When the new XO tablet didn’t ship last year, OLPC and its efforts to build educational hardware fell off my radar, and that’s why I was surprised to discover the XO Duo laptop today.

One Education, OLPC’s partner non-profit in Australia and New Zealand, is now selling a version of the XO-4 Touch laptop which runs Android:

This device runs Android Jelly Bean on a dual-core 1.2Ghz CPU with 2GB RAM and 8GB internal storage.  It has 2 USB ports, an HDMI port, Bluetooth, Wifi, and it is specced to have an estimated 8 hours of battery life.

The screen measures 7.5″, and packs in a touchscree on top of a Pixel Qi-based dual-mode display that offers both a color mode and a sunlight visible grayscale mode.

It just came across my desk today, but from what I can find the XO Duo has been available to schools in Australia (and on the One Education website) since early last year.

The list price is $250 AUD. That looks like highway robbery for an Android device, but given that this laptop is both much more easily repaired than your average Android and comes with educational software, I’m inclined to avoid passing judgement.

If nothing else, this laptop could double as a training platform so kids could learn the basics of electronics repair as applied to the gadgets they break. And since it runs Android it is also far more open than Sugar, the OS which was originally developed for XO hardware.

P.S. This device turned up while I was looking into reports that One Education is developing a new laptop called the XO Infinity. I have yet to find much, but what I’ve found so far is exciting. Stay tuned.

Many startups have made a go of producing enhanced ebooks, and so far no one has had much luck in creating a real market. But  Clare Swanson , writing for Publishers Weekly, thinks that HarperCollins has found a way forward.

Swanson is pointing at the success of the enhanced version of Chris Kyle’s novel*, American Sniper, and asking whether it’s a sign that the time of enhanced ebooks has come:

For the first three weeks of the new year, the enhanced edition of Chris Kyle’s memoir,American Sniper, led Apple’s iBooks bestseller list, consistently landing several spots above the title’s standard e-book. Its hot streak was a rare victory for enhanced e-books (especially over their unenhanced counterparts). On the whole, sales of enhanced e-books have fallen short of expectations since publishers began investing in the format, which incorporates video and other interactive features, roughly five years ago.

Is American Sniper’s place at the top of Apple’s chart a one-off occurrence, owing to the popularity of the film adaptation (which raked in six Oscar nominations), or is it a harbinger of good things to come for enhanced e-books—pointing to a new trend, enhancing titles with TV and film adaptations, that may help publishers sell what has been a historically difficult format to market?

I was going to add that article to the Monday morning links post, but then I got interested in the idea and decided to answer the question.

It took me about 10 minutes.

In short, yes, this is a one-off success and not a bellwether for a new market, and I have a simple explanation as to why.

Swanson failed to mention one important detail in her article: price.

The enhanced version of American Sniper is selling in iBooks and the Kindle Store for $5.99 and $5.86, respectively. That is far cheaper than most enhanced ebooks, so until it is possible to sell most (all?) enhanced ebooks that cheaply, this work is an outlier and not a forerunner for a rising market.

What’s more, given that the audio and video added to enhanced ebooks have a higher production cost than your average ebook, we also need to ask whether HarperCollins is making much of a profit on this title. (This ebook has 12 video interviews of the late author.) I don’t think they’d sell it for $6 if they were losing money, but I also don’t think they’re earning a whole lot.

And since HC has reported that they’ve sold 166,000 copies, I think it’s safe to assume that (at best) this is not a huge money maker which has justified the initial investment.

And so the success of this title is not something to get excited over. That is regrettable; I think enhanced ebooks are cool on a technical level. I’d like to see a market for them, but I just don’t expect that to happen.

P.S. In July of last year the Kyle estate lost a $1.8 million libel lawsuit brought by Jesse Ventura, thus proving that Chris Kyle is a very colorful storyteller and that this work is not biographical.

P.P.S. Coincidentally, the enhanced edition ranked higher in iBooks than in the Kindle Store following the release of the movie. Remember how Keith Moerer, the Apple Director of iBooks, said at the DBW conference last month that Apple did well with cross-promoting movies, music, and ebooks? I think we have an example to show what he meant.

images by melenita2012, clasesdeperiodismo

Here’s a late Friday night surprise for you.

