A new Chrome plugin was uploaded to GitHub last week which enables users to browse the book sections on Amazon’s website and check to see whether the book they are viewing is also available via Oyster.

This ebook subscription service boasts over 1 million titles, and while that is a smaller catalog than the Kindle Store, Oyster does offer titles from major US publishers, including S&S, HarperCollins, HMH, and Macmillan, as well as Pottermore.

And thanks to the plugins, readers have the opportunity to ask themselves if they really want to buy the book they’re looking at, rather than read it in Oyster’s apps for Android, iPad/iPhone, and their web browser.

This plugin is the work of Connor Montgomery, an engineer with Pinterest, and he reports that the plugin checks the book you’re viewing with Oyster’s catalog, and if it finds a match it adds an Oyster icon so you can read the ebook via the subscription ebooks service.

He posted a screenshot (the Oyster icon is in the address bar):

Amazon is known for having a well-made website which is easy for developers to build services which integrate into it, but that advantage is quickly being turned against the retailer.

This isn’t the first plugin which works to divert customers away from Amazon; I know of several that link users to The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites, and a bookstore cooperative in France released a plugin that enabled readers to browse Amazon.fr and buy from a local bookseller.

"Let’s not browse Amazon and not shop there" is almost becoming a cause celebre, is it not?

This plugin is available via GitHub, and it will soon be available in the Chrome Web Store.

GitHub via Dear Author

Just over a year ago the FCC granted US makers of ereader devices a limited exemption from complying with certain accessibility regulations, and this past week the FCC extended that waiver for another year.

As I reported last year, this waiver excuses Amazon et al from having to make ereaders which comply with the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010. This law requires that makers of "advanced communications services" to make sure those services are accessible to the disabled.

That is a generally good idea, but one tiny problem with the law is that the term "advanced communications services" is fairly broadly defined. It covers pretty much everything that connects to the web, from software to services to hardware, including tablets and ereaders.

Naturally this presents a problem for ebook readers, given that most do not offer TTS. Those same ereaders also lack the verbal cues required to make their menus usable by the visually disabled. This lead Amazon, Sony, and Kobo to ask for a waiver in August 2013.

A one year waiver was granted last January, and was extended this week. It’s now set to expire on 28 January, 2016.

The waiver continues to exempt ereaders from this regulation, and defines them as:

• the devices have no LCD screen;
• they have no camera;
• they are not offered or shipped to consumers with built-in email, IM, VoIP or other similar ACS client applications and the device manufacturer does not develop ACS applications for them;
• they are marketed to consumers as reading devices and promotional material about them does not tout the capability to access ACS.

Obviously tablets are excluded from this definition, and so are some ereaders. For example, Onyx and Pocketbook both make devices that have email, or web abilities, or a camera, and so might not be able to enjoy the exemption. Luckily for Onyx and Pocketbook, the devices aren’t sold and marketed in the US, so they can continue to skate the 2010 law.

Not all are happy about the renewed waiver, with David Rothman writing over at Library City:

This decision is a setback not just for disability-related causes but also literacy-related ones. Regardless of what the industry lobbyists say, TTS is reading—just a different kind. Even people without disabilities can benefit, using TTS to whet their interest in a book, and then getting hooked and enjoying the text the usual way. Not to mention all the commuters who could start aurally and continue with traditional reading. A little commonsense and social awareness, please. Can’t this be about more than K Street needs and arcane legal and legislative technicalities?

While I can understand how he feels, if I were in the position to need an accessible device, I think a tablet would suit me just fine. Given how much work Apple has put into the iPad and the accessibility features found in the latest versions of Android, I think they would serve better than an ereader with an E-ink screen.

And while we’re on the topic, let me add that this waiver only covers the one federal regulation. All other regulations, including rules about libraries buying accessible devices and companies making their services accessible to the disabled, still apply.

image by kodomut

Along with Amazon’s Kindle platform, Google Play Books is one of the few ebook platforms which will let you upload your own ebooks to its servers and then download them and read them in an app.

