The perennial ebook optimists at PricewaterhouseCoopers are back again with a new projection of the growth of the US and global ebook markets.

This time around the NYTimes is repeating the latest PwC prediction, writing that:

E-books have made impressive inroads into the English-reading world, but their success in Europe — even among wealthy, tech-savvy countries with robust publishing industries — remains spotty at best. In the United States and Britain, sales of e-books represent between a quarter and a third of the consumer book market and, by 2018, will edge out printed and audio books as the most lucrative segment, according to projections by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. But the picture is radically different in continental Europe. Last year, digital books made up 8 percent of the consumer book market in France, less than 4 percent in Germany and Italy, and 1 percent in Sweden and Norway.

The NYTimes also posted a graph of the prediction:

While I would be happy if PwC’s prediction came true, I feel I must point out that they have made this prediction before.

it is something of an annual tradition for the tea leaf readers at PricewaterhouseCoopers to make the same prediction about the US ebook market, namely that it would exceed the print market in 4 years. In 2012 PwC said that ebooks  would pass print in 2016, and in 2013 the goalpost was moved to 2017. And now PwC has moved the goalpost yet again, this time predicting that ebook sales would exceed print sales in 2018.

Don’t get me wrong, I would be happy if PwC was right at one point, but in pushing the target year back by a year they’ve basically admitted that they’ve been wrong twice.  That doesn’t exactly convince me that they’re going to get it right this time around.

And to be completely forthright, I’m not sure I would be able to prove that PwC was right or wrong when 2018 rolls around.  The size and shape of a market like ebooks cannot be feasibly measured accurately. You can make estimates, sure, but it’s too fractured to find the full measure.

In any case, I am looking forward to making this post an annual tradition. PwC will post their prediction, and I will point out that they missed in their previous predictions.  We’ll all laugh, drink hot cider, and what fun we’ll have.

It looks like Amazon may have launched a Dutch Kindle Store just in time for it to take off.

New data from the market research firm GfK shows that ebook sales accounted for 7% of the consumer market in the Netherlands in the third quarter of this year, with 1 in 7 fiction titles sold as an ebook. That’s up from an estimated 4.7% of sales in the 12 months ending July 2014.

GfK also reported that paper book sales continued to decline last quarter, with overall sales down 14%. Children’s books and nonfiction titles, however, did better. The total estimated sales of books in the third quarter amounted to 108 million euros, down 8.9% from a year earlier, with 8.5 million books sold.

With several regional competitors and multiple international bookstores present, the Dutch ebook market is far more competitive than its small size might justify. In addition to iBooks, Google, and the recently launched Kindle Store, Kobo and its partner bol.com are the leading ebook retailer, with Tolino and its partner, the bookseller coop Libris, rounding out the top 5 most visible competitors in that market.

ereaders.nl

image by Luke,Ma

Much ink has been spilt over the past day on the subject of Amazon, Hachette, and their new book contract, and while we don’t know who got the better end of the deal there is strong evidence to suggest that Hachette blinked first.

Buried under the news coverage of the new contract was another story which offers insight into Hachette’s motivations. PW reported yesterday that Hachette’s US revenues were down considerably from last year:

Third quarter sales at Hachette Book Group USA fell 18.5% in the period ended September 30, 2014 compared to the third quarter of 2013, parent company Lagardere reported. The decline was attributed to difficult comparisons with last year when the company had an “unusually high” number of bestsellers led by The Longest Ride, Lagardere said. The “difficult situation” with Amazon also impacted sales and HBG also postponed some titles, Lagardere said.

For all of Lagardere Publishing, revenue in the quarter fell 2.9%, to 564 million euros. In addition to softness in the U.S., sales were down in France and the U.K., but rose in Spain/Latin America.

While revenues were down in most of Lagardère’s publishing divisions, the sharpest decline by far happened in the US and was likely due to the ongoing contract dispute with Amazon.

