Some companies might want to spread out their product launches in order to get more press, but not Google. The ad network and its hardware partners announced a slew of new devices today which run Chrome on everything from a dongle to a convertible tablet to super-cheap laptops.

First up is the Asus Chromebit. Powered by a quad-core Rockchip 3288 CPU, the Chromebit packs most of a Chromebook into an HDMI dongle which plugs into your TV.

There’s no word on screen resolution or storage, but we do know that the Chromefit has wifi, BT, a full-sized USB port (for peripherals) and a mini USB port for power. It’s due out later this year, and is expected to cost less than $100. – Slashgear

To the best of my knowledge, this is Chrome’s first official dongle (not counting illicit models out of China), but it won’t be the only new Chrome device this summer.

Hisense and Haier are each launching a $149 Chromebook today. The Haier Chromebook 11 (pre-order at Amazon) and the Hisense Chromebook (pre-order at Walmart) sport identical price tags and quad-core Rockchip 3288 CPUs.

They come with 2GB RAM (expandable to 16GB), 16GB internal storage, a microSD card slot, a couple USB ports, HDMI, and an 11.6″ screen. Or so says Walmart; Amazon is quoting a different CPU speed (on the same CPU) for the Haier  Chromebook 11.  But Amazon is also quoting a longer 10 hour battery life on that slower CPU, so perhaps Haier stepped the speed down to extend the battery life. – Liliputing

And last but not least, Asus also revealed the next best thing to a Chrome tablet today.

The Chromebook Flip combines a low-power Chrome OS rig with the body style made popular by the Lenovo Yoga.

This $249 Chromebook features a 10.1″ screen, making it the smallest Chromebook to date. It runs Chrome OS 42 on a quad-core Rockchip 3288 CPU with 4GB RAM and 16GB internal storage, and it also has Wifi, Bluetooth, 2USB ports, HDMI.

The Flip will ship some  time this summer. Until then, we’re going to have to content ourselves with a few product images, and brief hands on reports. The Verge, for example, was intrigued by the Flip’s ability to switch between laptop and tablet mode. – OMGChrome

Flickr announced on Monday that it was adding CC-Zero and Public Domain licensing options. Users who want to share their images freely with the public now have the option to release their work with no strings attached.

The site has offered CC licensing since 2004, but for all the nuances built into the Creative Commons license it simply doesn’t cover all situations. For example, photos taken by the US government are automatically in the public domain, and the same applies when a member scans and uploads a century old photograph.

What’s more, lately Flickr has been asked by their users to provide more options for uploading new images and releasing them without restriction. For example, last week SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space flight company, uploaded hundreds of photos last week but had to use a CC-By license because that was the least restrictive option.

Today those photos are labeled public domain. They’re free for anyone to use, without no restrictions (moral rights excepted).

Or at least that is what SpaceX and Flickr intend; I’m not sure that the legal status of a preemptively declared PD work will stick.

As in most countries, the US has automatic copyright protection. Make a work and boom, it’s under copyright. But what the US lacks is any way to formally release a work from copyright. This in part inspired first Creative Commons licensing and later CC-Zero.

Under a CC-Zero license, someone still owns the copyright, and they’re granting permission for all to use the work willy-nilly. This differs from the public domain, where no one and everyone owns the copyright.

If someone releases a work under a CC-Zero license they still have the option of changing the license at a later time, but a work released into the public domain would theoretically be free until the end of time.

That is how it’s supposed to work, but here in the US we have courts which have repeatedly yanked works out of the public domain and placed them back under copyright. What’s more, the US copyright law also has termination clauses which would enable someone to terminate existing licenses after 35 years (TechDirt discussed this issue in depth in January).

That means that a work released into the public domain could be returned to copyright 35 years later – perhaps by a creator’s heirs. The heirs would then sue to regain control, and they’d probably win.

I could easily see that scenario happening with a work which had been preemptively declared public domain, can’t you?

