When the Earl was first announced in May 2013 it was an Android tablet with a 6″  E-ink screen, a solar panel, a bevy of sensors, and a firm ship date in late summer 2013.

Two years later and the Earl has gone through multiple hardware revisions, missed multiple ship dates, and it’s still nowhere near ready to enter production.

According to the latest update, the Earl tablet will be delayed past the end of 2015. When or if the Earl arrives it will look nothing like the concept design we first saw two years ago:

Sqigle, the company developing the Earl, had revealed several months ago that they were parting ways with their existing hardware partner, Onyx. The two companies had concluded that they had reached the limits of Onyx’s abilities and experience, so it was time to bring in a replacement.

Here’s where I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that the new partner is Netronix, a company with nearly a decade of experience in developing ereaders for dozens of companies.

The bad news is that bringing Netronix in means that the entire design is getting tossed out the window, a "full reboot" as Sqigle put it. Netronix wants to use their in-house resources to develop the production unit.

They project that they’ll have the Earl finished and ready to ship to backers in 9 months.

The new model will feature a modular design based around a flexible 4.7″ E-ink screen, not the 6″ screen found on the original prototype. Sqigle noted that after two years of working with the prototypes, "we’ve found a rugged tablet in most scenarios required the use of both hands. Other than reading guide books or maps, almost every other feature functions better on a smaller display."

Sqigle went on to add:

While we wait for a preliminary design from Netronix, we’re working to setup a new office here in Seattle. Working remotely with the new team will be much more manageable and it looks as though I won’t need to fly as much. My next trip to Taiwan shouldn’t be until the end of May. We expected to grow into a company like Netronix, but with this opportunity we’ll have to hit the ground running. Development costs have effectively doubled, not only do we need more funding, we need more customers. We’re planning to spend the next couple months putting together a dedicated marketing, sales and support team. We fully intend to fulfill our promise, though components may have changed, the original idea is still here. We’re pushing forward and with your continued support we’ll be able to finally bring Earl to life!

While this is quite the dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

Two years have passed since the Earl was first announced, and in that time the ereader and mobile device markets have advanced significantly. E-ink screens are better, the frontlight is now an established technology, and mobile electronics are both cheaper and more energy-efficient that they were a mere two years ago.

Sqigle has also had two years to work on the software which will run on the Earl. Not all Android apps like running on E-ink screens; graphic intensive apps like map apps tend to choke, freeze, or crash, and Sqigle has had time to work their way through the potential conflicts.

We could see the benefit of the overlong development cycle when the Earl finally ships, but after two years of waiting I won’t be getting my hopes up.

Kobo took a low-key approach with the launch of its newest ereader earlier this week. The Kobo Glo HD might be amazing and priced to disrupt Amazon, but hardly anyone has put their hands on the 6 inch ereader.

I’ve been watching Youtube for the past couple days, and so far I’ve found just the one video. It’s not long, but it is better than nothing. The video was shot at the breakfast launch event on Tuesday, and it takes the Glo HD through its paces.

So tell me, have you seen any other videos?

To be honest, I’m having trouble finding any photos of the device, much less videos. There’s so little first hand reporting that it is almost as if Kobo didn’t want anyone to see their new Kindle killer.

Given that the Kobo Glo HD has a screen resolution comparable to the Kindle Voyage but is priced the same as the Kindle Paperwhite, I find that very puzzling – also frustrating. If you see a report from someone who actually put their hands on the Glo HD, let me know. I want to read it.

The Kobo Glo HD is scheduled to ship in the US and Canada on 1 May. It will go up for pre-order next week on Kobo.com, and can be pre-ordered on the Chapter.Indigo.ca website.

Amazon has hit a snag in the launch of its Russian Kindle Store. Several local sources have reported that the Kindle now requires a special license before it can be imported into Russia.

The-eBook.org, Pro-Book.ru, and novostiliteratury.ru all report that a "specialist in information security" (?) by the name of Alex Lukatskii had recently tried and failed to import a Kindle Paperwhite. He was reportedly told by DHL that the Paperwhite had been rejected by Russian customs agents because it used encryption DRM.

Curiously enough, only the Kindle Paperwhite is banned; we have no similar reports about the cheaper Kindle. Both devices have been available in Russia since 2013, and according to one comment on The-eBook.org, the Paperwhite has been banned in Russia since January 2014.