I was recently asked for help on how to upload the files, so I thought it would be useful to document the steps involved and share them.

I don’t use Google Play Books for my main reading app, but I have uploaded several ebooks, and I can tell you that their are 3 different ways to go about it.

You can upload ebooks via your:

• iPhone/iPad
• Android device
• Web browser

Limitations

Before we get to the instructions, let’s first cover the limitations.

• Epub/PDF: Only PDF and Epub files can be uploaded, and not any other type.
• DRM: You can’t upload ebooks with DRM; Google won’t let you (according to Google’s own troubleshooting guide).
• File Size: Only files smaller than 100MB can be uploaded.
• A Thousand And One: Google will only let you upload 1,000 files.

Web Browser

Perhaps the easiest way to upload files is through the web browser on your PC.

To start, you’ll need to have an account with Google.

Open the My Books page on Google Play Books, and look for the upload button.

After you click the button, you should see a window like this. You can click the button and select the file you wish to upload, but I like to open a folder in another window and  simply drag the files from one window to my web browser. It’s convenient and simple.

Once you’ve uploaded the files, you’ll need to wait a while for the upload to finish. If you have a large file, this can take a while.

And once the file has been uploaded, you should be able to read it in your web browser.

iPad/iPhone

In addition to uploading through your computer’s web browser, you can also upload on your iDevice.

You’ll need to have the Google Play Books app installed first, and you’ll also need to have logged into your Google account before you try to upload a file.

Oh, and just so you know, there’s no option for selecting an ebook from inside Google Play Books and choosing to upload it. You’ll need to choose the ebook while you’re in Safari or another app and select the option to open the ebook in the GPB app.

Simply download the file with Safari or another web browser and choose Google Play Books as the app with which you want to open the file:

That will cause the app to open, and you will be prompted to upload the file:

The actual upload process will take some time, depending on the file size and your internet.

Android

You can upload an ebook to Google Play Books from your Android, but like the process for iDevices this process does have a few quirks. You’ll need to have the GPB app installed first, and you’ll need to find the ebook in another app and choose to upload it to GPB.

And if you are uploading a PDF, you’ll first need to go into the GPB app and enable the option before you try to upload the file.

Once you’ve down that, find the ebook you wish to upload in a file manager, your download folder, etc. Select it, and you should be prompted with the option to upload the ebook to GPB.

Choose that option, and the ebook should be uploaded automatically.

Addendum: How to Read Your eBooks

Once you’ve uploaded your ebooks, you can read them in your app or web browser  almost immediately, but before you do that you might want to also take the extra step of downloading the ebook.

One of Google’s less endearing quirks is that they don’t automatically download an ebook when you read it. Instead, they’ll send you bits and pieces of an ebook as you read it.

If you want to use your mobile device to read an ebook offline, you’ll need to specifically tell the Google Play Books apps to download the ebooks. Luckily, the process is pretty simple.

Simply find the ebook you wish to download, and press the "3 dot" menu icon. This will bring up a menu for the ebook.

Here’s what the menus look like on Android and the iPad:

 <- iPad

Android ->

As you can seem on Android the option is labeled "keep on device" while on the iPad the option is appropriately labeled "download".

Troubleshooting

If you have questions, the comment section is open. But you might also want to head over to the forums; that might be the better venue for tech support.

Publishers Weekly has a new article up today on a ebook startup called Trajectory, which has a strikingly familiar business model.

Cal Reid reports that Trajectory is developing a familiar sounding discovery engine:

. Using networked computers, the Trajectory NLPE scans the text of thousands of books, turning each sentence and its components into language data patterns that can be analyzed and extracted. The NLPE charts more than 30 “attributes” in the text of a book, including length, chapter, pace, intensity, mood, word type, and reader age. Using this data the NLPE can identify other scanned books that share similar attributes and language patterns.