Ars Technica

image by Alexandre Dulaunoy

When Amazon launched the Dash last spring they gave shoppers an easy way to re-order groceries and other consumables, and now they’ve made the process even simpler.

The retailer has just launched the Dash Button. This simple device has but single button and fills a single purpose: it lets you re-order a single item on Amazon (or possibly an entire order – it’s not clear).

Amazon hasn’t released any technical details on the Dash Button, but I think it’s safe to say that we’re looking at the device which went through the FCC yesterday. This tells us that the device has Wifi but no other connectivity or sensors, and that raises a few questions.

As you cans see in the demo video below, Amazon envisions its customers sticking the Dash Button to the wall and forgetting about it until the next time they need to restock. That’s when the customer presses the button and the Dash Button does its thing.

An always on wifi device would be dead within a week, so I’m betting that after it pings Amazon, the Dash Button disables wifi and goes to sleep until the next time you press the button.

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

Amazon and its competitors (Target, to name one) have been offering timed re-orders for some years now. I think Amazon calls it a subscription, but no matter the name clearly the Dash Button is the next step in Amazon’s plan to keep you from shopping elsewhere.

It’s a nifty idea, but I don’t know if it will prove useful enough to justify the clutter. The buttons may be small but by the time you get 6 or 7 stuck on the wall it’s going to start looking tacky.

I can’t speak for other consumers, but I’m much happier with simply keeping a spare box of whatever in the cabinet, and then ordering a new box when I open the spare. It’s a low tech alternative, but it works for me.

Plus I’d rather shop at Walmart, where consumables are often cheaper than Amazon.

If you would like to try it for yourself, the Dash Button is available only to Amazon Prime members, and only by invitation. It’s launching with only a limited number of eligible products, including items like toilet paper, cleaning products, dog food, and much more.

If you do get one, let me know what you think.

For the past couple years Amazon has followed Henry Ford’s maxim on color choices: you could have your Kindle in any color you want, so long as it was black.

With almost no fanfare, Amazon has quietly launched a new white basic Kindle in China and Japan. The new model is essentially identical to the $79 Kindle Amazon launched last fall, only in a new shell. It sports 4GB internal storage, wifi, an 800 x 600 resolution screen plus a touchscreen, and ties into Amazon’s Kindle Store.

It has all the same great software as on the black model, and if you don’t like the white color you can also order a case in any of 5 colors and 3 prints. The white Kindle is up for pre-order today for 499 yuan in China and 6,980 yen in Japan (that’s the ad subsidized price), and is scheduled to ship next Wednesday.

I’ve queried Amazon, but don’t have any info on when the white Kindle will ship in the US or the rest of the world. If and when it does arrive, you will probably find it on this page on Amazon: www.Amazon.com/white-kindle

Until then, I will be sitting here scratching my head. I’m not just puzzled by the exclusive launch; I also don’t see why Amazon launched a white Kindle at all. It’s not that black conceals dirt and smudges better than white, but also that there is a valid technical reason for choosing a black shell over a white one.

It’s a known fact that a black shell will make an E-ink screen look whiter, while a white shell will make it look more gray. This simple fact explains why Amazon first went with a gray shell on the Kindles released in 2011, and then black on all models released in 2012 and later.

And now Amazon is bucking the trend.

eReader Palace

Earlier this month Nvidia announced the Shield gaming console. This was the first Nvidia flagship device to use the cutting edge Tegra X1 CPU, and it won’t be the last.

Recent regulatory filings suggest that Nvidia is going to release both a new Shield tablet and a gaming handheld. There’s no evidence yet to suggest that the new devices have the Tegra X1 CPU, but I’d say the odds are in its favor.

Earlier today I discovered an FCC filing for a new Nvidia device. (There are actually a couple filings; one belongs to the console announced earlier this month, but the other belongs to the tablet.) All the useful identifiable info is concealed in that FCC filing, but the FCC ID revealed the new device’s model number: P1761WX.

