The drought of news about new US ebook readers ended today with the discovery that Kobo’s next ebook reader has made an appearance on the FCC website.

Kobo (or rather their hardware partner Netronix) has taken the sensible precaution of placing most of the useful info under an embargo, but there were a few nuggets of information scattered across the filings.

I can confidently report that the new Kobo device is described as having a 6.8″ screen, and that it was tested for Wifi. There is also a mention of a microSD card slot but no hint that the new device has audio support.

It looks like we might have a replacement for the Kobo Aura HD, the 6.8″ ereader which launched last spring. That device sported a 1GHz CPU and had an infrared touchscreen, a frontlight, and a 6.8″ Pearl HD E-ink screen with a screen resolution of 1440 x 1080.

All in all, there’s very little to say about the FCC filings other than that they happened, and given the rumor that popped up last month I find I have more questions than answers.

Last month the ever reliable @evleaks reported that Kobo was going to release a waterproof ereader called the Kobo H2O. As I reported at the time, even though there was no evidence to support the rumor I thought it had a good chance of coming true.

Making an ereader waterproof was a logical next step for a device that could be used in full sunlight, but just as importantly one of Kobo’s competitors already has a waterproof model on the market in Europe. The Pocketbook Aqua is an unimpressive budget device with a premium price tag, but it shows that at least one ereader maker is thinking in this direction.

Update: This device is named as the Kobo Aura H2O in the PDF for the FCC ID label. (There was a second page to that PDF which I missed when I first looked at the PDF.)

Alas, while the FCC filings are tempting, they don’t definitively confirm that rumor. This new Kobo device could just as easily be based on the prototype ereader that Netronix showed off at a trade show a couple weeks ago.

Charbax caught up with Netronix at that show and showed us an ereader with a 6.8″ E-ink screen, Wacom touchscreen. It ran Android 4.1:

It is entirely possible that Kobo sent their version of the Netronix prototype through the FCC last week, and not the waterproof model. There’s also a chance that the prototype and the rumored waterproof model are one and the same.

There’s no way to tell at this point, so we will just have to wait and see.

FCC (NOIKBN250)

News broke on Slashdot on Saturday that Jeff Bezos’s newspaper now uses Amazon affiliate links, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.

While reading a story in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, I saw that the paper had begun embedding Amazon Buy-It-Now links in the middle of story sentences. For example, in this article, a sentence about the sales figures for differing covers of The Great Gatsby read: At Politics and Prose, the traditional [BUY IT NOW] version — featuring the iconic eyes floating on a blue background — sold better than the DiCaprio [BUY IT NOW] cover.

While I can confirm that the buttons are cluttering up that article, I’m pretty sure it’s not as big of a deal as it first appears.

In the order of least to most important, here’s why I don’t think there’s a story here:

One, this type of link is not a new concept. It’s one of the common forms of web advertising, and it’s existed for a decade or more. Sure, the links on the WP website are more obnoxious than average but they are not that out of the ordinary.  So there’s no reason to bash the WP for adding them (the rest of the advertising, on the other hand … ).

Two, The links don’t reference the WP. If you click one you will see that the affiliate tag appears to belong to Slate, which does not belong to Jeff Bezos. Slate belongs to The Washington Post Company, the media company which sold the WP newspaper to Jeff Bezos. It’s not clear how Slate affiliate links ended up on the WP website, but I do know that:

Three, The affiliate links are not showing up in all articles. I checked a half dozen articles, and I cannot see any links to Amazon. Update: Pando Daily found affiliate links in an article and a letter to the editor. I guess the links are spreading.

Based on the points cited above, my current working theory is that the affiliate links are the result of a technical snafu of some kind, but I don’t have enough information to say for sure.

I’ve tried to reach out to someone at the newspaper for an explanation but I can’t find contact info. Until I get more info I will assume that this is less nefarious and less important than it was originally described.

At the very least, there are too many unanswered questions here to reach a definitive conclusion. If I learn anything new I will update this post.

Update: Digiday has a response from a WaPo spokesperson:

A spokeswoman for the Post, however, said the paper has been embedding buy-it now links in articles “for many years” and that they haven’t been used more widely under Bezos. She said the buttons are added by the copy desk, so the writers and editors who worked on the story are not involved.

As for why the button no longer appeared in the Aug. 15 article, she explained that the in-article button functionality was a mistake. The button was dropped when the Post recently introduced a new article format, then unintentionally added back in a way that put the links into the text instead of on the side.