Amazon has quietly expanded the Kindle Store with ebooks in 5 additional languages: Russian, Hindi, Polish, Latin and Hungarian.

Here’s one:

Amazon’s usually pretty fastidious about the languages they support in the Kindle Store (they’ll even tell you which ones are supported),  but lately there’s been a rupture between the languages  Amazon will let you upload and the ones which they’re selling.

There’s been no official announcement from Amazon, and they haven’t expanded the list of supported languages in KDP, but I can report that you will find the 5 languages listed in the foreign language section of the Kindle Store.

Of the 5, only Russian and Hindi have more than a handful of titles. There are 87 Hindi titles, and an unknown number of Russian titles.  I don’t know how many Russian titles are available, but I can report that Russian is listed as one of the 8 primary languages.

That detail is worth noting because each of the 7 other languages have their own national bookstore in their respective countries, and that suggests that the Kindle Store will launch soon in Russia.

And by soon, I mean very soon. If you’ll take a moment and visit Kindle.ru, you may note that the error 502 message is in Russian – in Amazon orange font.

That is most definitely not a coincidence.

The-eBook.org

Sometime in the past month Harlequin quietly shuttered its vanity press imprint Dellarte Press, replacing its website with a notice that the business is closing.

Harlequin was the second major US publisher to partner with famed vanity press Author Solutions when Harlequin launched Harlequin Horizons in 2009 (it was later renamed to Dellarte Press). That vanity press service launched only weeks after Christian publisher Thomas Nelson (a HarperCollins sub) eschewed the Ten Commandments and launched WestBow Press. 

Operated by Author Solutions with Harlequin acting as a front, Dellarte Press operated on a simple business model: sell authors overpriced bundles of self-pub services while at the same trying to upsell them additional useless marketing services.

As you can tell from my word choice, I have a low opinion of these services; the professional author groups had similar low opinion in 2009, which leads me to Harlequin Horizons' colorful early history, and why it was renamed.

The launch of Harlequin Horizons was not well received. The Romance Writers of America and the SFWA both responded by blacklisting Harlequin. They announced that titles published by any of Harlequin’s imprints would no longer count towards an author’s membership in the organizations. The Mystery Writers of America made a similar threat (it’s not clear if they followed through). And finally,  Preditors & Editors changed its listing for Harlequin to that of Vanity Publisher.

As a result of the pressure, Harlequin subsequently renamed Harlequin Horizons to Dellarte Press while also removing much of the Harlequin branding from the website.

DellArte Press has gotten little press in the subsequent 5 years, before it was abruptly shuttered sometime in the past month. The closure was only noticed this past week by Victoria Strauss of Writer’s Beware and by Mick Rooney of The Independent Publishing Magazine. Details are still scarce at this time (I’m still waiting to hear back from Harlequin) so I can’t tell you why Dellarte was closed or what will happen to the existing contracts authors may have had with Dellarte.

Rooney reports that Dellarte closed because it was a bust; he reports that it only shipped 16 titles in 5 years (I found 17 titles listed on Amazon). I don’t see how that could be true, but at this time I don’t have any evidence to the contrary.

I would think that the books distributed by Dellarte are now being handled by one of Author Solution’s many tentacles divisions, and thus bear a new publishing imprint, but I haven’t been able to confirm that supposition.

In any case, Harlequin is the second publisher to cut ties with Author Solutions; F&W Media’s Writer’s Digest ended its relationship last June when it closed Abbott Press. A couple months later Writer’s Digest opened a new imprint, Blue Ash Publishing, in partnership with the much more palatable and ethical BookBaby.

Author Solutions' current partners include Lulu, Barnes & Noble, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins, as well as several different units of Author Solution’s parent company, Penguin Random House.

Amazon launched its subscription ebook service in Canada and Mexico on Thursday. Readers in those two countries can now read as much as they like for only $10 (CDN) or 129 pesos per month.