This is similar to the model number for the Shield tablet which launched last year, and it suggests that the rumors from February were correct: we will see a revised model coming soon.

According to the test results, said device will have Bluetooth and Wifi, but not LTE. It will probably also have a Tegra X1 CPU. There have been rumors to that effect, and it is a reasonable conclusion.

And it’s just as likely that the new Shield handheld gaming device will also use the Tegra X1 chip. That device hasn’t shown up on the FCC website yet, but it has turned up on the Bluetooth and WiFi trade group websites.

A device labeled as the Nvidia P2523 has been certified for Wifi and Bluetooth. The listings don’t reveal much in the way of detail, but what we do know suggests that it will run Android 5.0 Lollipop and support the latest Wifi and BT standards:

• 802.11a/b/g/n/ac dual-band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi
• Bluetooth 4.1

There’s no info on the screen (unless the 5.0 referred to the screen), CPU, or other hardware, but I’m betting that we’ll soon be reading of the Tegra X1 CPU again.

The current Shield handheld resembles an Xbox controller with a 5″ screen bolted on, and it’s over two years old now. It’s running Android on an aging Tegra 4, so it could use an update.

FCC, Liliputing

Amazon’s contract to run a staffed pickup and drop off location at Purdue is ruffling a few feathers.  The NACS (National Association of College Stores) is suing Purdue University to force it to reveal all of the details from the contract it signed with Amazon.

NACS had recently filed a public document request and asked for a copy of the contract, but the document arrived with multiple pages redacted. Citing the Indiana Access to Public Records Act, Purdue said that the redacted sections covered Amazon’s trade secrets and could not be disclosed.

The trade group disagreed, and filed suit last Tuesday. The NACS argues that the redacted materials constitute public records that the university must release upon request. It supported its arguments ny pointing out that the NACS had obtained similar information from the contract Amazon had signed with the University of California-Davis in late 2011.

I’m not sure that’s a good argument.

Just because UC Davis may have disclosed information it should have redacted, that doesn’t mean that Purdue is in the wrong. What’s more, the deal Amazon struck with UC Davis is quite different from the one signed with Purdue.

The Purdue University deal involved Amazon acting as a surrogate college bookstore by installing a staffed unstore on campus, while Amazon’s deal with UC Davis is closer to being an affiliate deal.

UC Davis gets a cut of purchases made by UC Davis students on Amazon.com, but continues to operate the on-campus bookstore. Amazon has also leased space to install lockers on the UC Davis campus, but that is closer to a real estate lease agreement than a contract containing trade secrets.

But in the case of the Purdue contract, that could well contain operational details which do indeed count as trade secrets.

I will definitely be following this lawsuit. Amazon beat out a number of other companies, including Follett and Cenage, to secure the Purdue deal. The contract they signed will likely reveal clues about Amazon’s intentions, and it will offer hints on the deals that Amazon might strike with other schools.

The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, for example, is currently letting companies bid on running a virtual college bookstore on campus. According to the documents I obtained, that store is going to replace the college bookstore with a location quite similar in concept to the unstore which Amazon has at Purdue.

Trade secrets are nothing new, and in fact the Indiana law does say that they are exempt from disclosure requirements. But the public also has an interest in learning the details of public contracts, so it will be interesting to see which way the judge rules.

Lafayette Journal Courier

Libraries are getting screwed on ebooks even worse than consumers. Where a consumer has to worry about content vanishing with a deceased ebookstore or an expired contract, libraries have to contend with annual fees, expiring licenses, and mysterious technical glitches.

JA Konrath wants to help. Around this time last year he and August Wainwright launched eBooksAreForever, a new startup  which offers a library-friendly ebook solution.

Based on the idea that it’s more important to get ebooks into libraries than make a buck off of them, eBooksAreForever sells DRM-free ebooks under a "forever" license – meaning libraries never have to re-license at set time intervals, or after a certain number of uses.