“It was not intentional,” she said. “And yes, the button is being fixed and will go back on the side where it has always been.”

See, I told you it was a technical snafu. And on a related note,

image by clasesdeperiodismo

It looks like Barnes & Noble is taking a leaf from Amazon’s playbook.

Early this morning the retailer sent out an email to their customers, but rather than pitch ebook deals the email touts a new promo video for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook. B&N is widely expected to launch the new tablet next Wednesday, and for once they decided to start promoting the new hardware before it officially launches.

The video regrettably doesn’t share any new details on price or specs, and instead focuses on reactions to the new device (in much the same way that Amazon has used reactions to a new Kindle as part of their launch events). But in spite of the lack of interesting or useful info, this is a good sign for industry watchers. It tells us that B&N isn’t just going through the motions when launching the new hardware; they want it to succeed.

Now if only they could have released a new tablet which had a better screen and performance that the Nook HD, that would be awesome. As it stands, the new Galaxy Tab 4 Nook doesn’t exactly offer a compelling reason to upgrade.

I had a Galaxy Tab 3, and was underwhelmed by the performance, and I also know several Nook HD owners (including Juli Monroe of Teleread) who don’t see why they would want to downgrade their screens.

Still, B&N has had close to two years since their last tablet launch to work on their software; perhaps they will blow us away on Wednesday. We’ll have to wait and see.

With no fanfare or official announcement, earlier today Amazon quietly gave indie authors a sales feature some had been requesting for the past several years.

According to a new page in the KDP help section, authors and publishers who distribute their works through Amazon’s publishing portal can now elect to put their next work up for pre-order. Amazon asks them to first upload a draft copy of the work, and promises that Amazon will "publish a product detail page for it within 24 hours of approval". It’s not clear what Amazon means by approval, but I have confirmed with an author that this is for real.

Pre-order buttons were one feature that many indie authors wanted but few had – in KDP at least. While this option had long been available in iBooks, Amazon had restricted the option in the Kindle Store, limiting it to publishers and a select handful of indie authors.

But not anymore. Now Amazon has extended a much-wanted feature to KDP authors, giving them a way of boosting sales. To those outside the industry pre-order buttons might not look like much but they serve several purposes. For example, Hachette was used the pre-order buttons in the Kindle Store for their sales forecasting, so when Amazon took disabled the buttons Hachette last a valuable source of market info.

What’s more, Mark Coker showed in Smashwords’s last survey that pre-orders can significantly boost sales. One indie author even hit the iBooks best seller list based on pre-orders alone.

But as good as this news is, I have to agree with my source. he suggested that Amazon might have an ulterior motive:

Expert troll job. Amazon gives all self-published authors a pre-order option: https://t.co/v275NuYRTV

— Evil Wylie (@EvilWylie) August 14, 2014

Evil Wylie is obliquely referring to the ongoing contract dispute between Amazon and Hachette. As you might recall, in late May Amazon disabled the pre-order buttons which it was no longer obliged under contract to provide to Hachette.

This raised a hue and cry at the time, and now Amazon is extending the feature to indie authors. I do believe that Amazon is using this marketing option to serve a dual purpose; it helps indie authors sell more, while at the same time it drives home the point that Hachette still doesn’t have pre-order buttons restored.

I do believe in coincidences, but not this one.

With ebook sales both up and down at major US publishers, no one knows exactly what is going on with the US ebook market. The same cannot be said for the Netherlands.

A new report from GfK revealed that the Dutch book market shrank in the second quarter, while the ebook market grew. Sales of paper book were down 15.5% from the same quarter last year, reaching 7.9 million units, and market value also dropping 11.5%, to 106.1 million euros.

That bad news for paper books was good news for ebooks, which accounted for 6% of the Dutch book market in the second quarter of 2014, up from 5% in the first quarter, with around 80% of the sales coming from fiction genres.

The Dutch ebook market may not be a large one but it has drawn the interest of the major ebook platforms. Apple, Kobo, Google, and even B&N have all launched a local ebookstore there in competition with the bol.com. Amazon has also reportedly shown an interest, and is currently looking to hire a Dutch translator.

eReaders.nl

image by albertstraub

From the Not a Surprise Dep’t:

Fortune is reporting this morning (5 August 2014) that Onswipe has been sold off:

Onswipe, a New York-based ad-tech startup, has sold itself to Beanstock Media, a Silicon Valley-based adtech company, Fortune has learned. An announcement could come as soon as tomorrow.