The readers won’t find many best-sellers or traditionally published titles, but they can choose from a catalog of over 750,000 mainly self-published titles which includes a few titles like the Hunger Games trilogy,  the Harry Potter series, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Interpreter of Maladies, Flash Boys, and The Giver and Wonder Boys.

That’s a smaller catalog than that of Oyster, which boasts 1 million ebook titles at a cost of $10 per month, or Scribd, which also offers 1 million titles (ebooks, audiobooks, and comic books) for $9 a month.

Today’s launch follows the US launch by close to 7 months. The gradual global rollout of Kindle Unlimited continues to support my theory that Amazon only launches KU in a market where they can guarantee a certain minimum number of titles from local publishers.

This would explain why KU didn’t launch in Canada at the same time as in the US, or that the Mexico launch didn’t happen alongside the launch in Spain last November.

Kindle Unlimited boasts 15,000 French language titles in Canada, and 30,000 titles in Spanish in Mexico.

With reselling digital music now legal in the US, and app resales legal in Europe, Bloomberg raises the question of whether consumers should be able to resell the digital content they acquire:

Should consumers be allowed to resell digital songs, books, or video games once you’re done with your downloads? If it sounds unlikely, just remember that businesses trafficking in second-hand records and books were once considered controversial before society came to accept them as normal—at least up until the Internet undermined the logic of resale. The next several years should be key to whether a similar industry emerges for digital goods.

…

The big difference is that digital media items don’t get old. Used books or albums are worth less than new copies because they deteriorate with use, and it takes some effort to pass each copy from person to person. A "used" digital file, though, is exactly as valuable as the original and just as easy to distribute. The U.S. Copyright Office has already recognized that digital goods are fundamentally different from physical ones—first-sale doctrine, it has said, works only because of the specific nature of physical objects.

Aside from the author’s misunderstanding that media conglomerates like Fox would benefit from a digital resale market which would cut into the sale of new copies, it’s a smart article and it asks a question which needs to be answered.

Should consumers have this option?

As a consumer rights advocate, I think they should. And as a blogger I can report that ReDigi is "working with one of the world’s largest booksellers" to launch a used ebook marketplace later this year, but in all honesty I don’t think there’s really all that much interest.

I know that’s not the fiery response some might expect, but after watching the ebook market for the past 5 years I’ve come to believe that there’s little or no market pressure for the resale of digital content.

The consumers who most want to resell the content they buy have been voting with their pocketbooks. They’ve been buying physical media, and reselling that when they were through. They’ve been removing themselves from the market, and without them there’s less interest in the idea.

Take textbooks, for example.  College students need to resell the textbooks they buy, and since you can’t resell a digital textbook most students don’t buy it in the first place. Sure, some are being sold. But as we’ve seen from the failure of digital textbook startups like Kno and Coursesmart, there’s not enough to sustain a market for new digital sales, much less resales of previously sold content.

What’s more, I think digital piracy may be having an effect on the potential for a resale market. Those who can least afford to buy have taken to piracy instead, effectively dampening their interest in either selling or buying digital content when it is resold. And those who most object to the restrictions of DRM, or the lack of control it engenders, are also taking to piracy.

And without the interested buyers, there’s no market. Or am I wrong?

images by mikecogh, Sapphireblue

Monday’s news that Kobo has a couple new ereaders in the works has borne unexpected fruit. While I still don’t have any additional details on the devices themselves, I can report that the details on the screens have turned up a related opportunity.

A reader has found a German electronics wholesaler which says it has E-ink screens in stock. (Thanks, Micheal!) According to its website, Beck is now carrying a variety of screen sizes ranging from 6″ to 13.3″ – including the 6″ 300 dpi screen found on the Kindle Voyage.

This is not the first time I’ve seen E-ink screens for sale as components, but I was surprised to see a company claiming to offer the screen from the Voyage. I had thought that Amazon had had an exclusive on that screen, but now I see I might have been wrong.

I’m still waiting for pricing and technical details from Beck Elektronik, so at this time I can’t report on the specific condition of the screens – whether they are sold with bare cables or with an adapter board included.