Rather than comparing a book buyer’s purchases for book recommendations—like Amazon and most other online retailers—Trajectory’s technology analyzes and reveals the linguistic structure inherent in the text of a book. The Trajectory NLPE can also capture the emotional content, or “flow of sentiment,” inherent in a book by tracking the occurrence of keywords. The NLPE, Bryant said, can extract a “fingerprint” or a “personality,” from the text that can be used to compare one book to another.

If you think that sounds an awful lot like what Booklamp was doing before it was snatched up by Apple last year, congratulations. You just made a connection which Cal Reid and Porter Anderson both missed.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Booklamp was a quiet little ebook startup which had been working since 2008 on what it called the "book genome project". As I explained it when I covered the acquisition:

Booklamp had developed algorithms which analyzed a book’s structure, pacing, word use, viewpoint, action, dialog, description, perspective, genre, and other details in order to identify a book’s DNA, as it were.

At this point I don’t know how similar the tech is, but clearly the two startups are working from similar ideas in the same general area.

And that raises a few questions, including how Trajectory plans to succeed where Booklamp failed. The latter company sold out to Apple in part because it was a better deal than trying to survive as a digital publishing startup.

Of course, Trajectory might actually benefit from Booklamp’s spectacular exit; now that the idea of this kind of a discovery engine is well-known, Trajectory should find it easier to sign new customers.

If nothing else, trajectory has better looking graphs:

But I could be getting ahead of myself; Trajectory has the feel of a relatively young company:

So far Trajectory has scanned about 30,000 titles, including the HarperCollins catalog (Trajectory acquired the assets of the now-defunct startup Small Demons, which included access to Harper’s e-book catalog) and about 1,000 public domain classics.

According to the LinkedIn profile of Richard Nash, one of the senior folks at Small Demons, the Trajectory deal went down in early 2014.

I’ll have more to report when I get a chance to speak to Trajectory next week.

Sources have been telling me for about 3 months now that Adobe was going to release a Digital Editions app for the iPad, and that app showed up in iTunes yesterday.

And like any new app, it could use some work. In spite of its name, Adobe Digital Editions 4.0.2 for the iPad is very much a beta release of the app.

It offers the same Epub3 support found in the Adobe DE4 app which Adobe launched last fall for Windows and OSX, including rich layouts and embedded audio and video. From the mentions of support for interactive quizzes, and math formulas, it looks to be Adobe’s bid to enter the nascent digital textbook market.

The app doesn’t have much in the way of features yet, but there’s a search function and a timer which will tell you how long you’ve been reading. Readers can bookmark, highlight, or look a word up in the dictionary. There are optional dictionaries for a wide variety of languages from English to Russian to Thai.

The app doesn’t offer many formatting options, but it does let you change the font size and margins (in Epubs). It also has 5 color themes (including white, night, ivory, sepia, and blush):

I’ve been testing the app for a few minutes this morning, and it is rather slow and clunky. It works, but this wouldn’t be my preferred app (even if I hadn’t caught Adobe spying on users several months back).

But if you use Adobe DE 4.0, you might want to install the app. There’s been some speculation that Adobe’s spying activities had been intended to function as a syncing service which would let Adobe DE users share an Adobe account across multiple devices – PC and iPad.

Most of the major ebook platforms offer this kind of sync service, and it would make sense for Adobe to add a similar service. And since it would be useful to some readers, this app is worth a look.

But I also don’t see a way to enable that sync, nor is it mentioned as an option at this time. So there’s really no need to rush out and install the app.

You can find the app in iTunes.

Indie Authors have long paid for advertising to promote their books, and now Amazon is pitching the idea directly.

Self Publishing Review reported this morning that Amazon is now pitching pay-per-click advertising to indies with titles in KDP Select:

According to the quoted parts of the FAQ, Amazon’s offering to run a targeted ad campaign which could either be broadly targeted or could be limited to only certain viewers. This includes the option of a focus as tight as a "customers who previously browsed the Kindle Store for a particular genre". The advertiser would pay for each time a customer clicked on an advert, rather than for each thousand times an ad is shown. The minimum ad budget is $100, and the minimum CPC is 2 cents.

Update: The related page is now live in KDP. Early results are mixed.