In the long run they want to offer the ebooks DRM-free under a "one copy, many user" license, but right now the ebooks are still limited to one user, one copy.

The startup has been in a quiet beta test since May of last year, and on Thursday Konrath formally launched the service publicly invited indie authors to join. He reports that EAF now has just under 1000 ebooks in its collection.

According to EAF’s blog, this includes  titles from successful authors like Hugh Howey, Belle Andre, HM Ward, Melissa Foster, Barry Eisler, JA Konrath, Bob Mayer, and Barbara Freethy. The company has been carefully selecting the authors which have been allowed to join the service, resulting in a curated catalog which focuses more on quality than on quantity.

And that, folks, is just one of the many differences between EAF and the last distributor to offer this type of deal to libraries.

As you may recall, way back in August 2012 Smashwords launched a  service called Library Direct which enabled libraries to buy a slate of the top 10k, 20k, 50k, etc,  popular titles in the Smashwords catalog. The ebooks were sold with DRM and limited to a "one copy, one user" license.

That service never came to much, leading Smashwords to decide to instead distribute through OverDrive and 3M Cloud Library. When I queried Mark Coker, he said that SW changed direction because"the Douglas County model has been slow to take hold".

Douglas County refers to a particular library system in Colorado which is best known for running its own ebook DRM server. DCPL buys ebooks direct from publishers, checks them out to patrons, and avoids having to pay OverDrive’s annual hosting fees for those ebooks. (Instead, they pay a license fee to Adobe.)

Coker is correct in that the Douglas County model has been slow to catch on, and it’s easy to see how that stymied Smashwords' plans to sell direct, but luckily this issue won’t have as much of an impact on EAF.

Since EAF sells ebooks with almost no restrictions, libraries can host the ebook catalog without having to shell out additional fees to support DRM. This should reduce costs and technical headaches considerably.

For more details, visit the eBooksAreForever FAQ (library, author/publisher) and Konrath’s blog post. You can also reach out to EAF at [email protected].

eBooksAreForever

images by state_libraryofohio,

In April 2013, the law firm of Giskan Solotaroff Anderson & Stewart filed a class action lawsuit against Penguin and its scamtastic vanity press, Author Solutions.

The case survived several motions to dismiss, and this past February it completed discovery and filed for class certification. Now Writer Beware reports that the same law firm has filed a second class action against Penguin Random House and Author Solutions.

The new suit was filed in Indiana on behalf of a couple authors in California, and it alleges alleges unjust enrichment, fraud, and that Author Solutions violated UCC code, the California Unfair Competition Act, , the Indiana Senior Consumer Sales Act , and the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act.

According to the complaint (PDF) filed on Monday, Author Solutions bilked the plaintiffs out of $25,000 and "over $10,000" by selling them publishing and marketing packages and then not following through and providing the promised services.

This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Author Solutions. The company has a reputation for running a vanity press operation where its revenue comes not from helping an author distribute and sell books but from selling books and useless services to authors.

Author Solutions partners with ostensibly legit companies like Lulu and Barnes & Noble as well as publishers like Simon & Schuster to set up front operations where authors are sold over-priced publishing packages. (The front companies get a kickback commission on any victims authors which buy a package.)

Those packages aren’t a good value, but as we’ve learned from the discovery in February, the real profit (and the real reason that ASI partners with other companies) is in upselling authors on overpriced marketing packages which ASI then fails to deliver.

For example, the filing for this lawsuit details $8,000 one author spent to buy a marketing package. ASI promised to get positive responses from 5 literary agents and place adverts in The Bookseller, New York Times Sunday Book Review, and Baker & Taylor Forecast Magazine.

There’s no evidence that the adverts were ever placed, and only 4 responses were received from agents, two of which were requests that ASI stop sending spam.

And that’s just one incident; don’t forget that Author Solutions has been running its scams for over a decade, and has fleeced hundreds if not thousands of authors.