Either is possible.

E-ink screens made by Pervasive Displays, E-ink’s partner in the DIY and hardware development market, are available both with and without those adapter boards. Pervasive Displays makes screens with sizes ranging from 1.44″ to 10.2″, all of which have unusual screen resolutions.

You won’t find them in ereaders, but you can find them through electronics wholesalers – DigiKey, for example. AdaFruit is also carrying a few products, although those are more intended for DIY market rather than hardware development.

As you can see from the prices on Digi-Key, the screens run pretty expensive when sold as a single component. I can’t tell you the prices Beck will be charging with any certainty, although I would expect the Voyage’s screen and the 13.3″ screens to be expensive. I’ve been told by Netronix that E-ink is selling the latter to device makers at $150 a pop.

Speaking of the screen on the Kindle Voyage, this new report increases the odds that Kobo’s new "Alyssum" device has a 6″ screen, and not the 6.8″ screen which I suggested on Monday. If Beck really does have that screen, then it would mean Kobo might as well.

And that is why I am doing breathing exercises at the thought that Kobo might launch a Kindle Voyage competitor this spring. At this point that is pure speculation, but I will be keeping an eye out just in case.

Beck

Companies, creators, and groups have long used free prizes to draw the attention of the public, and now Amazon wants to turn it to their advantage.

The retailer launched a new giveaway service on Tuesday which looks to simplify and automate the process of running a promotional contest online. Anyone who has an account with Amazon can launch a giveaway contest and offer contestants just about any prize they want – just so long as it’s carried in Amazon’s warehouses.

The contests can be set up so the first X participants get the prize, or every Xth participant receives one, thus guaranteeing either a frenzy or a long term build to a finale. The costs of the prizes (as well as shipping and taxes) will have to be paid in advance, but Amazon assures us that any unawarded prizes will refunded and the costs reimbursed.

To get the ball rolling, Amazon is offering a few contests of their own. The first can be entered simply by clicking on the icon, but to enter the other two you will need to follow Amazon on Twitter and let Amazon’s Twitter app have access to your twitter account.

I can’t speak for you, but that is a turn off for me.

While this looks like a useful service which could make a lot of practical sense, I noticed that there are a couple obvious improvements Amazon could make.

I’ve looked over the Amazon Giveaway FAQ carefully and browsed the site, and I can’t find any way for someone to launch a contest and give away an ebook or other digital content.

I would have though digital content would be the ideal prize. The production and distribution cost for even a large number of prizes is minimal, and Amazon could turn the contest to their advantage by suggesting that the winning contestants add the music or ebook to their Amazon account.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t even let you give away an ebook which is in the Kindle Store (nor Kindles), so that idea is out. And that a shame, because I would bet that publishers would like the chance to give away a limited number of copies of their more expensive books – or at least the chance to test the idea.

If nothing else, it would make a change from simply putting the ebook on sale.

TechCrunch

Long the go-to site for declassified US govt documents, The Black Vault has recently faced a setback in its efforts to digitize and upload records from Project Bluebook, the US Air Force’s decades long program which documented UFO sightings and alien contact reports.

It seems that Ancestry.com did not take kindly to The Black Vault copying some of the record which Fold3, an Ancestry.com subsidiary, had digitized and placed online. John Greenewald, founder of The Black Vault, reports that he’s had to take down all Project Bluebook uploads:

It is with great frustration to announce, that Ancestry.com, and their subsidiary Fold3, has laid down a claim to copyright on the Project Blue Book material – which has long been labeled as “public domain” by the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA).   Ancestry.com is claiming ownership to the digital version of this material – despite me having records that Fold3 doesn’t even have in their archive and I received under the FOIA starting back in 1996.  They simply claimed it was 100% theirs and I was forced to remove it.

I haven’t confirmed this with Ancestry.com, but Motherboard did get a comment from the company. "It’s about electronic theft," Ancestry.com spokeswoman Heather Erickson told Motherboard. "[Greenewald] can go over to the national archives and digitize the records, but he used our copies. We asked him to take them down, it’s a permissions issue."