I must say, this is new to me. I’ve only ever heard of indies using email newsletter blasts and other offsite promotions, both of which have proven to be quite effective on occasion.

While it has always been possible for indies to buy ads on the Kindle, Amazon’s websites, and on the Fire tablets, this is the first I have heard of Amazon pitching the idea directly inside KDP. It’s almost as if Amazon has decided that KDP is mature enough that it worth pitching services to it.

What next, will Amazon start asking for coop fees?

In all honesty, that is only half a joke. In August 2014 Amazon extended the option of pre-order buttons to all users of KDP, both indie author and publisher alike. Now that Amazon is extending advertising into KDP Select, the next obvious step would be for Amazon to let indies stat paying coop and other promotional fees – just like the big boys.

I know some indie authors who have said that they have wanted to be taken seriously as publishers. Congratulations; Amazon is now taking you seriously.

I hope your pocketbooks are deep enough.

Hard on the heels of Tesco pulling out of the UK ebook market comes troubling news from Germany.

A German startup blog reported on Wednesday that txtr is insolvent. The future of the company is not known at this time, but I do know that an administrator has been appointed. Christian Köhler-Ma, a lawyer with Olswang LLP, has been tasked with overseeing txtr’s affairs.

Launched in 2008, txtr was originally focused on developing a 6″ ereader with a novel design. The txtr reader featured 3g connectivity and  a unique interface, but it was plagued by development and production issues.

After the txtr reader was shelved in 2010, txtr pivoted to providing a whitelabel ebookstore platform which built on the cloud services originally developed for the ereader.

Txtr launched its own ebookstore in a number of markets, and it counted companies companies like Sony, Deutsche Telecom, and other telecoms among its customers.

Perhaps txtr’s most well-known customer was 3M, which both invested in the ebook company in 2011 and hired txtr to develop parts of the 3M Cloud Library.

3M remains one of the larger investors in txtr, but I would not count on them to rush in and save the day. I reached out to Tom Mercer, the 3M Cloud Library Marketing Manager, and he told me that:

I can’t comment on txtr or what they will be doing. However, the Cloud Library ended our relationship with txtr and took over development in late 2013. We now develop all of our apps and technology with our own development teams in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Txtr went on to develop a second ereader, the beagle. This 5″ device was designed to be paired with a smartphone and was going to be bundled with and subsidized by new smartphone contracts. No one really liked that idea, so when the beagle finally hit the market it cost as much as the Kindle and did far less.

Needless to say, it flopped – in the European market, at least. The beagle was recently licensed to a Japanese firm and launched in Japan under a new name. The fate of that device is not known at this time.

Txtr has had little good news to report since the beagle flopped, but that’s not to say that the startup hasn’t been busy.

Last summer the team behind txtr launched the ebook subscription service Blloon as a wholly separate ebook startup. At the time, I wondered why the companies were kept apart, but now I think we know the answer.

I can’t speak as to how far in advance they saw this coming, but I do have a source which told me that txtr was supposed to be bought by foreign investors at the end of last year. That deal fell through at last moment.

According to my source, Blloon is an independent company which should not be affected by the bankruptcy. I was also told that some of the txtr shareholders received shares in Blloon before it was spun off last summer. Blloon subsequently launched its ebook subscription service in the UK last fall, and plans to expand into the US and Germany this year.

The fate of txtr is still unknown, but given that a number of key employees now work at Blloon, it is safe to assume that the older company has been abandoned to its fate.

And that’s a shame, and not just because txtr’s customers will get screwed if the servers are turned off. It’s also regrettable because txtr had developed an interesting ebook platform with features that were in some ways better than what is offered by Kobo or Nook.

Thanks, Mik!

Remember last week when a drunk govt employee crashed a quadcopter on the grounds of the White House?

DJI, the company which makes the thousand dollar drone that crashed last week, is a little embarrassed by the irresponsibility of one of their customer, and the bad publicity has inspired them to push forward with a firmware update which adds a number of no-fly zones where the drone will be blocked from operating.