Given the steep decline in revenues and the timing of news, I think it’s clear that Hachette struck a deal before they released the quarterly report, before they had to admit just how big of hit they took from letting the contract lapse earlier this year.

If they had waited until after the quarterly report, I bet Amazon would have turned the screws another notch – or even worse, let the negotiations drag on until after the lucrative holiday season had already begun.

And with S&S already having signed a deal with Amazon, there wasn’t going to be any chance of another major publisher negotiating with Amazon for another 9 months. That’s much longer that Hachette could have afforded to wait.

image by Ida Myrvold

Vook continued to gobble up its smaller competitors today with the acquisition of Coliloquy*.

Founded in 2011, Coliloquy first got its start in developing interactive ebook apps for the Kindle (as in the Kindle ereaders, and not the Fire Android tablets).  As Amazon wound down the development program for Kindle Active Content, Coliloquy expanded their focus to include developing apps for other platforms, including Android and iOS.

Coliloquy has published over 30 titles in the past 3 years, including A Dark & Dismal Flower by JC Herz, Getting Dumped by Tawna Fenske, and Georgetown Academy by Alyssa Schwartz and Jessica Etting, as well as app titles developed on behalf of Disney and published under Disney’s imprint, including RickRiodan’s Heroes of Olympus series.

I was also told by Vooks spokesperson Matt Cavnar that Coliloquy has expanded beyond ebook apps to include ebook publishing, which is Vook’s main interest. According to Matt, Vook is "laser focused on helping authors with ebooks specifically, so that’s the fit for us".

Clarification: Vook is buying only the publishing arm of Coliloquy, and not the rest of the company.

From the description on the Coliloquy website, it appears that Coliloquy saw itself as much a publisher as a tech startup. They were actively seeking manuscripts for publication, but were only accepting submissions from agents or previously published authors:

All of our authors work with one of our traditional editors, as well as directly with our team on narrative structure and technical constraints.

What’s more, I think that there are other parts of the Coliloquy platform which interests Vook. Namely, analytics:

Engagement. In addition to point-of-sale data, we focus on engagement—how invested are readers in the story and its characters? What percentage finish the book? Re-read it? Single book sales are great, but in the long-run, we want readers to come back to our characters and stories—to truly engage and interact.

Coliloquy is Vook’s second acquisition in the past few months; in September Vook bought the failed boutique publisher Byliner. Shortly after acquiring Byliner, Vook boosted royalties to 85% of net; Vook plans to expand that deal to authors published by Coliloquy.

One of the niftier features of the Kindle Store is the way that it lets you embed a sample of an ebook in a webpage. Now there’s an option for indie authors to do the same with just about any Epub file, albeit in a slightly more complicated and less convenient way.

A Japanese developer by the name of Satoru Matsushima has released a self-contained Epub viewer which can be installed on most websites. It’s called BiB/i, and all that is required is for you to upload the code for the viewer as well as the ebook you want to embed, and them post the embed code.

The embed code looks like what you would see with the manual (non-automatic) Youtube embedded videos, so some technical skill is required.

I haven’t installed it myself on this blog, but as you can see below it does work:

Mein eBook

You can find other demos here.

The code works well, and you can even use BiB/i to open an ebook sitting on your computer. Simply open the ebook embedded above, switch to full screen, and then drag another EPub file into your web browser.

This won’t work so well for large ebooks (for those it is recommended that you unzip the ebook file before uploading it) but I did just test it myself. I was able to open a couple different Epub files. They were slow to load at first but I could read them.

I’ve just heard of BiB/i, so I can’t tell you if it is in widespread use yet, but I do know of at least one alternative (besides uploading a sample to Scribd and embedding that). There’s Epub2Twitter, which lets you embed ebooks in a Tweet, and ReadK.it, which enables authors and publishers to create self-contained ebooks which can open themselves in a web browser (as well as regular ebook apps).