Ancestry.com is either blatantly abusing the DMCA notice to take down content over which they don’t have a copyright, or they think they can claim copyright on the basis of having scanned the documents.

Either way, it’s complete hogwash.

Just to be clear, all documents created by the US government are automatically in the public domain. This isn’t true for all national governments, but US copyright explicitly excludes works of the federal government.

Since Ancestry.com can’t claim to have created the original public domain documents, its copyright claim would have to derive from a type of "sweat of their brow" copyright claim. In other words, the work invested in scanning the documents justifies the copyright claim.

While that argument would stand up in some countries, it fails in the US.

The US Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that (Feist v RTS Co, 1991) the mechanical act of gathering together facts into a single place isn’t enough to deserve a copyright. While the Feist case was focused on the copyright status of phonebooks, it is arguably applicable in this situation:

The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. See Harper & Row, supra, at 547-549. Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity.

One could argue that I took that out of context, but Project Gutenberg, which has itself been scanning documents for 4 decades now, has expressed a similar legal opinion.

They believe that digitizing, proofreading, scanning, or other mechanical alterations to public domain documents do not meet the minimum threshold to meet the definition of original work, and thus don’t qualify for copyright:

Work performed on a public domain item, known as sweat of the brow, does not result in a new copyright. This is the judgment of Project Gutenberg’s copyright lawyers, and is founded in a study of case law in the United States. This is founded in the notion of authorship, which is a prerequisite for a new copyright. Non-authorship activities do not create a new copyright.

If I wanted to, I could cite a half-dozen other legal opinions on the topic, but I don’t see the point. Ancestry.com has no legal basis to make a copyright claim.

Now, they could be planning to sue over The Black Vault’s abuse of Fold3’s TOS, but that would have nothing to do with copyright. That is a contract issue, and filing a DMCA notice in such a situation is no more or less than copyright bullying.

image  by Skley, CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES

Amazon will probably never satisfy typography enthusiasts but that doesn’t mean they’re not continually improving the fonts they offer on the Kindle platform.

A couple months ago Amazon quietly started rolling out a new font for the Kindle platform. There was no announcement, and the font is still not widely available, but if you read on your Fire tablet then you may have gotten a little pop up telling you that there is a new font choice available.

The font is called Bookerly, and for those of you without a Fire tablet, here it is on the right (Georgia is on the left):

I’ve been reading with the new font this afternoon, and I’m not sure what to say. Sure, it looks a little nicer, but I was fine with the existing fonts. I never really had a complaint against Amazon’s font choices (justification is another matter).

I’ve been in ebooks long enough to know that ebooks used to look much worse than they do now, so when I hear the font purists complaining I simply tune them out and go back to reading.

What do you think of the new font?

If you haven’t had a chance to try Bookerly yet, there is a way for you to install it.

The font is not available on my Kindle iPad app nor on the Kindle Android app I checked. And I also have reports that it’s not available on E-ink Kindles either. But if you would like to try it, one helpful soul over on XDA Forums extracted the font files and I have them posted as a ZIP file.

If you’ve hacked your kindle, you can sideload the font. You can also embed the font in an ebook file (Epub or KF8).

What do you think?

One Man and His Blog

While readers are flocking to subscription ebook services in droves, the concept is facing increased legal opposition in France.

In December Fleur Pellerin, the French Minister of Culture, called for the legality of subscription ebook services to be investigated, and now a group of French publishers are taking the position that it is illegal.

The Syndicat National de l’Edition  (SNE) released a statement today which reads (translated by Google):

After careful consideration and legal analysis, the Office of SNE is concluded last December that the subscription offers whose prices are not set by the publishers are not legal, and except as specified by the 2011 Law on the price of digital books, namely the collective use offers proposed for vocational purposes, higher education or research. In these sectors, in fact, multi-subscription offers publishers have long been at the initiative of the publishers themselves, and correspond to the specific characteristics of their business models. In contrast, the market for "mainstream", the law does not allow multi-vendor subscription offers only subscription offers consist of one editor, who control the price.