The commenter was puzzled why this story counted as news when it was a year old. That was an important detail because without it I would have written this story off as an unverified urban legend found on Facebook – even with the confirmation that Russia does have import regulations covering encryption systems.

More so than most countries, Russia has strict import regulations for encryption. Where most countries would at least let you bring in a device for person use, that exemption doesn’t always fly in Russia.

Devices which incorporate encryption can be imported, but they sometimes require an import license. Thanks to the DRM used on the Kindle platform, the Kindle Paperwhite has run afoul of that regulation, and it is effectively banned in Russia.

Update: Or perhaps not. I now have conflicting reports that Amazon did secure the import permit (Thanks, Vladimir!), and that Paperwhites have made it through customs. (Thanks, Alex!)

via Digital-book.ru

Following tense months-long negotiations with Amazon, HarperCollins is reportedly planning to force ebook retailers to adopt agency pricing as early as next week.

Publishers Lunch reports that:

Multiple retailers report that Harper has informed them their selling terms will change as of Tuesday, April 14. (The change is actually effective midnight Pacific time, rather than Eastern. Amazon would be among those companies that naturally end their business day on Pacific time.) Harper is requiring retailers to implement all price changes within 24 hours.

Going forward Harper will require that their ebooks be sold at the publisher’s listed consumer price, without any discounts.

The notice going out to retailers is an interim measure; HC hasn’t signed contracts with all the retailers just yet. Something tells me that they have signed a new contract with Amazon, and that it will go into effect next week.

This comes as no surprise.

When I first reported on the HarperCollins-Amazon dispute earlier this month, I noted that many titles from Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan were showing that the prices were set by the publisher. That used to indicate that the ebooks were being sold under an agency agreement where the publisher set the price and the retailer was forbidden to discount.

In the past 6 months Amazon had negotiated contracts with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. Those contracts were described at the time as agency lite, but in retrospect I don’t think that term is accurate.

I was surveying ebook prices in the Kindle Store in late March when I noticed that nearly all the more popular titles from Simon & Schuster and Hachette mentioned that the prices were set by the publishers. Many Macmillan titles also had that notice (not Macmillan AUS or Palgrave Macmillan titles, though).

I concluded that Simon & Schuster and Hachette had a stronger agency deal than previously expected, and sarcastically suggested that HarperCollins wasn’t satisfied with the outright agency terms the other publishers enjoyed.

For a statement made in jest, that was surprisingly prophetic.

image by msbhaven

One of the three big names in subscription ebooks suddenly decided to launch a retail ebookstore to complement its Netflix-style unlimited service. Am I the only one who wondered why?

Earlier today many news sources reported that Oyster was launching an ebookstore. They’re saying that the startup is trying to take on Amazon, or that Amazon is under attack, or stuff like Oyster wanted to take on both Amazon and Apple.

I’m coming to this story late in the day not because I missed out on the pre-brief (I got it, actually) but because I spent some time thinking about why Oyster launched the ebookstore.

To put it simply, Amazon has nothing to do with it. Here’s why that premise is wrong:

• An ebookstore with its own proprietary DRM and walled garden is not a threat to Amazon (exception: Apple, with its huge hardware platform).
• An ebookstore which only sells in the US is not a serious threat to Amazon.

So why did Oyster launch an ebookstore?

To explain that, I’ll have to share some background.

Founded in late 2012, Oyster has run a subscription ebook service for the past 18 months. It offers a million title strong catalog which users can read on Android, on the iPad/iPhone, or in the web browser. The service costs $10 a month and is limited to the US.

Oyster has ebooks from 3 of the 5 major US trade publishers as well as a bunchaton of other publishers, including indie authors. But the service doesn’t have nearly as many titles as the Kindle Store. In comparison, the major ebookstores carry millions and millions and millions of titles.

That difference in selection is the indirect explanation for Oyster’s new ebookstore. Tell me, what do you think is the most common reason given for cancelling a subscription ebook service like Oyster?

If you answered "I can’t find the ebooks I want" then you won the prize.

Folks, this is why I say that customer retention is Oyster’s focus here, not Amazon. Oyster might not be losing all that many subscribers each month, but they were losing some.