A private message from Onswipe CEO Jonty Kelt, obtained by Fortune, called the deal a “soft landing,” which is startup parlance for failure.

Update (12 August 2014): The deal was officially announced today. The following story is mostly correct, with one exception: at least one existing investor, Spark Capital, will be getting equity in Beanstock as part of the deal.

Not to be mean, but this is one of those times that I wonder why a company stuck with an unworkable idea for so long.

Initially launched in 2011, Onswipe set an ambitious goal: "to power the way the world experiences the web on tablets". This startup developed a unique publishing platform which enabled websites to take their existing content, automatically generate an app-like layout for mobile devices, and monetize it by adding adverts. At first the  platform was only designed to support the iPad, but it was later expanded with support for a couple Android tablets, including the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, the iPhone, and (in late 2013) Android smartphones.

As you can see in the screenshot above, this looks like a cool idea, but unfortunately the nifty-ness of the tech didn’t translate into market success. Hardly any publisher wanted to use Onswipe; last fall Onswipe boasted that 27 million website visitors were viewing an Onswipe supported site each month. Compared to the 500 million plus iDevices then in use, that is a relatively small number.

Frankly, I’m not surprised by the limited adoption or by today’s news. As I pointed out last fall, Onswipe was promoting a solution which was – at best- clunky when it launched. By the time it was working well enough to offer consistent performance, it had been made redundant by advances in website design.

Thanks to a concept called responsive web design, Onswipe’s proprietary platform was redundant. If you take a moment from reading this post and adjust your browser window so it is narrow and tall, you’ll see that a well-designed website (or even an adequately designed site such as this one) supports all screen sizes from smartphone to desktop. That effectively killed any need for Onswipe.

Onswipe  is reportedly selling for just enough to retire its $2.5 million in debts and pay off a $2 million convertible bridge note raised this spring. The latter was provided six months ago “to keep the company alive in order to find a soft landing,” Onswipe CEO Jonty Kelt wrote in an email obtained by Fortune.

The company had raised around $12 million in funding.

According to Kelt’s email, Beanstock Media is acquiring Onswipe because it does not have a mobile strategy, and because it wanted more direct sales and a New York presence. This firm bills itself as a publisher trading desk company for ad placements. It had reportedly brought in $40 million in revenue in 2013, far more than the roughly $500,000 in monthly revenue Onswipe was reportedly generating.

It will absorb 24 of Onswipe’s 28 employees.

Fortune

Do you want to see something weird? Then check out this page on Amazon.com for one of the Kindle Paperwhites.

If you click the link you’ll see that you’re looking at the product page for the international Kindle Paperwhite (2013). We can tell that it is the international page by the  dropdown menu for countries and the mention of a Carta E-ink screen lower on the page, and we can also see that this model is not available.

And as you can see in the screenshot below, there is also an orange bar with the helpful suggestion that you might want to consider buying the new model: the Kindle Paperwhite with Wi-Fi (2014). And yes, that link works.

Amazon has quietly deployed a new product page (complete with a new ASIN) for a new Kindle Paperwhite. That’s great news, but unfortunately it’s not clear whether we have new hardware as well.

And that’s where things get weird.

Amazon is directing customers to a new Kindle Paperwhite which is fundamentally identical to the model it replaced.  The features are the same, and all of the listed specs are identical. Sure, there are a few minor differences in the descriptions, but there’s no real way to tell that this is a new model.

According to the German ebook blog which noticed the change in July (I was sitting on the story), the 2014 model has twice the storage of the old model. That detail is not listed anywhere that I can see, but this has been confirmed by several different members of MobileRead.

What’s more, earlier today AlleseBook.de posted a side by side screen shot of last year’s KPW with this year’s KPW. Note the different amounts of storage, and the different serial numbers:

Anyone who has been keeping an obsessive eye on Kindle news will know that there already was a KPW model with 3.1GB of storage floating. It was only available in Japan, but now it seems Amazon is selling it outside of Japan.

Apparently Amazon has very quietly started selling that particular Kindle Paperwhite variant in Europe (and Canada, I can now confirm) while calling it the 2014 model. And this has me very confused.

I was expecting that Amazon would launch a new Kindle Paperwhite this year. Even though the rumor about the Kindle Paperwhite Ice Wine fell through, I was still expecting to see an improved Kindle.