Barnes & Noble might have announced plans to spin off Nook Media into its own publicly traded company early next year, and after looking at B&N’s ongoing investment in its digital sub I think the plan is going ahead, full steam.

The largest bookstore chain in the US has just announced that they are now going up against CreateSpace, Lightning Source, Blurb, and other competitors in the POD market. And it looks like B&N may have crawled into bed with Author Solutions to do it.

B&N put out a press release today which announced the launch of the Nook Press print service. B&N describes it as:

Designed to be simple and customizable, the NOOK Press print service provides customers with a complete do-it-yourself experience for creating a hardcover or paperback book. The new service offers black and white or color printing, high-quality paper choices, multiple trim sizes and cover treatments.

With print costs starting at $4 per copy for a 5″x8″ paperback, Nook Press POD can handle both color and B&W; hardback and paperback; and it can support the common book sizes from 5″ x 8″ to 8.5″ x 10″.

There’s no mention in the FAQ on the website or in the press release on how one would get the books into a bookstore, so at this point we can only assume that there is no distribution option, alas. (I have queried B&N on this point.)

That’s going to drastically limit the value of the Nook Press POD services, given that Lightning Source and Createspace both offer distribution to bookstores.

In related news, B&N is also launching a new author services section today to help enable authors to get their ebook and print book on the market. Authors can now choose from a variety of packages and a la carte services to receive professional assistance making their book, including editing ($399 and up), cover design ($499), and package deals starting at $999, B&N has all of the bases covered.

It’s not clear who is actually providing the services on behalf of B&N, but one thing I can tell you is that they are rather expensive. I have also noticed that the package deals bear a worrisome resemblance to the packages offered by Author Solutions under its various guises.

For example, B&N’s $999 package and $1,999 package look an awful lot like the $799/$1,899 packages offered by AuthorHouse. The way that the feature lists are worded suggest that Author Solutions is actually providing the services on behalf of Nook Press. (Curiously enough, AuthorHouse is actually providing more services at a lower cost.)

I am still waiting for B&N to get back to me on that point, so you should take that observation with a grain of salt.

But even if I am wrong in making the connection, I would still suggest that authors avoid this part of Nook Press because the prices are simply too high.

The package deals cost more than similar packages at AuthorHouse and offer fewer amenities. That alone is a good reason to avoid them.

But I don’t know I can make the same claim about the POD section. What do you think of the POD prices at Nook Press?

***

Here’s a thought I had right after publishing this post.

At first I was puzzled that B&N would invest in a sub that was being spun off next quarter,  but now that I have looked over the services I think i understand what is going on here.

In adding more services, B&N is trying to make Nook Media more attractive to a potential buyer. Rather than simply be a (failed) ebook platform, Nook Media can now be pitched as a digital publishing services company.

It’s my guess that both the POD and author services have been outsourced. The actual investment for B&N is far less than what it would cost to develop those services from scratch.

The services might not be very attractive to authors, but that’s not why the services were launched. This is a Wall Street play, not a move to invest in a market. B&N’s goal is to make Nook Media  more attractive to potential investors, and it will probably work.

A new report from the IOE confirms what educators and past studies have been saying for years: reading for pleasure does indeed boost your vocabulary.

In a report titled "Vocabulary From Adolescence to Middle-Age" (PDF), two researchers at the UK’s Institute of Education studied the the vocabulary test scores of 9,432 test subjects in their early forties. The results were then compared to the tests that the participants had taken as children and sorted based on each test subject’s childhood reading habits.

Researchers Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown found that those who had read for pleasure at the age of 10 scored 67% on the vocab test when tested at the age of 42, but those who hadn’t read for fun as kids scored an average of only 51%.

The study also showed that what people chose to read as adults mattered as much as how often they read. The greatest improvements in vocab scores between the ages 16 and 42 were made by test subjects who identified themselves as readers of 'highbrow' fiction. That group scored an average of 5 points higher on the test.