You can read the  complaint (PDF) for more details.

Writer Beware

images by Fæ,

Kindle owners are angry today, and with good reason.

When Amazon launched their new unlimited storage tier yesterday they gave their customers more storage than you can shake a stick at, but they also quietly killed the free storage which they used to offer their customers.

A couple readers have told me, and I have confirmed, that Amazon is no longer offering the free 5GB storage tier. (Thanks, Tiberiu!) While no one would expect to get a freebie forever, the changeover is having an unexpected impact on Kindle owners, who have lost access to the cloud storage they have been enjoying since late 2011.

Update: Amazon reports that the SendToKindle conversion service did break, but they fixed it. Also, Kindle owners now have a separate place to store the personal documents they SendToKindle which Amazon says "will no longer count against your Cloud Drive storage limits". (This too was not temporarily nonfunctional.) And as always, the ebooks you buy from Amazon will always be hosted by Amazon.

Please disregard the rest of the post. It covers an issue which has been fixed by Amazon.

Since Amazon also offers an email conversion service for Kindle owners, this presents a special problem. As my tipster put it:

I just found out this morning that sending files from my PC to my Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t work anymore.

Why is that? Because Amazon has killed the free 5GB option for all Cloud Drive users, and people are now forced to choose a yearly Cloud Drive plan in order to still be able to use the Send-to-Kindle feature.

Edit: I can now confirm the report. I just set up a new account at Amazon and registered a Kindle to it. That account has no online storage.

So Amazon took storage away from Kindle users? That sucks, but here is the kicker:

I still have 10 GB of storage on Amazon’s servers.

Amazon might not be giving any free storage to Kindle owners, but I’m getting 5GB as a Prime member, and I’m getting another 5GB because I also own a Fire tablet:

To be clear, I do own a Kindle, but I’m not getting 5GB of free storage to go with it.

Take a moment and wrap your mind around that, people.

If you own one type of Amazon hardware, you get 5GB of storage. But if you own another type of Amazon hardware, you get diddly.

Am I the only one who is having trouble fathoming that decision?

Amazon has nullified two of the features that made the Kindle better than any other ebook platform, while at the same time making the platform less useful to Amazon’s customers. I don’t understand why they did that, so I have queried Amazon on the matter. Right now I am hoping that they will respond with the explanation that this was a mistake, and that they will fix it.

And while they’re at it, I would hope that Amazon will extend the free 5GB to Kindle app users as well (it would be silly to leave them out in the cold).

Given that the Kindle help pages still say that Kindle owners can store personal documents on Amazon Cloud Drive, I think there’s a 50-50 chance that this really was a mistake, technical or otherwise.

Stay tuned.

After fewer than 3 months on the market, the profanity-filtering reading app Clean Reader has been neutered by its developer.

Inktera announced on Twitter Wednesday afternoon that it was bowing to pressure from authors and publishers, and was yanking its ebookstore out of the Clean Reader app.

In support of #authors #readers #books everywhere, the @Inktera bookstore system has been pulled from @CleanReader, effective immediately.

— Inktera (@Inktera) March 26, 2015

Inktera is a subsidiary of PageFoundry, the ebook company which had developed and is supporting the app on behalf of Jared and Kirsten Maughan, Clean Reader’s owners.

PageFoundry is an otherwise ordinary ebook company which had developed an ebook platform (apps, ebookstore, backend). PageFoundry’s apps were combined with a custom content filter to create Clean Reader, and aside from the filter PageFoundry’s ebook apps are just your typical ebook apps.

While Inktera’s announcement doesn’t quite kill the app (I checked, and you can still sideload ebooks), it does effectively neuter the app. What’s more, this act suggests that the death of Clean Reader will probably happen as soon as PageFoundry can find a reason to get out of its contract with the Maughans.

Update: Or maybe not. Clean Reader posted an update to their FB page which acknowledges the removal and says "there will be several changes made to the app and an update will be released in the near future". So they don’t see the app going away.