But with the news of the 2014 model quietly replacing the older model, I am left with more questions than I can answer.

Is this it? Does this Kindle mean we’re not going to see a KPW with even minor improvements this year? Or was this a mistake on the part of Amazon?

I don’t know. If anyone knows what is going on, the comments are open.

I queried Amazon for an explanation, but did not get a response by the time I published this post.

Update: According to Amazon, "This is not a new product – we’ve added more on-device storage to the existing Kindle Paperwhite."

Amazon fired their latest salvo in the pr battle with Hachette this morning, and for once I wonder if they made a mistake.

The retailer sent out an email to all authors and publishers currently signed up with KDP, asking them to take a side in the ongoing contract dispute with Hachette. The letter can be read at readersunited.com, so I won’t quote it here, but I do wish to comment on it.

The letter expands upon the arguments presented in Amazon’s last statement, which was posted on one of Amazon’s forums, and it frames the ongoing contract dispute with Hachette as primarily having to do with ebook prices (why KDP authors should care about Hachette’s rbook prices being too high, I do not know).

The letter opens with a brief history lesson on the rise of paperback books, including a misquotation of George Orwell (which is a shame, because the full quote is an apt fit for recent history). The letter goes on to remind us of that recent history, including Hachette’s role in the collusion to raise ebook prices, and then it reiterates the economics argument Amazon made in their statement last week (which does have some market research to back it up).

The letter concludes with a plea for KDP authors and publishers (as well as anyone who finds the website, which has the salutation Dear Readers) to directly email Michael Pietsch, the CEO of Hachette Book Group, and express their displeasure.

—

This is not a good sign. While I don’t want to single out Amazon for engaging in a pr campaign (Hachette started one months and months ago), the fact that Amazon is now trying to fight this as a pr battle and not in the boardroom suggests to me that the negotiations are not going well.

If Amazon thought they were shortly going to get the deal they wanted, or even one they could live with, they would not have sicced KDP authors on Hachette. It would have been a wasted effort, and contrary to Amazon’s past behavior, to recruit allies to act on its behalf.

But now Amazon is actively building a base of support. I see that as a sign that Amazon expects the negotiations to drag on. Speaking as someone who would rather see authors, that sucks.

P.S. Does anyone else wonder whether Hachette is dragging things out so they can get another major trade publisher to help them tag team Amazon on Agency pricing? It would fit with Hachette Livre CEO’s statements that there was no hurry to resolve the dispute.

image by clagnut

Barnes & Noble is sending out invites today for a press event in two weeks. They haven’t revealed any specific details about the topic, but the invite, which you can find , drops enough hints to let us know that we’re finally going to see the next Nook hardware.

The retailer had announced in June that the next Nook device would be made by Samsung, but did not share any details about price, specs, or the release date, which was tentatively set for early August.

Based on information released in the Nook Developer section of the B&N website, I can now confirm that the  Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, as B&N is calling it, is indeed the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It sports a 7″ screen, and according to the specs shared by B&N it will be running Android 4.4 on a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU with 1.5GB RAM, and 8GB or 16GB internal storage. B&N also says that there will be a microSD card slot, a pair of cameras (1.3MP and 3MP), a 4Ah battery, Wifi, and Bluetooth.

And most importantly, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook will have a screen resolution of 1280 x 800, fewer pixels than on the Nook HD.

Those are pretty much the same details as the specs for Samsung’s version of the tablet, and in fact B&N also links to a set of publicly available Galaxy Tab 4 specs as confirmation. But to be nitpicky, until I found that page on the B&N website no one knew for sure whether the specs would be the same.

The new Galaxy Tab 4 Nook is most likely going to ship in the days immediately after the launch; I would not be terribly surprised if it was available on the 20th.

B&N is set to also release a 10″ Nook later this year; according to the SEC filing on the Samsung-B&N contract, the larger tablet is going to be a rebranded Galaxy Tab 10.1. It is scheduled to ship 60 days after the launch of the 7″ model.

B&N is under contract to buy a million tablets from Samsung before the end of 2014. I’m not convinced that they will pull it off, but that really depends on the market. For example, if Amazon doesn’t release an updated 7″ Kindle Fire tablet later this year then B&N will have less competition for the new sales.