According to Engadget and Time, DJI is pushing out a firmware update for the Phantom 2 drone which will block the drone from being flown anywhere within 15.5 miles of downtown DC. It will also add no-fly zones for US airports.

I’m still waiting for a confirmation from DJI, but at this time I do know that Time is reporting:

The company said it would release what it called a mandatory update for its drone operating system in the coming days. The update would automatically disable drone flights over Washington D.C. and fence off no-fly zones around than 10,000 airports across the country. However, owners of most DJI drones won’t be forced to download the update — those who choose not to install it would just miss out on new features down the road.

“We are pushing this out a bit earlier to lead in encouraging responsible flight,” said DJI spokesperson Michael Perry. “With the unmanned aerial systems community growing on a daily basis, we feel it is important to provide pilots additional tools to help them fly safely and responsibly.”

The Phantom 2 drone costs $899 from DJI (and up) and weighs in at just under 3 pounds. And for those who live in DC, it is now a very expensive paperweight.

And it wouldn’t be possible without DRM.

There have been times where I have been tempted to take a milder position on DRM, but then shit like this happens and I am reminded just how wrong DRM is from concept to practice. While some might claim that DRM exists to protect content creators, time and again it is used to abuse the rights of the end user.

Whether it’s making it impossible to transfer legally bought ebooks between devices, breaking a $200 litter box when it runs out of cleaning solution, or making movies vanish from a user’s account, or blocking users from installing a 3rd-party coffee pod, DRM is clearly a user-hostile technology.

***

Update: A reader has pointed out a key detail which I missed and may change your opinion. It’s illegal to fly drones in DC, a fact which DJL acknowledges on their website. In short, DJI is choosing to enforce federal regulations when they have no obligation to do so.

While that is their privilege, I still object to their decision to retroactively turn a thousand dollar drone into a paperweight.

When news broke yesterday that Blinkbox Books would be shutting down after it failed to find a buyer, I hoped that a 3rd-party would step in and at least save Blinkbox Books customers from losing all of their money.

And now one has.

Blinkbox Books has sent out an email today to its customers today with the news that they will soon become customers of Kobo (if they aren’t already).

The text of the email is at the end of this post. It doesn’t say much beyond announcing the deal, but it does include a link to an FAQ which contains quite a few more details.

The FAQ informs us that Kobo will be taking over Blinkbox Books' customers' accounts. There’s no information on whether the distribution deals will transfer, but a customer’s library and the record of the books they bought will/should make the transition.

The annotations made in an ebook in the Blinkbox Books apps will not transfer, just the record that a customer bought a book, and any credit or vouchers will not be transferred and should be redeemed before 9 February.

Blinkbox Books' customers are advised to open an account at Kobo, if they don’t have one already. Blinkbox Books will be shutting down on 28 February.

Update: Tesco has released a statement:

“We will work together with Kobo to transition users’ libraries to the Kobo service, ensuring they continue to have access to their previously purchased books and have the option to buy new ones from Kobo,” a spokesperson for Blinkbox told TechCrunch. “Those who access blinkbox Books on a Hudl [Tesco’s low-cost tablet] will be able to install the free Kobo reading app on their device. We will be communicating the timelines for the transition in due course.”

In short, this is largely the same deal that Sony struck with Kobo when the Japanese company pulled out of ebooks last year. That deal did not work out so well for all of Sony’s customers, but it was a better alternative than Sony simply walking away.

Thanks, Sam!

As a beloved customer of blinkbox Books, we wanted to let you know as early as possible that sadly, the decision has been made to close blinkbox Books.

Customers who have bought ebooks with blinkbox Books will be moving to Kobo and we’ll be contacting them in 2-3 weeks. If you have not bought any ebooks with us, then we recommend you register with Kobo before we close the business on 28th February 2015.

