bookstore coop in September, and clearly they are making their presence felt.

Thanks to the close attention of Kobo, Tolino, and Amazon, the Dutch ebook market continues to grow. eBooks made up 26% of online sales and 5.2% of total sales, up significantly from last July (23% and 3%, respectively).

CB Logistics doesn’t break the market share figure down by quarter, but instead averages it over the previous 12 months. That makes it difficult to estimate the growth rate, but if we compare the figures from last July to the ones from today it’s easy to see that eBooks are on their way to doubling their market share in only a year.

There’s nothing like marketing to a captive audience. TV commercials make use of that idea, and pretty soon a new startup called Rook will launch a service which offers free ebooks to users so long as they remain at their current location.

The Guardian reports that later this spring Rook will release an app which will provide "location-based free access to ebooks". Under Rook’s system, readers will be able to read an ebook for free so long as they remain at the coffee shop, commuter, train, or other location where they first opened it.  Should the reader leave, they’ll have the option of buying the ebook.

Rook is at the London Book Fair this week, where they plan to announce a couple publishing partners. The service is launching this spring in London and NYC.

This is a nifty idea which I’ve been wanting to see someone turn it into a startup ever since B&N announced the Read In Store program in 2010. That program lets Nook owners read for up to an hour a day in Barnes & Noble stores, but B&N never hit on the idea of expanding the program to include other locations (airports, coffee shops, libraries, etc).

B&N’s program is still running, and there have been similar programs on Spanish, French, German, and American rail systems which let you read ebooks for free.  So far as I know only the French effort is widely available; the other programs are limited to specific lines.

And now Rook is turning the idea into a retail operation.

Coincidentally, Rook is up for an innovation award at the London Book Fair. They were also nominated for a similar award at Futurebook’s conference last fall.

I don’t see what is innovative about building a business on a 5-year-old idea, but then again I also don’t see how Rook is going to cover its costs. They’re saying at the LBF that their revenue will come from retail:

#PDMC15 #LBF15 @getrook makes its money when a reader pays to keep reading out of the original area.

— Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) April 13, 2015

I just don’t see that happening.

I would expect that a reader might find a book in Rook’s app and then go on to buy it from their preferred source, be it a local bookstore, Amazon, or some 3rd-party app. I don’t foresee a significant number of readers tying themselves to yet another reading app, and if I’m right then Rook would be better offer sending readers to other stores and collecting a commission.

But even if I am wrong Rook is still going to have to compete for a reader’s attention. They’ll have to fight against the ebooks, games, and other content a customer carries on their mobile device. Those customers may be a captive market but they’ve already been captured by someone else, and that is going to make Rook’s job that much harder.

So how will Rook proceed? I don’t know, but I’ve reached out to Rook. I will post their response.

Rook

image by craigdfreeman