All we know at this time is that Amazon has a slightly revised 8.9″ Kindle Fire tablet in the works; leaked benchmarks have revealed that in terms of hardware it will be a minor improvement on last year’s model. We don’t currently have any details on any new 7″ model, and that could be to B&N’s advantage.

On the other hand, if the tablet market really is stalling, like Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly says, then B&N will have their work cut out for them:

You said the tablet had “crashed.” Do you believe it’s going away?

Yeah, “crashed” is a strong word. So, the tablets have been an unbelievable phenomenon. I don’t think there’s a category that ever took off so quickly and so big in the history of tech.

The issue has then been that, once you have a tablet of a certain generation, it’s not clear that you have to move on to the next generation.

As a consumer?

As a consumer. I think replacement is the issue. The penetration has gone so fast that it’s reaching an amazing degree and therefore it becomes more of a replacement market, and the level of innovation in the past year has not been as great as it had been in the previous two years. So, there again, the jury’s out in terms of what’s going to happen, because it’s going to depend on what innovation comes to market. But you need a reason to replace.

I know that many are focusing on the word crash, but I would suggest you ignore that word and simply consider what he said about the market. The thing is, I am seeing the same trends and I’m not sure he’s wrong.

I am looking at new devices launched this year and I’m not seeing any major improvements over the models launched last year. That strikes me as a good reason for anyone with a year old tablet to continue to use it instead of upgrading to a new model, or if they buy a new one to instead get a device released last year when it goes on clearance.

For example, as Juli reminded me in the comments the new Galaxy Tab 4 Nook is going to have to compete with the Nook HD, a two year old tablet which has a higher resolution screen, adequate performance, and is a lot cheaper. Refurbs can be had for under $80, leading me to wonder why anyone would pay more for B&N branded hardware. (Thanks, Juli!)

And if no one is upgrading, B&N is on the hook for a million tablets which they might not be able to sell.

Famously secretive, Amazon hasn’t said much about Liquavista since acquiring the screen tech company last spring, but a recent check of their patent filings has revealed that the retail giant isn’t letting Liquavista gather dust on the shelf.

A reader has tipped me to five new patents for electrowetting screen tech which Amazon filed last week, including at least one which suggests that Amazon wants to integrate a Liquavista  screen into a future Kindle. (Thanks, Javi!)

The patents cover both making a screen and integrating it into a device. They get quite detailed, far more so than I can cover in this post, but one in particular caught my eye. That patent mentions a new hybrid electrowetting screen tech which has separate greyscale and color components. This, folks, is new to me:

By providing a greyscale picture element layer and a separate colour picture element layer, the electrowetting display device can provide high quality and high brightness greyscale images and high quality colour images independently of each other. In an example, having a dedicated picture element layer for colour and another dedicated picture element layer for greyscales allows each layer to be optimised for desired properties for colour and greyscale images, rather than in known systems where the colour properties of a colour filter may be compromised so the colour filter may contribute to both colour and greyscale display states.

The description goes on to add that this new design is easier to manufacture than Liquavista’s existing designs, but I would say that is less important than the fact that it suggests the possibility of a single screen offering both a color option and high resolution grayscale option.

Update: As a reader points out in the comments, Liquavista showed off a 9.7″ XGA screen in 2011. That’s 1024 x 768, or about 132 ppi. If the RGB pixels are replaced by gray/gray/gray pixels, this would effectively triple the resolution of the screen. Thanks, Felix!

So far as I know Liquavista has not shown off an electrowetting screen which had both color and grayscale ability, so this truly is something new.

For those just tuning in, Liquavista is a Netherlands-based screen tech company which Amazon bought from Samsung in 2013. For the past decade Liquavista has been working on a screen tech based on the principles of electrowetting (Wikipedia). Liquavista’s tech is supposed to provide a low -power alternative to traditional LCD screens, but so far it has not released a single commercial product (in spite of several missed release dates in 2010, 2011, 2012).

Originally a project in the research labs at Phillips, Liquavista was spun off into its own company and later acquired by Samsung in early 2011.

Samsung wanted Liquavista for its screen tech, but sold the company to Amazon once it was clear that one, Liquavista couldn’t produce a screen which looked as good as LCD or OLED, and two, the battery problem faced by mobile devices had largely been solved (here’s a more detailed explanation).

Amazon has never explicitly stated why they wanted Liquavista, but it has generally been assumed that Amazon was going to use the screen tech either in a consumer product or for some unknown internal purpose related to Amazon’s warehouses (this was why they bought Kiva Systems).