About Kobo

Kobo offers a comprehensive digital reading ecosystem, which includes a catalogue of more than 4 million eBooks, top-ranking eReading apps, and award-winning devices.

image by LoopZilla

Draft2Digital, an Oklahoma-based ebook distributor, has inked a deal with Tolino to distribute indie published titles through the ebookstores which make up the Tolino consortium. Authors and publishers whose titles make up the 40,000 D2D catalog now have a new sales channel: a network of German, Belgian, Italian, and Dutch booksellers.

Like its larger competitor, Draft2Digital distributes ebooks under a commission (as opposed to fee for service distributors like BookBaby). It currently distributes to Nook, Kobo, iBooks, and Scribd.

With its own ereader and tablets, Tolino represents 1,800 stores spread across 4 countries. It was formed in early 2013  when 4 German media retailers (Thalia, WeltBild, Hugendubel, and Bertelsmann) and Deutche Telekom pooled their resources to better compete with the Kindle Store’s dominance of the German ebook market.

According to the latest estimates from GfK, it accounts for a 45% share of the German ebook market. Its impact on the other markets in central Europe is less certain, largely due to only having signed new partner in the second half of 2014 (Belgiam retailer Standaard Boekhandel joined in July, followed in September by the Dutch bookstore coop Libris, and in November by the Italian retailer IBS.it).

image by torkildr

Late last month I asked whether consumers were buying fewer books after switching to subscription ebook services like Scribd, Oyster, or Kindle Unlimited, and according to the latest info from Neilsen Book the answer is No.

A few details from the latest edition of the Nielsen Books & Consumers Market Research crossed my desk today, and this report shows that the subscribers in the UK and the US spend more on average than non-subscribers.

The data I have shows that about 4% of book buyers have subscribed to one of the standalone ebook subscription services. Curiously, when you add in the Amazon Prime members that figure jumps to 10%. It also shows that subscribers tend to be male (59%) while book buyers tended to be female:

When it comes to age, subscribers to any of the leading services tended to fall into the 18 to 44 years old age groups, while the older age groups were better represented among book buyers.

But no matter the age, the survey group was spending a lot of money on books. As a group, subscribers had a monthly budget of $58, while non-subscribers had a budget of $34. The survey also showed that subscription customers were willing to pay more for their subscription than the standard flat rate of $9 to $10. Men were willing to pay an average of $17, while women would pay $14.

***

That’s an interesting survey report, isn’t it?

I don’t have all of the data, but one of my takeaways from what we do have is that publishers are right to be concerned about making their ebooks available through Oyster or Scribd.

In a trend which mirrors the rise of ebooks, the ebook subscriber base tends to be concentrated among the most profligate book buyers.  If more publishers signed up then those book buyers would have fewer reasons to buy outside of the service, and they could end up spending less money on books.

Jonathan Nowell, the President of Nielsen Book, laid out in his talk the week before last how print sales have declined with the rise of ebooks over the past 5 years, and I’m sure that’s not a trend which publishers want to see repeated.

BuchReport.de

The UK ebook market is going to be a little less crowded in March.

Tesco has announced this morning that it will be shutting down Blinkbox Books, one of its digital subs. Apparently the rumored deal to sell it to Waterstones has fallen through, leaving Tesco few options other than to close the store:

We have taken the decision to close our e-book service blinkbox Books. We’ve learnt a lot since launching the service and whilst we saw encouraging levels of take up, we believe that we can do more for our customers by focusing on our core business. The service will close by the end of February.

Tesco has been having financial issues for about 6 months now, and as part of its cost-cutting measures it has decided to get rid of its money-losing digital sub, Blinkbox.

Blinkbox Movies was sold off earlier this month, and there is a rumor that a buyer has stepped forward for Blinkbox Music (edit: it’s been sold to Guvera). And a couple weeks ago rumors circulated that Blinkbox Books would have a similar fate. Unfortunately for its customers, that didn’t happen.

Tesco had been working to build an ebookstore since 2012, when it bought the whitelabel ebookstore provider MobCast for £4.5 million. After sinking what had to have been millions of pounds into the company, Tesco then launched Blinkbox Books in March 2014.

And now, less than a year later, it’s being shuttered.