France is one of a number of countries in Western Europe that has fixed price book laws which require booksellers to offer books at the prices set by publishers.

In letting users read as many books as they want for a flat monthly fee of 10 euros, Amazon is in effect setting the price itself, and SNE believes this is illegal. And they could well be correct, although we will need to wait for the French government to finish its investigation before we know for sure.

Kindle Unlimited launched in France just under two month ago with around 20,000 titles in French and over 700,000 titles in English and other languages. It’s now available in the US and 5 countries in Europe, and it’s facing increased opposition both from indie authors, some of whom blame it for a decrease in revenue, and from major publishers.

Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of Hachette Livre, has gone on the record in opposition to the idea of subscription ebooks. The French blog IDBoox quoted him as saying in December that Hachette will be the last to get into this market.

Hachette Livre is the parent company of Hachette Book Group, one of the two Big 5 US publishers which have yet to sign deals with any of the subscription ebook services (the other publisher is Penguin Random House).

IDBoox

image by jeroen_bennink

The AAP released its monthly Statshot report, and with one month left in the AAP’s annual reporting cycle it’s safe to say that 2014 was a good year for American trade publishers.

The Association of American  Publishers announced today that revenues for trade publishers were up 3.7% in the first 11 months of 2014.  Paperbacks made a surprising resurgence, while ebooks showed solid growth and hardback revenues declined.

The total revenue reported by the 1,209 trade publishers was $6.5 billion, up from $6.3 billion. The adult segment dropped by 1.4% to $4.3 billion, while the YA/kids segment continued to show strong growth. It was up 20.7% for the year, reaching $1.7 billion.

In terms of formats, revenues from hardback sales dropped by just under a percent, to $2.3 billion, while ebooks were up 4.5% (to $1.4 billion) and paperbacks were up 8.3%, to $1.9 billion.

And for the first time I can also report that downloadable audiobooks were up 26%, to $147 million, while physical audiobooks droped 8%, to $65 million.

As always, all I received was the standard press release, which included these details and not much more:

While we’re on the topic of book revenue stats, earlier today Shelf Awareness posted this useful little chart. It shows all of the date which the AAP is tracking but not releasing to the press (it’s for sale).

I think it offers a useful perspective of just how large the trade industry is vs the rest of book publishing.

The rumors that Amazon is interested in RadioShack store leases has lead some to wonder what Amazon would do with the spaces, and today Amazon spontaneously answered that question.

The retailer officially launched its new something at Purdue University today. Purdue is one of the three US universities that has an affiliate deal with Amazon, and like UMass-Amherst Purdue has a contract for Amazon to supply textbooks. But one way that Purdue differs from other schools is that it now has an Amazon "unstore" (my word) open on campus. (Amherst has a textbook annex where Amazon will probably install an unstore, but that hasn’t happened yet.)

According to the press release, the square footage of the location is about 2300 sq ft, and it isstaffed by Amazon personnel. It’s located in the Krach Leadership Center at Purdue University, and is described as a "customer order pickup and drop-off location". Amazon also shared this render of what it looks like:

As you can see, this isn’t actually a store. There are lockers, a customer service desk, and a drop off location, but no actual product on display.

In fact, I wouldn’t even call this a retail location, which is why I coined the term "unstore". Amazon’s pop-up stores came closer to being retail stores than this new unstore, but in spite of the incongruity of that comparison I think this image says a lot.

If Amazon does secure those RadioShack leases, this is about what I would expect the stores to look like after they are remodeled. This image probably also offers a few clues about the customer service location which Amazon is said to be planning for the office building it recently leased in Manhattan. That will likely have a very different interior, but both locations will share certain elements.

What’s more, we might even see this idea replicated on other college campuses. As I pointed out last August, Amazon is encircling US universities with delivery lockers located in off-campus convenience stores. If the Purdue location works out, Amazon could decide to rent space on other campuses.

Of course, all this speculation could be a case of putting the cart before the horse. We don’t know yet whether the idea will work, much less whether Amazon wants to expand.