But now Oyster can promise to sell the ebooks which it was unable to lend, and that is going to keep some subscribers from leaving. Or at least that is what will happen in the long run; the ebookstore only has a million titles at the moment. The catalog does include titles from the Big 5 (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster) as well as titles from smaller publishers like  Scholastic, Harlequin, Norton, and Chronicle.

Customer retention is not as amazeballs hypeworthy as competing with Amazon, but it is a critical part of any service.

Today Oyster repaired a deficiency, making them more competitive against their immediate competitor, Scribd. The latter company offers a more diverse selection of formats, and it too has an ebookstore (albeit one with a limited catalog).

P.S. I’ll be adding an early review of the ebookstore in the comments. What did you think of it?

If you’re one of the millions of Americans with dyslexia then I have some good news for you.

OverDrive rolled out an update last week which added a new font option to its mobile apps. Install the new app and you’ll find that you can switch the font to OpenDyslexic.

You can see a sample of the font at right.

OpenDyslexic is one of a number of fontfaces which are intended help those with dyslexia better comprehend the words they are seeing. The fonts are drafted to emphasis certain parts of each character to make them easier to differentiate. Common design elements include giving certain parts of the characters thicker lines, varying the length of the projecting bits on characters like b, d, g and p, and slanting characters.

If this is your first encounter with OpenDyslexic, here’s a larger sample:

OpenDyslexic wasn’t the first dyslexic font, but it was the first released under an open source license. Other dyslexic fonts like Dyslexie are licensed at a high cost. All of the fonts have the same general goal, though: they’re supposed to make reading easier for people with dyslexia.

However, some experts don’t believe that the fonts help reading comprehension. As a layperson who doesn’t have dyslexia, I can’t tell you one way or another. But I do think it’s better to have options.

The fonts were added last week, but the news just crossed my desk today. (In related news, OD also added new audiobook features to its Android app.)

I’ve tested the font myself and can confirm that it works in OD’s iPad app. I can’t say the same for the Android app; I was able to select the font but it did not show up in the ebook. Hopefully I found a bug unique to my Android tablet, but if not then OD can always fix it in the next update.

They’ve done it again.

In 2010 Kobo disrupted the ereader market when it released its first Kobo Reader. That wasn’t a very good device, and Kobo didn’t have a huge market share, but Kobo was selling it cheap in the US and Canada. Its $149 price tag forced B&N and Amazon to drop the prices of their models, resulting in a much cheaper ereader market.

And now Kobo has done it again.

This Toronto-based ebook company just launched the Kobo Glo HD, a 6″ ereader with specs similar to the Kindle Voyage, only at a much lower price.

The Glo HD sports a 6″ Carta E-ink display with a screen resolution of 1448 x 1072 and a sharpness on par with Retina screens (300ppi). It runs Kobo’s software on a 1GHz CPU with 4GB internal storage. There’s no card slot, but it does of course have Wifi, a frontlight, and a touchscreen.

After looking at the leaked images, the leaked quick start guide (PDF), and reading the press release (PDF), it’s safe to say that the Glo HD won’t have the nifty edge-to-edge touchscreen found on the Kindle Voyage, but I’m fine with that.

I never liked that touchscreen, and what’s more Kobo makes up for the lack. The new Kobo Glo HD is scheduled to ship in the US, NZ, Canada, and Australia on the first, and it will cost:

• $129.99 (CA/US)
• €129.99 (EU)
• £109.99 (UK)
• $179.99 (AU)
• $219.99 (NZ)

I can’t speak for the markets down under, but the US, EU, and UK prices are equal to the regular price of the Kindle Paperwhite in those markets.

To put it simply, Kobo has redefined what a premium ereader is and what it should cost. They have released an ereader which is comparable to the Kindle Voyage, and then they knocked $90 off of the regular price.

This leaves the Kobo Aura H2O, with its 6.8″ screen and $179 price tag, as the sole premium ereader on the market. The Kindle Voyage and the Kobo Glo HD are now mid-range ereaders.

And as for the Kindle Paperwhite, well, it is going to have to get a lot cheaper.

Is anyone else looking forward to Amazon’s response?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Br5mbK_-5A

Reports of the demise of the German ebook startup txtr have been mildly exaggerated.

An email went out late last week to German publishers, informing them that txtr was being taken over by a European retail conglomerate. Publishers Lunch reported that Media-Saturn-Holding, the parent company of the Media Markt, Saturn, and Redcoon chains, will be adopting txtr as its ebook platform.