I would say that it is safe to conclude that Amazon wants to use the Liquavista tech in a future Kindle. This conclusion is reinforced both by the hiring spree earlier this year and by the money that Amazon is clearly pouring into Liquavista.

Starting in December 2013, Liquavista has filed for at least 16 patents, including patents that cover the material, manufacture techniques, design, and function of electrowetting displays. That stands in stark contrast to the previous two years when Liquavista filed for a grand total of 5 patents.

Amazon is clearly throwing money at Liquavista, and I can’t wait to see what ends up on store shelves. With luck, we might see the new Kindle by the fall of 2015.

Update: Unless, of course, the rumored Kindle Paperwhite Ice Wine (the one which was supposed to launch this spring) has a Liquavista screen. A reader just pointed out the possible connection. Thanks, Guilliame!

Sony has confirmed today that they will not be making another ebook reader – not even for their sole remaining market in Japan.

There will be no PRS-T4, and lesen.net reports that the remaining stock of the Sony Reader PRS-T3 will be sold until it runs out. That device was was launched last fall in Europe but never shipped in the US, so I’m not sure how many people actually have one.

TBH, this comes as no surprise. After Sony first pulled out of the North American ebook market, and then a short while later abandoned Europe and Australia, there was little reason for Sony to develop a new model – not even if they were going to co-brand it with Kobo, as one ridiculous rumor suggested.

Having pioneered the idea of an E-ink ereader with the launch of Sony Librie in 2004, Sony is largely responsible for inventing a market which it is now exiting. Sony worked with E-ink and Toppan Printing Co of Japan for several years to develop the first generation of the 6″ screen which was used in the Librie, and later the Sony Reader, Kindle, Nook, and other ereaders.

And not only did Sony release the first 6″ screen, they also followed it up with several cutting edge devices. Sony was the first to adopt Epub, and with the release of the PRS-700 in 2008 Sony was the first to combine an E-ink screen with a touchscreen and a frontlight. Okay, the PRS-700 was a clunky design based on poor tech, but it was still 4 years ahead of the competition.

Sony was also the first to develop a mid-sized ereader. The PRS-900 with its 7″ screen was released in 2009, a full 4 years before Kobo released the Aura HD, with its 6.8″ screen.

This tech giant put a lot of skull sweat into their hardware, resulting is some devices which were simply amazing at the time. Their designs were elegant; this post inspired me to pull out my PRS-950, and it is simply beautiful. Even 4 years after it was released, the 950 is still better looking than half the ereaders on the market.

But while Sony may have made pretty devices they also made some boneheaded mistakes. The Sony Reader Store and Sony’s PC software was unpleasant to use well into 2012, and Sony was also the last to add an on-device ebookstore to their 6″ model (the expensive PRS-900 had one, via 3G).

And after Sony got caught out with expensive ereaders following the Nook-Kindle price war in June 2010, the writing was on the wall.

To be fair, a 10 year run is not bad. Sony may not have sold very many ereaders, but they did last longer than any number of startups, including:

• Entourage, which launched a pioneering dual-screen ereader in 2009. The clunky tech and high parts cost resulted in poor sales and dissatisfied buyers, and the company ran out of money in early 2011 right about the time that the tech was finally available to make a good device.
• Cool-ER, which launched an indie ebookstore and ereader clone in 2009 (think Kobo, only without the capital, retail partners, or tech know-how). It ran out of money in July 2010.
• Pandigital, which in 2010 was technically the first company to release an enhanced ebook reader based on Android tablet. This consumer electronics company also released an ereader with an epaper screen. It went bankrupt in 2012.
• FoxIt, which thought it would be a good idea to expand on its PDF software and launch a generic 6″ ereader in 2009. The company is still around the the device is not.
• Samsung, which debuted 4 ebook readers at CES 2010 – just in time for the 9.7″ model to be killed by the iPad. The rest of the models were victims of the Nook-Kindle price war about 6 months later. They did eventually launch but they didn’t sell well and were discintinued in 2012.

The late Sony Reader is survived by the Sony Digital Paper DPTS-1, a 13.3″ ebook reader which costs $1,100 and only supports PDF.

lesen.net

When Amazon released their latest statement in their contract dispute with Hachette a couple days ago, one point they raised was that $9.99 ebooks sold more copies than $14.99 (1.74 times as many, in fact). This tied in with basic market economic theory, and it also fits with past data from Smashwords.