I’m still looking for info on how consumers are going to cope with losing access to their ebooks. I can see in the FAQ that the ebooks are locked inside the Blinkbox apps, so downloading an ebook to Adobe DE is out, but at this point we don’t know whether Tesco will be doing anything to compensate readers or help them move their content to another platform.

It’s a shame Tesco couldn’t work out a deal to sell its customer lists to another retailer. Sony arranged a similar deal with Kobo when it got out of the ebook market in 2014 – certainly a better option than simply walking away.

The Bookseller

Tom Kabinet may be best known for its ongoing legal fight over its used ebook marketplace, but that’s not all there is to this startup. Founder Marc Jellema announced at a pitch at the Startup Bootcamp on Friday that he plans to launch a subscription ebook service later this year.

Details are still limited, but we do know that the service is expected to open in the third quarter with a cost of 5 euros per month. Jellema hasn’t revealed the specific terms of the subscription, but he plans to expand the service to six other countries in Europe by the end of 2016.

There’s no word yet how many titles have been secured, but Jellema is raising has lined up an additional 300,000 euros in capital investment. eMerce.nl also reports that Jellema has a distribution deal with HEMA. This would appear to be a retailer with operations in seven countries, which could explain Jellema’s confidence.

But even with a retailer as a partner, operating this kind of service in 7 countries is an ambitious and perhaps foolhardy goal. Amazon, with all its resources, hasn’t pulled it off, and while Tom Kabinet could pull it off the odds are still stacked against the company.

Even leaving aside the question of whether the subscription model is viable, Tom Kabinet operates under a financial cloud. While its used ebook marketplace is legal under Dutch law (for the moment), the Dutch publishers who oppose it will almost certainly continue to sue, only this time pursuing their legal options in EU courts.

Right now there are German court rulings which contradict the Dutch court ruling that allows Tom Kabinet to continue operating. This gives the site’s opponents a chance to appeal to the European Court of Justice to decide the issue once and for all.

While the German court rulings are more technically correct under EU regulation, the EU has a strong tendency to support consumer rights over existing law. This is why the UsedSoft v Oracle decision was decided in favor of consumers being able to resell software licenses (irrespective of the license terms, which usually forbid resale).

But at this point it’s too early to say whether European consumers will ever enjoy a similar right to resell ebooks. It is, at best, a coin toss.

eReaders.nl

image by Ben+Sam

This being January, a new semester is starting at many colleges across the US, and that means that many students are encountering B&N’s textbook platform for the first time.

Barnes & Noble hasn’t officially launched Yuzu in the 9 months since they turned the platform on, but that doesn’t mean they’re not inflicting it upon college students.

The retailer has been promoting Yuzu in the college bookstores it runs while at the same time neglecting to mention that the platform is still under development. Basically B&N has been recruiting college students to be unwitting guinea pigs in the development process, and conning them into paying for the privilege (with no refund option).

And judging by the students who have shown up in my comment section, they’re not too happy about the situation. Three students have left comments on this blog in the past week, all of which have complained about Yuzu.

For example:

I just rented my first e-book for school and of course it’s Yuzu. I hate hate hate it.

The text is tiny and you can’t enlarge the whole page. Highlighter feature seems useless to me. No, you cannot print and I even tried sending to onenote to enlarge it there, but it didn’t work. I so regret the $73 I had to spend for this and hope they get enough of the same feedback to stop using this affiliation for textbooks. I would have been so happy if I could have read on another platform…sigh.

And then there’s this one from yesterday:

Yuzu is horrible. I wish I would have gotten the hard textbook because it takes twice as long to read the digital book. It is hard to turn the pages, every time you touch the screen the note tab pops up, so you have to close it. Very irritating. It is hard to navigate, not intuitive at all. It also freezes up frequently, so you have to reload it all the time. Do not use yuzu!

And one from last week:

Posting this as a word of caution to any students considering purchasing an e-book on the YUZU platform. I am using the webapp organic chemistry e-textbook I purchased for a class and will never do this again. This would have been fine for a casual read, but there are several issues in functionality that make this almost useless for a class text book. (The price difference was not that significant either, compared with the hardcopy).