This news arrives in the midst of a storm of protests from authors who object to readers choosing to filter the content in the books they read. Over the past week many authors have protested the app with arguments ranging from moral rights and religious bias to objections to its poorly designed filter.

I’ve covered the highlights of the protests before, so I won’t repeat myself here. But I do want to point out that the listing for the Clean Reader app in Google Play shows that the app has an install base between 500 and 1,000. (Hat tip to Felix Torres for spotting that detail.)

The thing is, folks, this app probably had more protesters than actual users, making this whole series of events a tempest in a thimble. There’s the principle involved, sure, but as I see it far too much energy was invested in protesting an app which no one was using anyway.

Many readers challenge themselves with books in other languages. Usually they have to install a translation dictionary in order to catch the nuances, but there are other options.

Yesterday a friend on Twitter pointed me at Duolir, an iOS app which offers an instantaneous translation feature.

While instant translation is nothing new, most current examples involve mechanical translation of the text;  an article is fed through either Google or Bing Translate and the result is spat out – errors and all.

Duolir goes one step better.  This platform offers dual-language ebooks which have been specially made so you can click on each sentence and read the sentence in another language.

In practice it looks something like this:

That’s a nifty trick, but it’s not exactly a new one.

Google does something similar with Google Translate, and you can also find ebooks like the ones in Duolir on another site, DoppleText. Those ebooks work in (almost?) any app which supports Epub. They also reportedly work on the Kindle, but I would test that first.

I was also told on Twitter that a French publisher had shown a proof of concept several years ago. That example reportedly used Javascript in Epub3, although I haven’t found a file which shows it. (Thanks, Jiminy!)

If you would like to see a similar trick in action, ReadBeyond.it posted a demo ebook. It doesn’t work quite the same as Duolir, but it does work in iBooks and in the Menestrello app. (Thanks, Alberto!)

The ReadBeyond.it translations look like this:

This is a pretty well-known trick, so you’re probably wondering why it’s not more widely used.

While Duolir offers around 50 titles, and Doppletext has around 40 public domain titles, that’s just a drop in the bucket in comparison to the hundreds if not thousands of books where this could be used.

If I had to guess, I’d bet that the cost of making the ebook is probably the killer. There isn’t a huge market for this feature, not compared to releasing two separate single language ebooks, so it is difficult to justify the expense.

And that’s a shame, because on a technical level this is nifty.

Goodreads may have picked up tricks from their corporate parent since being bought by Amazon in 2012, but beta testing new features was apparently not one of them.

The social network added new relationship options on Friday. Ostensibly intended to better define how authors and the hoi polloi interact, the new options are causing more problems than they solved.

Update: GR posted an update on Monday with the news that they fixed most of the problems described in this post.

Where under the old setup you could be a friend or a fan of an author (or both), the new system offers "three ways you can choose to engage with author pages on Goodreads" : friend, follow, or favorite.

While I’m sure it sounds like follow is simply a new name for fan and that favorite is a brand new option, it’s more complicated than that.  The relationships friend:fan and friend:follow:favorite don’t match up cleanly.

To start with, the old system had members forming connections with authors, while under the new system members "engage with author pages" – and yes, that is the way GR framed the interactions.

Yes, authors are no longer members of Goodreads; they’re now pages. In other words, Goodreads sees authors as things.

Goodreads apparently made this change so that they could set up profiles for authors not on GR. Looking at how they talk about it in the FAQ, I think they plan to use the unclaimed profiles for marketing purposes:

Why would I want to Follow an author who isn’t a member of Goodreads?
First, we’re working really hard to get every author to join the Author Program. When an author you’re Following joins, you’ll automatically start receiving their updates. Additionally, we want this to be the way you keep up with the latest from all the authors that matter to you, regardless of whether they are on Goodreads or not.