And now I can report that the data used for the Author Earnings Report shows similar sales and pricing trends. Late Wednesday night Data Guy, the numbers person behind the AE Report, left a comment over on The Passive Voice with details.

DG crunched the numbers from the July report and found that $10 ebooks not only sell more copies than $15 ebooks, the lower price point also generates a higher average revenue.  As you can see in the graph below, ebooks at the $10 price point generated nearly 5 times as much revenue as those at the $15. point.

And that’s not all.

As you can see in the above chart, Amazon may have been a little too conservative in their call for lower ebook prices. Not only does the $9.99 price point generate more gross revenue than the $14.99 point, cutting the price of that $10 ebook in half might just boost revenues again.

The data shared by Data Guy shows that ebooks priced at $4.99 generate two thirds again the revenue of ebooks which cost $9.99. Smashwords has been making similar statements about the $2.99 and $3.99 price points for several years now, so the new info from Data Guy doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

But I was surprised to see that the two data sets don’t quite reach the same conclusion. I wonder if the difference could be reflected in the Smashwords data not including as many traditionally published ebooks as the data set which Data Guy scraped from the Kindle Store. But whatever the cause, the new data confirms that lower priced ebooks generate more ebook sales.

To be honest, no one has ever disputed that point, which is why there has been little disagreement with the facts of Amazon’s statement of two days ago. But what Amazon has left out, and which isn’t reflected in the above chart, is that ebooks are not priced and sold in a vacuum.

I’ve been following a couple discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, and several people have pointed out that the lower priced ebook might boost ebook sales but it could also drastically undercut print sales. I think John Scalzi said it best:

If you entertain the notion that Amazon is just 30% of the market and that publishers have other retailers to consider — and that authors have other income streams than Amazon — then the math falls apart. Amazon’s assumptions don’t include, for example, that publishers and authors might have a legitimate reason for not wanting the gulf between eBook and physical hardcover pricing to be so large that brick and mortar retailers suffer, narrowing the number of venues into which books can sell. Killing off Amazon’s competitors is good for Amazon; there’s rather less of an argument that it’s good for anyone else.

(Thanks for the link, Felipe!)

I can see where Scalzi is coming from, but I’m not sure that he’s right on this point. Given that Amazon accounts for a sizable share of the US print book market, I think that they already took into account the effect lower ebook prices might have on print sales.

Amazon is more than capable of making the kind of meta-analysis of how one part of the book market affects another, so I think they would know if higher ebook sales would have a positive effect on print sales.

Of course, just because Amazon might come out ahead when ebooks cannibalize print sales doesn’t mean that Amazon’s competitors will as well (which is really the point Scalzi was trying to make). Physical bookstores don’t benefit from an increase in ebook sales to the same degree as Amazon, so the corresponding drop in print sales would hurt them.

But is that Amazon’s problem? And more importantly, is Scalzi’s point necessarily true?

I’m not so sure. I am an advocate of booksellers moving online in pursuit of customers, and if you consider an indie bookseller as an online entity and not a physical bookstore then yes they could well benefit from the increase in ebook sales.

But I also can’t answer that with any certainty. As with everything, the actual situation with ebook prices is not only more complicated than Amazon would describe it, it’s also more complicated than the naysayers and pundits might realize.

With that said, I am happy to stay a low-price ebook advocate.

The benchmarking site Antutu revealed this morning that they have discovered the first evidence of Amazon’s next tablet. A new set of benchmark test results were posted to the site which describe an 8.9″ Kindle Fire tablet with a Snapdragon 805 CPU, suggesting that the new tablet is going to be a slight upgrade to the existing model.

The current Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 CPU with a clock speed of 2.2GHz. It ships with 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, an 8MP camera, and a screen resolution of 2560 x 1600.

According to Antutu, the new model will keep the screen resolution, RAM, internal storage, and cameras, thus eliminating most of the reasons to upgrade from the current model. But the site also reports that the new Kindle Fire 8.9 will have a slightly faster Qualcomm CPU. The benchmark results mention a quad-core Snapdragon 805 CPU which runs at 2.5GHz. From what I can find online, the SnapDragon 805 has a newer chipset and an improved GPU, making it faster all around.