What’s more, the study also noted that the newspapers read by a test subject could be having an effect on their test scores. The study found that those who read a tabloid regularly actually made slightly less progress than those who never read newspapers, while readers of better newspapers showed  greater improvements in their test scores.

"The long-term influence of reading for pleasure on vocabulary that we have identified may well be because the frequent childhood readers continued to read throughout their twenties and thirties," say the researchers, Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown. "In other words, they developed 'good' reading habits in childhood and adolescence that they have subsequently benefited from."

And finally, the study found that reading was a popular pastime at age 42. Just over one in four people (26%) said they read books for pleasure every day, and a further 13 per cent said they did so several times a week.

IOE via The Bookseller

images by pedrosimoes7,  John-Morgan

That’s the story that’s going around, anyway.

Book agent Kristen Nelson reported in her November newsletter that St Martin’s, a Macmillan imprint, is no longer interested in negotiating deals for already successful indie titles:

For example, an attending agent highlighted that a St. Martin’s editor was willing to go on record to explain exactly why her house will no longer buy indie authors who have self-published ebooks that have gone on to be wildly successful. St. Martin’s claims their data shows that the ebook sales have already tapped out the market.

This wasn’t a surprise to me; it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. I’ve also heard that even if a publisher buys a successful indie title intending to publish a trade paperback edition, and even if they’re willing to pay bookstore co-op, booksellers are reluctant to grant that title the physical retail space. They are simply turning down the co-op offer.

This news first broke on Kboards, where Hugh Howey commented that publishers told him something similar in 2012 when he and his agent were shopping around Wool.  Howey had self-published and sold 50,000 copies, and two different publishers told him that "everyone who would ever read WOOL has already read it".

So are the publishers right?

Yes, but only in that the publishers in question have admitted that they cannot outperform a successful indie.

As a market prediction, they are almost certainly wrong, and in the case of Wool they were ridiculously wrong. Since being picked up by S&S, the Wool series has sold over two million additional copies.

While I doubt most indie titles would have that level of success if they were picked up by a major publisher, I would have thought that a publisher could boost sales through a judicious application of marketing and promotion.

And I’m not the only one. In 2012 Passive Guy commented on Amanda Hocking’s sales after signing with St Martin’s:

The publisher’s view of a finite audience is part of the outmoded scarcity model Kris Rusch has written about. One reason why some successful indie authors may not sell nearly as well with a traditional publisher is that traditional publishers are too rigid and don’t know how to sell to new online buyers.

PG thinks St. Martins has screwed up sales by charging too much for Amanda’s audience – $8.99 for the ebook. If SMP had let Amazon set the price instead of insisting on agency pricing, it would have made a lot more money.

Hocking was one of the first best-selling indie authors to sign with a major publisher, and she wrote in April 2012 that she had sold around a million copies of her Trylle series before unpublishing it when she signed with Macmillan. In comparison, she also reported that by the end of April 2012 the first book in the series was already in its fifth printing (damned good for a book published in January 2012) and that the other books were selling well.

Hocking hasn’t discussed her sales since then, but she did go on to sell another series to St Martin’s last summer.

And now St. Martin’s doesn’t think they can outsell a successful indie title? I wonder what they’re not telling us?

I doubt we’ll ever learn the real casus belli for their decision, but as Hugh Howey explained:

… just because publishers are saying something — and acting on those beliefs — doesn’t make them right. It’s just another excuse for their caution. Of course they’ve been burned by a few acquisitions. The majority of their books don’t sell well. And it’ll always be for some reason (vampires are so done; no one reads urban fantasy anymore; books this long don’t sell) when the truth is that the market is variable, no one knows why some things take off and others don’t, and publishers succeed by throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks, and reading way too much into what doesn’t.

Thoughts?

image by Secret Pilgrim

As the publishing industry continues to fragment into an increasing number of independents (and a shrinking number of giants), there’s growing opportunity in connecting those indies with the publishing pros they need to get their books to market.