The retail services company Storecast.de will run the platform on Media-Saturn-Holding’s behalf. It’s not clear who owns what at this time, but Media-Saturn-Holding reportedly took on the responsibility for payment obligations and contractual relationships as of 1 April.

It’s also hired a number of former txtr employees, including Dan Vidra, but not all the employees will be making the transition. Txtr had previously reported that some of its staff had departed the company to go work at Zalando, an online fashion platform. Also, a number of former txtr staffers, including former CEO Thomas Leliveld, had already left the company last year and decamped to launch Blloon, a new ebook startup which offers a subscription ebook service.

With annual revenues of over 21 billion euros, Media-Saturn-Holding operates stores in 15 countries in Europe, including Russia and Turkey. This makes the conglomerate about as good of a fit for the late ebook startup as we could have hoped following txtr’s bankruptcy in January.

I will admit that I was somewhat surprised that Rakuten isn’t the new owner, given that the Japanese conglomerate recently bought OverDrive. I would have thought that txtr’s tech would be worth buying, but now that so many employees have flown the coop Rakuten may have decided that txtr was no longer worth the expense.

Txtr has not yet informed its customers about the changeover, and if I get an email I will amend this post. I have also queried Media-Saturn-Holding and asked for more details on this story. I’ll post their response when i get it.

Publishers Lunch

We’ve all encountered strange formatting in ebooks, but this next one takes the cake.

Writing over at Science Blogs, Martin Rundkvist reports that the last couple ebooks he bought from Google Play Books were surprisingly terse:

On my Android smartphone, the OCRed texts in my e-book copies of Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass(2012) and Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE (2011) have lost all their apostrophes. All their quotation marks. All their long dashes. And all their diacritic characters. When Stephenson writes “naïveté”, my e-book says “navet”, which is French for turnip. When the problem first showed up, in Roberts’ book, I actually thought he wrote non-standard English as a futuristic device.

When you run operating systems in non-English language modes, like Swedish or even Chinese, you get used to misidentified characters, with ÅÄÖÜ becoming all kinds of junk symbols. But this doesn’t look like a case of that. Google’s reader software is just quietly omitting some of the most common characters in English novels!

As a geek and an ebook blogger, I like to collect stories of unusual formatting and other technical errors. Whether it’s Google deleting ebooks just because someone crossed the wrong international boundary, or strange text inserted into a copy of Game of Thrones, formatting errors are fascinating puzzles which are fun to solve.

In the case of the missing punctuation, I wasn’t able to replicate the error. But I would bet that Martin encountered a bug which involved the user language being set to Swedish and the language code for the ebook set to English.

I’m not sure where he got the idea that OCR had something to do with this, though; the ebooks in question are new enough that they were published digitally, and not converted from a scanned copy.

Does anyone know how this happened? Have you seen similar errors?

image by dlofink

Hints have been circulating for over a month now that Kobo would launch an ereader this spring, and it looks like they just came true.

Update: the Kobo Glo HD launched on Tuesday, 7 April.

Numerous retail sites in New Zealand and Australia have leaked details about the Kobo Glo HD, Kobo’s next ereader. Sporting a 6″ E-ink Carta screen, the Glo HD is built to be a competitor to the Kindle Voyage.

According to the NZ retail site Mighty Apes, this device is set to ship in New Zealand on 1 May 2015, and carry a local price of $219 NZD.  Another source puts the Australian price at $149 AUD.

An earlier rumor said the US price would be $149, or about $50 less than the Kindle Voyage. I have no information on a US launch, but I would expect the Glo HD to ship in the rest of the world by the end of the month.

We actually know very few details at this time; in fact, I haven’t even gotten an invite to the launch event. But the leaked listings do tell us that the Glo HD will have the same 6″ screen as the Kindle Voyage, pack in both a frontlight and touchscreen, and ship with 4GB of internal storage.

Curiously, there’s no mention of a microSD card slot. While it’s possible that this detail was left out, there’s also a chance that the Glo HD doesn’t have a card slot at all.

Kobo Glo HD Specs

• 6” Carta E Ink HD touchscreen
• 1448×1072 resolution
• 300 ppi
• Built in ComfortLight
• Battery life of up to 2 months
• 4 GB on-board memory

This is a thin report, I know, but I can flesh it out with a few more details. After googling the model number (N437-KU-BK-K-EP), we know that the Glo HD will have an optional sleepcover.