There is of course no news yet on the launch date or list price for the new tablet, but we still know more today than we did this time last month. And for that, I would like to thank whoever at Amazon reads this blog. Three weeks ago I asked why we weren’t seeing any new rumors or leaks about Amazon’s next tablets and now Amazon has responded.

I’m kidding, of course, but I did have a point a few weeks ago when I wrote that there was a marked lack of rumors or leaks concerning Amazon’s next tablet. Today’s leak is the first evidence of any kind to suggest that a new tablet was in the works.

And now that we know it exists, it’s safe to suggest that it should launch in September or October. I would also not be surprised if the new tablet was thinner than the existing Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, though of course that is pure speculation.

Antutu via SlashGear

Spain’s long debated online tax on Google News and other aggregation sites passed the Congress of Deputies, Spain’s lower chamber of Parliament, last week and it is as bad as Google (and anyone who depends on Google) could have feared.

Not only does the new law require Google News as well as aggregators like Flipboard (and even Facebook for that matter) to pay for the use of an excerpt, it also explicitly prevents publishers from granting permission for the excerpts to be used for free.

Passed as part of a set of reforms and changes to Spanish copyright law, canon AEDE (as the Google tax is known) grants publishers an inalienable and non-revokable right to a payment for any use of their content.

Julio Alonso shared the news earlier today. Writing over on Medium, he says:

Once you read the actual proposal, it becomes quite clear that Spanish newspaper editors have learned from the German experience. There the government passed a similar law that forced Google to pay newspaper editors if they were included in Google News. When approved, Google excluded all newspaper editors from Google News and asked anyone wanting to be listed to reapply explicitly declaring that they renounced to be compensated. All newspaper did reapply not wanting to miss out on the traffic it generates. Google won.

The Spanish law proposal declares that editors cannot refuse the use of “non-significant fragments of their articles” by third parties. However, it creates a levy on such use to compensate editors and declares it an inalienable right (derecho irrenunciable).

The introduction of the inalienable right was done to avoid what happened in Germany. If you are a digital editor that publishes with a copyleft license, like myself, and you minimally understand how the internet actually works, you cannot decide to not charge Google News. It is compulsory. More than a right it is an obligation. Therefore, Google cannot exclude sites requiring payment from Google News. It would still need to pay for those it includes, even if they do not want to be compensated.

The bill has only passed the lower house at this time, but local commentators expect that it will also pass the upper house in short order and become law.

And that is when the excrement will impact the rotary impeller unit.

While Google has in the past responded to similar laws by changing their policies, it is widely believed that Google will simply pull out of Spain entirely, followed shortly thereafter by other search engines, Pocket, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flipboard, and virtually every other startup with a service which could be used to share an excerpt.

To make matters even worse, Spain’s own news aggregation site, Menéame, is also talking about moving abroad. This Reddit-like site reports that they considering moving the company out of Europe entirely in order to escape this law because they’re not sure whether simply moving to another part of the EU will be enough.

And the law could even affect indie bloggers like me; under Spain’s new law I might  have to pay for the privilege of quoting the excerpt above. While European law does have a legal concept called "right to quote", it’s not clear how that will be affected by the new law. I also cannot find specifics on the Spanish version of that law, so I am at a loss to understand financial and legal implications.

At this point no one understands the full ramifications of the new law, in part because few have seen the final language. But one thing we can guess is that if this law passes as currently described it won’t just hurt tech companies; the law will also make it harder for Spanish readers to find relevant news stories and stay informed.

When I last covered the proposed Spanish law in May of this year, I described it as a textbook example of insanity, in that it is a new attempt at an idea which has repeatedly failed in the past.

Time and again, whenever someone tries to force Google to pay for the free advertising it gives to news sites the search engine finds a way to avoid paying. In Germany last year Google changed its policies to require explicit permission for free use of excerpts and then delisted anyone who didn’t agree. Google is subsequently being sued in Germany for copyright infringement, antitrust, and other misdeeds.

In Belgium in 2011, the newspaper rights management company Copiepresse won a 5-year-old lawsuit in which Google was accused of pirating content by sharing links. Google subsequently complied with the court order to remove the offending links, leading to cries of vicious retaliation. After a brief negotiations Google paid a token fee and got to continue to use the links and excerpts. Google also paid 60 million euros to head off a law in France similar to the one now being considered in Spain.

And now Spain is going to try an idea which has only seen marginal success elsewhere. Would anyone lay odds on how badly it will not succeed in Spain?

images by Shardayyy, David Hurt