Blurb is seizing on that opportunity today with the launch of a new marketplace. It’s called Dream Team, and Blurb has recruited industry veterans Molly Barton and Richard Nash to run it.

I missed out on the press briefings, but from what I can see in the coverage on TNW and Venturebeat this looks a marketplace much like the one Reedsy launched last month. TNW reports that:

The Dream Team group, operating under the Blurb aegis, is comprised of 50 creative professionals who provide expertise in copy editing, developmental editing, book design, art direction, illustration, photography, cover design, ghostwriting, ebook conversion and more. Authors and businesses can pick and choose their own custom team without having to submit to a package deal.

Team members are spread across the UK/EU, Canada, US and Australia, and are equipped to work on projects in English, French, and Dutch for both print and digital books.

Blurb won’t be taking a cut of the deals between authors and the pros, but they will be benefiting from the increased number of projects brought to fruition. Blurb’s past research has shown that projects done entirely by a single person have the lowest completion rate.

Some time back Blurb conducted a survey of 40 book projects on the site, and discovered that when an expert is hired to assist on a project, the completion rate tripled to 30%. Hiring a second pro bumped the completion rate to 90%.

The Dream Team  marketplace is only in its earliest stages, and Venturebeat says that Blurb plans to let it grow based on the needs of authors:

The marketplace will eventually add new types of collaborators like ghost writers, publishing business managers, marketers, publicists, and more. The idea, Gittins said, is to slowly transform Dream Team into a platform that offers all the services of a traditional book publisher, and then some.

As the Dream Team marketplace grows it will have to outcompete other marketplaces, including the ones run by Reedsy, Bibliocrunch, and Book Machine. That last startup is focused on building an online community of publishing pros through local events in NYC, London, and elsewhere.

If there’s one thing I hate about book culture it’s when someone gets up on their high horse and tells me that I am reading the wrong books, or reading them the wrong way, or reading them in the wrong format.

Juliet Lapidos is one such person. Writing in The Atlantic, she takes the position that you should always finish all of the books you read.

I finish every single novel I start. If I happen upon the first line of a 1,000-page novel, I of course don’t feel compelled to read to the end. But as a matter of personal policy, when I decide I’m going to read a novel, I read the whole thing.

I’ve gathered over the years that my persistence—or stubbornness, depending on your point of view—is unusual. Most people I encounter think nothing of dropping a novel halfway because they find it boring or because they can see where it’s going or because they forgot it on the subway and moved on to the next thing.

This behavior, common though it may be, seems lazy to me. Wrong, even. Once you start a book, you should finish it.

This is one of the links in tomorrow’s morning coffee posts, but after having read and thought about it today I have decided to respond directly.

Lapidos presents several arguments, none of which are compelling. For example:

First: Pleasure. When you stop short, you risk missing something incredible. I can’t count how many novels have bored me for a hundred or even two hundred pages only to later amaze me with their brilliance. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers is long and dated. I quickly grew tired of Samuel Pickwick’s adventures, which were probably funny for 19th-century readers but which I found annoyingly quaint.

I don’t wish to sound like I am criticizing her reading choices, but I don’t find boredom pleasurable. It’s boring, and I don’t see why I should spend any of my limited time on this planet reading a book that is tedious. I’ve already made that mistake too many times.

Second: Fortitude. When a book makes me antsy I sometimes think of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment from the late 1960s, which found, in brief, that children who were able to wait longer before stuffing themselves tended to do better in school and have a healthier body mass index later in life.

Let me cut her off at the knees: People like her are why some kids grow up hating to read. She is the type of person who would hand a kid a boring or difficult book and tell them to finish it anyway, thus instilling in that kid a hatred for the experience of reading.

But since she also brought up willpower, I will point out that there is research to suggest that willpower is a finite resource. The more a person must force themselves to finish a book, the less willpower they have to use for other things.

Like, you know, work.