I also discovered that Kobo leaked the FCC ID (NOIKBN437). Kobo hasn’t filed the FCC report yet, but what with all of the details and the video I am certain that they’re going to do so in short order.

The Glo HD is one of two ereaders which we expect Kobo to launch this spring. The other model, codenamed Pika, is going to be a budget model with a screen resolution of 800 x 600, and a touchscreen but no frontlight.

The latest rumor said that both models would launch by Easter. That hasn’t happened, but I do expect a launch this week.

If this works out the way I expect, Kobo will carry 3 ereader models. At the high end we’ll have the Aura H2O, which will have a 6.8″ screen and be priced to compete with the Kindle Voyage. The new Kobo Glo HD will be priced to compete with the Kindle Paperwhite, while Pika is Kobo’s equivalent of the $79 Kindle.

MobileRead

Thanks, David!

Sony has opened a new chapter in its long history as a DRM pioneer.

The news is a little late crossing my desk, but two weeks ago Sony announced a new partnership with Immanens, a French company which develops distribution technology for digital publishing companies. Immanens will adopt Sony’s new URMS (User Rights Management System) DRM in the platforms it develops for third parties.

Under development since 2011, URMS is based on an ebook DRM standard created by the Marlin Development Community. The standard is touted as being more flexible and more secure than either industry standard Kindle DRM or the Adobe DRM used on EPub ebooks and some PDFs.

According to what I was told in October 2014 and January 2015, Sony’s new DRM supports a variety of business models and uses, including lending, gifting, sharing, and (assuming the publishers will go along with it) reselling ebooks. The platform is also designed so libraries can loan ebooks for a variable length of time and readily renew loaned ebooks (this is not so easy under OverDrive).

The platform also has benefits for users. Sony told me last year that consumers will be able to combine all of their ebooks on to a "common bookshelf". Library ebooks, gifted ebooks, and ebooks purchased from stores which support URMS DRM can be stored on a common bookshelf and then transferred to any compatible device.

Given that we know of exactly one company which will be using the DRM, it’s not clear how that common bookshelf will work out in practice, nor is it clear whether the DRM will be more secure than its competition.

Sony boasted to PW that URMS will offer increased security. Based on the assumption that any widely used DRM will be hacked, URMS is designed so that it can be updated with patches that repair any security holes found and exploited by hackers.

That is not a new concept in the history of DRM, and it hasn’t worked out well in the past. Amazon, for example, has repeatedly updated its Kindle DRM over the past 7 years, and as a result it now has to support multiple generations of Kindle DRM which are still being used on discontinued Kindle models.

Not so coincidentally, Sony has also used DRM updates to try to keep DVDs secure. There’s no evidence that the technique was effective, but I do know of at least one occasion where consumers got screwed.

In 2007 Sony started distributing DVDs which used a new flavor of DRM and neglected to make sure that all the DVD player manufacturers had updated their firmwares.  A lot of customers complained on Techdirt, Slashdot, and elsewhere that their newly purchased DVDs wouldn’t play on their DVD players.

Sony did eventually fix that problem. Let’s hope that they also found a way to avoid a similar problem with URMS. Let’s also hope that the new DRM is flawless, otherwise it’s going to vanish into a crowded market with nary a peep.

Sony is planning to license its DRM to tech companies in the educational, corporate, and library markets, but there is also a chance that it might also show up in the consumer ebook market as well.

While conventional wisdom says that the ebook market is dominated by 3 DRM platforms (Kindle, iBooks, and Adobe DE), that is not strictly true. Many of the smaller ebook platforms, including Google, Kobo, Scribd, Oyster, and Logos (to name a few), use a unique type of DRM internally (Google and Kobo support Adobe DE DRM as well).

The current market fragmentation suggests the possibility that Sony might license URMS to a new entrant in to the consumer ebook market.

"We’re not pretending we’re going to replace proprietary systems at Amazon and Apple," Spiros Rally, the VP of DigitalWorks at Sony DADC, told PW. "However, we do think that we offer a powerful alternative for trade publishing in the library space, and around direct-to-consumer sales."

images  by rebopper, _Max-B

Last month the culture ministers of 4 European countries called for lower taxes on ebooks, and now French publishers are launching a campaign. France’s Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE) has launched a website where it invites visitors to educate EU commissioners on the difference between books and not books.