Why would I want to Follow a dead author? Isn’t that kind of morbid?
Well, it’s not likely that Mark Twain is going to claim his author profile and start writing pitch-perfect reviews of contemporary novels (though if he did, that would be pretty cool, right? OK, it’d also be a little creepy). The short answer here is that we want “Follow” to be a way for all our members to get updates about all of the authors that matter to them, living or dead, in the author program or not.

So Goodreads snuck in a marketing plan in with an update to the structure of their social network.

I think I could have swallowed it, or at least I wouldn’t have noticed, had Goodreads not mucked up the change.

Numerous Goodreads members have responded to the announcement with complaints that the existing "friend" relationship has morphed into a mutant friend+follow engagement. Anyone who was a friend of an author is now both a friend and a follower of an author page.

That would not be an issue of not for the simple fact that unfollowing an author page also breaks the friend engagement with that page.

Apparently it escaped Goodreads' attention that a member might be a friend of an author because they like the person while at the same time not having any interest the books that person writes.

I don’t know why GR missed it (other than that GR sees authors as things and not people), but that makes perfect sense to me. I know several people who write stuff which I would not read to save my life, but I would still regard most of them as friends*.

And to make matters worse, there are GR members who didn’t even know that their friend was also an author until the changeover:

This is beyond frustrating. I don’t want to "follow" dead people. I don’t want to "follow" most of my author friends, many of whom I all of a sudden realize are authors. I would be okay with substituting the word "follow" for what used to be "fan," though I don’t see what that improves.

And even authors aren’t happy with the change:

I write erotic romance and erotica. When before I was able to "vanish" in the number of friends a friend had, without drawing attention to the kind of genres I write, now that is obviously over.

There are scholars, teachers and civil servants among my friends. Do you seriously mean to expose them openly like that? I understand everyone of them who deletes me from their list.

There are now some 400 responses to the announcement, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who like the change.

In any reasonable world, that would be enough to encourage Goodreads to revert to the old system.  Then again, in that reasonable world Goodreads would first have tested the new set up before inflicting it upon users.

As it stands, we’re probably stuck with the munged together  system. Goodreads has promised to reconsider the change, but I don’t have much hope that they’ll fix the damage they caused.

Goodreads

Thanks, Glinda!

image by Appelez moi thibal

The US trade book market (or at least, the part of the market for which data can be had) closed out 2014 with a slight growth overall and in ebooks, but the news from France was mixed.

The market research firm GfK  reported this week that their latest estimates show that the French book market declined by 1.3% in 2014, to 3.9 billion euros. The decline was driven by a 1.4% drop in the number of units sold, to 351 million.

While the loss was minimal, GfK noted that this was the fourth consecutive year in which French book purchases declined. They estimate that 26 million French aged 15 and older bought a book last year, with 60% of purchases made by women.

That includes ebooks, which were the one bright spot in this week’s report. Paid ebook downloads increased by 60% in 2014, to 8 million copies sold. The estimated market value was 64 million euros.

For those of you who don’t have a calculator handy (or whose mother and grandmother weren’t both teachers) GfK is telling us that ebooks made up about 1.54% of the French book market in 2014.

That sounds shockingly low, but I don’t have any data to contradict it. In fact, i don’t have any other data at all.

I know of one public source of sales data which might shed light on the French book market, and that would be the publishing conglomerate Lagardère. This media company owns book publishers in the US, UK, France, and elsewhere, and they recently released their annual report for 2014.

Unfortunately for us, Lagardère isn’t saying anything about ebook sales in France. They do say that ebooks made up 26% of US revenue and 31% of UK revenue. and that digital accounted for 10.3% of Lagardère Publishing’s revenues.

But all they’ll say about the French ebook market is that it is "still at an early stage" (source, see slide 11).

While we shouldn’t read to much into Lagardère’s reticence, it does tend to support GfK’s claim that the French ebook market doesn’t amount to much.

Frankly, that comes as a surprise.

GfK via Actualitte

image by Piano Piano!