Third: Respect. …

To drop a novel after a few chapters is, then, to disregard what makes it a formal work of art rather than a heap of papers that reside in a desk drawer. Today, books and authors need all the help they can get; if you care about literature as an artistic endeavor and the people who create it, then you should do so fully.

Rebecca Schinsky tweeted a good response to this. Earlier today she asked: "Does music suffer when you change stations mid-song? Does food culture die when you don’t finish a meal?"

She’s not wrong.

***

I don’t usually pay attention to people like Lapidos, and to be honest I don’t think enough of her arguments to come up with a clever closing argument which ties this post together.

I say read however you want, whatever you want, wherever you want. And while you’re at it, please extend the same courtesy to other readers.

image by jlz

The Verge posted an interview yesterday of Oyster founder Willem Van Lancker. He makes some bold claims about the future of books, including that the phone is the future of ebooks:

Where are people reading more, tablets, phones, or on the web?

We’ve always been really big believers that the device of the future for books is the phone. That’s the first thing we went to publishers with when we started talking about the differentiation of Oyster, that we can provide the best possible mobile experience.

It’s hard to get the data on this with Android, because, what is a tablet? But between iPhone and iPad, it’s a 50 / 50 split. It might even be higher on the phone in recent months over the iPad. This is an app that people use on their phone constantly, and we see the actual activity spiking during the week at lunchtime, and through the evening and peaks around midnight, and on the weekends it’s pretty sustained. Unlike a lot of products, our biggest days are Saturdays and Sundays, but when we added the web reader, you see it spiking on weekdays because people are reading during work.

We thought about making a button you could hit that would make Oyster look like Microsoft Word like they do for March Madness. It would be funny to bring that to books.

I have long said that smartphones and tablets (and not dedicated ereaders) were the future of the ebook market, but I’m not sure Van Lancker is right in this instance to focus on just one type of device.

While we have seen evidence that smartphones are outselling tablets by a factor of five to one and are driving sales in some markets, I’m not sure that he is correct to say that they’re the future – at least, not yet.

For one thing, with 200 million iPads sold and 500 million iPhones sold in 7 years, the fact that iPads and iPhones are showing up in Oyster in equal numbers suggests  the argument that the iPad is preferred over the iPhone as a reading device. (And even if you assume that an arbitrary percentage of the units sold are no longer operational, you’re still going to have far more iPhones in use.)

But more importantly, the growth of phablet screen sizes is quickly rendering most distinctions between smartphones and tablets irrelevant. When you have 4.3″, 5″, 6″, and 7″ tablets and 5″, 6″, and 7″ smartphones available in a single market, the only way you can really distinguish between them is by the connectivity – namely, whether you can use one to make a call. And thanks to Skype, I’m not sure that’s a valid criterion either.

In short, I wouldn’t say that smartphones are the future; at this point that is an arbitrary label applied to some mobile devices. Instead, I would say that people will read on the device they have at hand. Often times that is their phone, yes, but not always.

For example, I have always carried around a 7″ tablet to read on, but lately I have started to replace it with an Android ereader. Yes, I know one shouldn’t generalize from a single example, but his argument is based on the same flaw:

Why did your gut tell you that people are going to be reading on phones in the future?

It was my own behavior. Even when I’m in bed at night, I have an iPad mini with Retina and I still use my phone. And I have an iPhone 6 now, which is even better.

Thoughts?

Germany’s biggest news publisher has just acceded to the fact that it needs Google more than Google needs it. Reuters reports that Axel Springer recently ended a two-week-long test where Springer blocked Google from using snippets of  articles from its websites noting that the test had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.

For the past two weeks Springer has blocked Google from using snippets from 4 of its most popular news sites: welt.de, computerbild.de, sportbild.de. and autobild.de. There are no publicly available details on the traffic lost during the test, but Springer did note that "traffic flowing from clicks on Google search results had fallen by 40 percent and traffic delivered via Google News had plummeted by 80 percent in the past two weeks".