My biggest complaints: The pages appear to be protected such that you cannot print. Since turning a page takes about 5 seconds (each…turn….), I tried to print out the end of chapter questions so that I can work on them while referring to the text. What I got was a blank page. NO PRINTING!

And then there are the reviews on iTunes, where the iPad app has a two-star rating:

What the heck. This doesn’t allow us to copy and paste for easier quoting in our papers and we can’t even use the ctrl + f shortcut or Find shortcut to find keywords for easier studying. I guess they did this so people couldn’t cheat on papers? Yet Blackboard has a program to catch plagerism…. Why why limit us customers on how we use this app? I feel so cheated. Buy the eBook from the publisher or some other site, not Yuzu. Life will be easier without this app/site.

In short, this platform has been around for 9 months and is an utter fiasco.

So why does that matter (other than to show that B&N doesn’t care about fucking over college students)?

Well, B&N is still planning to spin off Nook Media into a publicly traded company later this year, and that means they will need to pitch it to outside investors. And with digital revenues declining by 50% each period, B&N can’t pitch Nook Media based on growth, so they’ll have to pitch its diverse offering of services, including the Nook Store (which consumers are fleeing in droves), the overpriced POD service, the author editorial services (which have been outsourced to Author Solutions) and Yuzu.

My point, folks, is that Nook Media is a stitched together patchwork of technologies which – at best – resembles Frankenstein’s monster.

But I would not make that comparison, because in the novel the monster was at least minimally functional as a unit, while you can’t make that claim about Nook Media.

A more apt description for Nook Media would be to compare it to an early failed experiment from The Island of Doctor Moreau – one which was never shown to the public.

Alas, if only B&N would show that same courtesy to Nook Media, but it looks like this chimera is going to be put on display at least once later this year when it is spun off. Let’s hope someone (other than this blogger) notes the kludged together nature of Nook Media and comments upon it.

image by Ant1_G

Having successfully transitioned from author to brand, the famed James Patterson is now trying a new business model: not writing at all.

He’s offering a unique opportunity for a single individual to pay $294,038 for the privilege of destroying the next Patterson-branded book. The package includes a first-class flight to an undisclosed location, two nights’ stay in a luxury hotel, a 14-karat gold-plated binoculars, a five-course dinner with Mr. Patterson, and a complete autographed set of the Alex Cross series, including the books Patterson wrote himself.

And at the end of your trip, you’ll get to read Private Vegas, shortly before watching it be wiped from this Earth.

I don’t know about you, but $300 thousand sounds like a good deal if it keeps the next Patterson book out of circulation, so much so that I am about to go launch a crowd funding campaign to raise funds.

Who’s with me?

No, wait – scratch that idea.

Apparently I misunderstood the story in the NY Times; the $300 thousand only give you the privilege of destroying a single copy, not the book itself. My bad.

Yes, Patterson is offering some rich fan the opportunity to spend a lot of money to blow up a single copy of Private Vegas (and no, Patterson won’t be holding it at the time).

Why?

According to the NY Times:

Susan Holden, managing director of the promotion at the advertising agency Mother New York, said she asked Mr. Patterson that very question.

“He said to me that he wouldn’t be surprised if one in his circle of friends might be interested,” Ms. Holden said. “He’s a super down-to-earth guy, but he runs with a billion-dollar crowd, so for some person that’s a huge Patterson fan, this could be chump change and could be funny.”

Patterson is also offering a promotion for those with tamer interests. Starting Wednesday at noon,  Patterson’e website at selfdestructingbook.com has been giving away codes which will enable a limited number of fans to read for free. It’s only open to US residents, apparently, and the codes will expire after 24 hours.

Edit: A reader pointed out a connection I missed that renders this story even more absurd. As you may recall, about a month ago Patterson released this video where he uses the allegory of a book burning to represent how book culture is being killed off in the US:

And now he’s literally destroying a book. The irony is delightful, no?

image by Alexandre Dulaunoy