The site asks supporters to "Tell the European Commission (@UE_Commission) about what is a book and what is not a book" be either tweeting a picture of an ordinary object along with the hashtag #ThatIsNotABook, or the picture of a book or ebook tagged with #ThatIsABook.

This site is the latest stage in a five-year-long effort to change the EU’s tax laws so that paper and digital books are taxed the same.

While paper books are seen as a cultural item and thus taxed at a lower rate, ebooks are viewed by EU regulators as a service, and they’re taxed at the full VAT (17% to 25%, depending on the country).

France and Luxembourg challenged that tax policy in 2012. They passed laws which lowered the taxes collected on ebooks, and were subsequently sued by the European Commission. Earlier this year the European Court of Justice ruled that the lower tax rates were illegal, and had to be raised to the full VAT rates.

That ruling was a minor setback, and it has deterred no one. This movement has broad support across Europe, including in Italy and Malta, each of which illegally lowered the VAT collected on ebooks, as well as in Poland, Germany, and France, where the culture ministers released a joint statement calling for the lower tax rate. The Italian culture minister also signed the statement.

Publishing Perspective

Scholarly Kitchen posted an article yesterday which explains why Amazon is so much better at marketing and selling than the book publishing industry.

Joseph Esposito uses the post to lay out his vision for a new type of bookstore – one which could compete with Amazon. Describing Amazon as a destination site, Esposito sees its success as primarily due to pull marketing. In other words, Amazon draws people in by offering a huge warehouse of books and a great shopping experience.

To compete with Amazon, Esposito thinks publishers need to adapt to the new nature of the internet:

But the Web is now being brought to us; it’s evolving into a push medium. All that time we spend looking at the news feeds for Facebook, Flipboard, and Twitter point to where the Web is going and where new bookstores will have to be. To build a bookstore that goes head to head with Amazon is foolhardy. It would be easier to carry the ball into the defensive line of the Chicago Bears.

So a new bookstore is going to have to bring its offerings to where people are rather than the other way around; a new bookstore has to be ubiquitous. A recent example of this comes from HarperCollins,which has created an arrangement with Twitter to sell copies of the bestselling Divergent series of young adult novels from within individual tweets.

The fact that this is a topic of discussion in the publishing industry, in 2015 no less – folks, this is why Amazon is winning whatever war publishing feels it is fighting with the retailer.

It’s not that Esposito is wrong so much as that he is five years late to the discussion. Both Amazon and authors started push marketing at least 5 years ago.

Authors have been on social media since at least 2010, and they’ve been pushing people to bookstore to buy books. This concept is so well established that there are dozens of blog posts by indie authors which discuss the nuances of how to go about it.

What’s more, Amazon mastered the concept of push marketing even further back. I don’t know exactly when Amazon launched its affiliate network, but that was explicitly designed to give other websites a financial incentive to push customers to Amazon (ht to Marshall Poe for making a similar argument in TSK’s comment section).

Tell me, can I make more money by pushing people to HarperCollins' bookstore than by sending them to Amazon? No? Then why would I bother?

Speaking of HarperCollins, they are a great example of a publisher trying and failing to market and sell directly to consumers. Have you visited HarperCollins.com, and tried to browse, search, or buy an ebook?

I have, and so have several commenters on The Passive Voice. It’s terrible. If, as Esposito posits, direct retail is the future of publishing, then HC literally cannot build a retail site to save its life.

But never mind HarperCollins; let’s consider what Esposito wrote next:

From a conceptual point of view, the most interesting project I have stumbled upon for “post-destination” bookstores is that of Chris Kubica, who explained his work in two articles in Publishers Weekly, which you can find here and here. Kubica gathered a group of publishing people in New York to brainstorm about a post-Amazon bookstore. The conclusion was that each individual potentially could be the site or source of a bookstore–a bookstore of one. With seven billion people on the planet (and growing), that’s potentially seven billion bookstores. Now, how can Amazon compete with that?

Easy. Amazon thought of it first, they thought of it ages ago, and they do it better than anyone in publishing.

Folks, if you want to beat Amazon then you need to come up with an idea first. You can’t decide to adopt an SOP five years after it becomes an SOP. That’s not innovative; it’s reactionary.

image by dennisforgione