Axel Springer was the last holdout of a cartel of German publishers which had been trying for years to force Google to pay for the traffic it sends them, a fight which the publishers have lost every round.

After years of yelling and threats, the publishers got a law passed in 2013 which required search engines like Google to pay for the use of snippets in search results. Google responded by requiring publishers to grant free use of the snippets under the promise of being removed from Google News (as we can see from today’s news, that is not an idle threat).

Earlier this year the publishers counter-attacked. 200 German publishers signed up with VG Media and started legal proceedings against Google, alleging that Google was violating that 2013 law. They asked to be awarded 11% of Google’s revenues based on their abilities to heft a very wide shovel.

In addition to demanding that Google pay for the use of the snippets, VG Media filed an antitrust complaint against Google. That came to naught  in August after the Bundeskartellamt declined to investigate Google’s dominance of the search engine market, noting that the  publishers had not offered sufficient basis to justify an investigation. (The fact that the Bundeskartellamt also had to investigate VG Media as a possibly illegal cartel may have influenced its decision.)

VG Media’s efforts came to an end a couple weeks ago when it announced that its members would be granting Google the use of snippets for free, and now Axel Springer is joining them. Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have "shot ourselves out of the market" had it continued to block Google.

While it is good  to read that the publishers have conceded the fight, this story is not over with yet. Spain has recently passed a law which grants publishers the inalienable right to license their content (as in it’s illegal for them to give the snippets away for free), and the EU’s new digital commissioner has stated his intentions to  push for an EU-wide Google tax.

Reuters

A new amendment to Spanish copyright law passed the upper house of Spain’s Cortes Generales today, and it is due to become law next year. El Pais reports that the amendment makes a number of revisions to existing law, including the creation of a controversial tax on news aggregators.

The new law makes many problematic changes, including requiring universities to pay fees to a collection society for digital course materials which had otherwise been released under a CC license, but the one I am most interested in today is the tax on news aggregators.  (You can find a complete breakdown on the changes on Google en Espanol.)

Colloquially known as the Google tax, the new law is intended to force Google as well as other search engines and news aggregators to pay for the use of links to news articles published elsewhere.

But it probably won’t work – at least not with Google.

The text of the changes to Spanish copyright law (PDF) is difficult to understand, but Spanish news sources say that it is actually worse than previously expected.

The law gives copyright holders the inalienable right to be paid for the use of their work – including a link. This means that they can’t decide to give away the content for free, something Google has required in Germany and elsewhere.

TBH, I’m not sure myself that the law says that links must be licensed, but the text of the law  (PDF) is convoluted enough that I am not comfortable arguing with a native speaker.

On the plus side there is an exception for excerpts used for news and entertainment purposes, which means sites like this blog are safe (social networks might also be covered), but the law is still going to compel aggregators like Reddit, Google News, and Spain’s own Menéame to pay for the use of links.

And just so we’re clear, one of the core concepts of the internet, the web link, is now considered to be copyright infringement in Spain when used by certain parties.

Please excuse while I go roll a SAN check.

It’s not clear where news sites and aggregators in Spain will be going from here, but I do know that Google has already issued a statement (originally in Spanish):

We are disappointed with the new law because we believe that services like Google News help publishers to drive traffic to their websites. As regards to the future, we will continue working with Spanish publishers to help them increase their income while we consider our options under the new regulation.

Google hasn’t said how they will respond to the changes in the law but I would bet that at a minimum Google will be delisting any site that might be covered by the new provisions. The search engine giant has taken similar steps in the past, including in Belgium and Germany, when other publishers tried to force it to pay for the free advertising it sends them.

There’s even a chance that Google might pull out of Spain entirely, but at this point that is just wild speculation.

All I know for sure today is that most if not all of the publishers who pushed for this Google tax will come to regret it in short order. It is safe to say that these sites rely on Google for anywhere between a quarter and half of their site traffic, and with Google no longer sending visitors their way the drop in traffic will quickly be felt in the pocketbook.