High taxes on ebooks may be the law in the EU, but it’s certainly not a popular one.

Following just two short weeks after the EU high court ruled that ebooks aren’t actually books and thus could not be taxed as such, the Culture Ministers of Germany, France, Poland, and Italy released a joint statement decrying that ruling.

Declaring "a book is a book, no matter the form", the culture ministers* jointly called on the European Commission to take steps to change EU law so that paper books and ebooks carried the same VAT rate.

There’s no English language version of the statement, but the French language version came through Google Translate reasonably clearly:

Books are essential to the development and circulation of knowledge and culture. They play a crucial role in promoting cultural diversity, one of the greatest strengths of Europe, and reinforce the sense of European citizenship. The promotion of reading and literature should be at the heart of our cultural policies. 

The digital age offers huge opportunities for the future of books and literature, particularly to encourage reading among young people. Support innovation in the book industry is the only way to meet expectations, evolving, readers and creators.

Whether printed or dematerialized, it is the content that makes the book and not the way in which the reader will have access. A book is a book, whatever its shape.

For these reasons, we are convinced of the need to apply the same reduced rate of VAT to the digital book as the printed book. The principle of technological neutrality must be clearly stated at the European level so that innovation and development of digital books are not compromised.

The culture ministers are responding to a recent decision handed down by the European Court of Justice. The ECJ had ruled that France and Luxembourg had violated EU law when the two countries had reduced the VAT collected on ebooks.

That case has been thoroughly reported before, so I won’t repeat myself here.

I will note, though, that this debate has taken on a life of its own. When Luxembourg first changed its tax laws 3 years ago, it looked like a cynical tax move intended to encourage businesses to set up shop in the Grand Duchy.

But now we have minsters in four of the stronger EU member nations pushing for the EU to revise its tax laws. I’ve long believed that ebooks should be taxed at the lower rate, and now that it is a cause célèbre there is a high probability that the laws will change.

In about 4 or 5 years.

Call it realism or pessimism, I don’t expect the EU to move much faster than that.

P.S.  The four culture ministers are: Fleur Pellerin, French Minister of Culture and Communication; Monika Grütters, Delegate of the German Federal Government for Culture and Media; Dario Franceschini, Minister of Property, the Cultural Activities and Tourism of Italy; and Malgorzata Omilanowska, Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.

Lesen.net, Actualitte

image by kodomut

We still don’t know for sure when Google’s Project Ara will make its way to store shelves, but when it does arrive it will have some nifty options. In addition to a cornucopia of CPU, screen, camera, and other options, Project Ara owners will be able to add a radiation sensor.

The Russian company Intersoft unveiled a prototype dosimeter-radiometer sensor at the second Ara developers conference (in January, but it only crossed my desk today). The DO-RA.Modul takes Intersoft’s existing sensor tech and shrinks it down to about the size of a postage stamp:

Intersoft’s been working on the module since at least last July. They’ve also developed an Android app to control the sensor, and they’re hoping to have both available at the end of the year.

And given that the new module is only about a third the size of Intersoft’s existing products, I’d say that they’re going to pull it off. The current dosimeter-radiometer sensor is designed to plug into a smartphone’s headphone jack (iPhone, for example) and feed data to an app. It launched last summer with a price around $150.

Speaking of nifty modules for Project Ara, Lapka is also working on a bevy of sensors ranging from CO2 to an EKG to a glucometer.

As you may know, this company has its own modular sensor platform, and it’s using its past experience and know-how to turn a Project Ara smartphone into an honest-to-goodness tricorder:

I can’t find any way to tell whether those are functional models, and not just a concept mock up, but it’s nifty nonetheless.

I learned of Lapka’s plans a few weeks ago, and while I can’t wait to see them come to market I do have to wonder about the practicality. Sure, the above concept is nifty, but did you notice that the CPU and battery modules are missing?

I think that could make it a little hard to use all those sensors, don’t you?

PhoneBloks