For as long as I’ve known them, Amazon has always released free tools which you could use to make ebooks to sell in the Kindle Store. That’s a common modus operandi for tech companies, so when a reader told me today that Amazon was charging for an en ebook making app, I was surprised.

Kindle Convert is a $19 app which is designed to help users digitize their archives. Based on the description, I would say that this is less intended to create a sellable ebook than to help users make a more accessible copy of any scanned documents and images.

The app is only available to US residents, and it’s only available for Windows 7 and 8.

Amazon says that the app works by turning scans of English-language printed books and documents into ebooks. A user can either elect to leave a scanned page as an image, or run the image through Amazon’s OCR software and convert it to text. If you stick with the image, you can crop the image, rotate it, center it on a page, and perform other basic image editing tricks. The text generated via OCR can be edited to remove errors, and styled.

Once a user is done cleaning up the source material, they can save the resulting ebook to their Kindle account. There’s no way to upload an ebook to the Kindle Store, but the app does offer the option of delivering the ebook to any of a user’s Kindle apps or devices.

As I said earlier in this post, this tool is intended for personal use, and not for making ebooks to sell. I suppose you could use it for that purpose, though; it would just require a few extra steps.

I do find it curious, though, that Amazon made those extra steps difficult and slapped a price tag on this app.

Kindle Convert is Amazon’s 5th ebook creation tool, and it’s the first one Amazon has charged for. KindleGen, Kindle Comic Creator, Kindle Kids Book Creator, and Kindle Textbook Creator are all free downloads for Windows and OSX.

This app is $19, and it is probably an experiment on Amazon’s part. They want to see if they can sell this kind of app, and in this case I think the price is worth it.

Thanks, Timothy!

HP’s efforts in the edtech market may not get as much press as its printers, but this tech giant continues to invest and today it announced a new deal with OverDrive.

A couple weeks ago HP announced a line of Education Edition tablets and notebooks which are being marketed to 1:1 programs. Those devices come bundled with the HP School Pack, a suite of instructional tools. Today HP is adding the popular OverDrive library ebook app to the pack, and it is also bundling a variety of eBooks and audiobooks specifically curated for HP Education Editions.

More than 100 ebook and audiobook titles will be included. Most, including Alice in Wonderland, A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo and Macbeth, will be public domain works which could have been downloaded for free anyway.  (Librivox is a good source of PD audiobooks, in case you were interested).

When it comes to gadgets in the classroom, the iPad and the Chromebook get most of the press but they’re not the only players in this market. Intel is perhaps the best well-known of the minor players, and it has invested a lot in developing special hard ware designs and academic platform, but all of the major consumer electronics makers are interested.

For example, when the Guilford county schools went with the Amplify tablets in 2013, they chose the NewsCorp sub over HP, Samsung, and Dell (and probably Apple, although I can’t confirm that detail). The latter 3  had each partnered with Pearson to combine its hardware with Pearson’s platform.

On a related note, Apple had a similar deal with Pearson for the LA school district’s botched billion dollar 1:1 program.

In the time since bidding on that Guilford contract, HP has developed its own educational platform. They announced it a couple weeks ago, along with a bunch of new tablets and notebooks. I covered the launch of the tablets, and missed the launch of the platform in the buzz.

HP educational tablets are built around 10″ screens and run either Windows 8.1 or Android 4.4. They are powered by Intel’s Bay Trail Atom Z3735G or Z3735F chips with 1GB or 2GB RAM, 16GB/32GB internal storage, Wifi/BT, a pair of cameras, and a 28.5 WHr battery.

The Android-equipped Pro Slate 10 EE G1 starts at $279, and the Windows-equipped Pro Tablet 10 EE starts at $299 for education and $349 for all other customers. The price includes a 1-year subscription to Office 365 personal, but it’s not clear whether the educational platform comes bundled with the consumer sale.

The tablets in question are being drop tested and are certified to meet the IP52 standard, which makes them not much more rugged than your average consumer device. According to Intel’s website, its tablets meet the same standard and can survive a 2 foot drop.