To be fair, some of the publishers may have already adapted their business model to depend on other sources. The UK’s Telegraph, for example,  boosted their site traffic by 20% in June by focusing on better promoting on Facebook.

I do not know that any of the Spanish publishers who backed the Google tax will be able to make similar boasts, though.

image by Tax Credits,  efile989

The American Association of Publishers released a new report today with the latest stats on the US book market. As with their past monthly reports, the AAP has released the bare statistics to the press, and from what I can see the news is generally good.

Based on the net revenues reported by 1,209 publishers, the AAP reported on Wednesday that the US trade book industry increased by 4.1% in the first 7 months of 2014 ($3.57 billion to $3.7 billion).

The adult segment showed a drop in sales of 2.2%, while the religious pressed reported an increase of 1.9%. Much of the latter could probably be attributed to an increase in the sale of religious ebooks, which saw a 25.7% increase over the same period in 2013.

The best performing segment was kids/YA, which shot up by 25.8% ($762 million to $958 million). This includes a 59% jump in YA ebook revenues, thought the specific value for that segment has not been shared.

In terms of formats, downloadable audiobooks continued to be the fastest growing format remain with a +26.2% growth over the same period in 2013. eBooks came in a distant second increasing by 7.5% ($871 million to $937 million). Hardback books dipped by a fraction of a percent, while sales of paperback book grew by a not insubstantial 5.3% ($1.08 billion to $1.13 billion).

If you’re still trying to choose between a Paperwhite and a Voyage, here’s something that might help make up your mind.

I just got an email from Kindle pr with the confirmation that the Voyage doesn’t support Kindle Active Content, and it will not be getting support any time in the future.

For those just tuning in, Kindle Active Content is the clunky name that Amazon uses to describe apps developed to run on Kindle ereaders (and to be clear: Not the Android tablets). Amazon carries about 490 apps in the Kindle store, including 20 freebies, which can be installed on a Kindle – just not on the Voyage.

The apps vary from simple games like dots and boxes to more complex apps like the choose your own adventure type of book like Dusk World (or Coliloquy’s apps), crosswords,utilities, and there are even test prep apps.

None of which will run on Amazon’s flagship ereader, the Kindle Voyage.

The lack of app support was first noticed on MobileRead over the weekend, but at that time it wasn’t clear whether this was a new policy or perhaps the result of technical issues. The Voyage does have a higher resolution screen which could have affected the apps running on it, but it turns out that is not the case.

I was told by Amazon spokesperson Kinley Pearsall that app support would not be coming in the future, and that:

You’re correct that these apps are not supported on Kindle Voyage. We’ve heard from customers that they generally prefer apps on their phones and tablets, so our focus is on building the best purpose-built reading devices.

On a related note, rumors circulated last year that Amazon was going to shut down this program. It looks like that rumor may have been at least half true; the last new Kindle Active Content was added in late 2012 (according to the listed publication dates).

But the program isn’t entirely dead; I have been told that existing Kindle models, including the Paperwhite, will continue to support Kindle Active Content indefinitely.  Of course, that is no guarantee that a future update won’t break support for a specific app but I won’t assume the worst, either.

While we’re on the topic of apps on ereaders, Amazon is not the only one to come up with this idea. The Ukrainian ereader maker Pocketbook has a well developed catalog of apps for its ereaders, and there are also a couple Android based ereaders with E-ink screens. You can install Android apps on the Onyx T68 Lynx and the Icarus Illumina. Both run an open version of Android.

I never really liked the idea of running apps on my Kindle, but I do like how I can extend the abilities of my Illumina by installing Android apps. This is also one of the reasons why the T68 Lynx compared well to the Kindle Voyage in my review last week.

Alas, Amazon doesn’t think this feature is as important as I do.

What do you think? Will this affect your decision to buy a Voyage?