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

Job listings on the Amazon website have revealed that the retail giant is hiring translators who can localize the Kindle hardware and apps for the Dutch and Russian ebook markets.

The job listings call for a self-directed individual who is fluent in one or the other language and has at least "5+ years of demonstrated" experience in translating software from English to either Russian or Dutch.

Amazon has long been rumored to be eying the Russian and Dutch ebook markets, but now it would seem the launch of the local Kindle Stores are as little as 6 months away. The listings are matched by a similar posting for a Chinese translator (Amazon already supports both traditional and simplified Chinese, and has sold ebooks in China since 2012).

Even though Russian is not one of the languages supported in the Kindle Store, we’ve long known Amazon was looking in that direction. In April 2013 Amazon hired the CEO of Russia’s Atticus Publishing Group, Arkady Vitrouk, as the head of Kindle Content for Russia. At the time his LinkedIn profile said he was the "Director, Kindle Content at Amazon EU Sarl", but his position is no longer visible so it is not clear of he still holds the position.

Local digital publishing blogs in the Netherlands have been speculating for a couple years now that Amazon would launch in that market. Amazon still doesn’t have a local Dutch site, but their interest was seemingly confirmed in September of last year, when Amazon enabled authors and publishers to sell Kindle ebooks in Dutch, Danish, and around a dozen other languages in Europe (as well as Afrikaans).

No matter when the local Kindle Stores launch, Amazon will have their work cut out for them. In the Dutch market Amazon will have to face entrenched competition from local ebook retailers like bol.com as well as international competitors like Apple, Kobo, Google, and even B&N. What’s more, Amazon will also have to contend with local publishers who are happy to produce ebooks that are DRM-free or protected only by digital watermarks.

My latest data indicates that 3/4 of locally published and distributed titles either have no DRM or so little DRM that the end user won’t notice. I bring this up because it opens up the possibility that local retailers might also add Kindle format ebooks to their stores, giving them a chance to compete for an audience which some assume is out of reach.

In Russia Amazon is going to face different competitors, and they will also have to battle the specter of piracy. While Dutch ebook buyers make heavy use of free ebooks, Russia is known for rampant piracy. This is such a truism that both of the leading Russian ebook providers, LitRes and Bookmate, are pitched as solutions to (and fighters of) piracy.

LitRes is the leading ebookstore in Russia, while Bookmate is a subscription service in the likes of Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, and Oyster. As I reported in May, both companies have accepted capital investment from one or another of Russia’s major online retailers (i.e. retailers Amazon might decide to buy) and are in a good position to grow with the market. LitRes and Bookmate have very different focuses which I already covered in depth (here, here) so I won’t repeat it here.

In spite of the competition and the problem of piracy, both markets represent excellent growth opportunities. The latest data from leading Dutch ebook distributor Centraal Boekhuis tells us that the ebook market grew by about 58% in 2013, and accounted for 3.2% of the local Dutch book market. This obviously does not include ebooks sold in other languages which were published outside of the Netherlands.

In Russia Sergei Anuriev, CEO of LitRes, estimated that around $15 million in ebooks were sold in the country in 2013. He believes the market doubled in size over 2012.

I don’t have exact details on how many ebooks were purchased in either country in 2013; too much of that data is locked in the servers of the major international ebookstores. But what data we have suggests that the markets are still small and have excellent potential for growth.

eReaders.nl

images by akk_rus, Bert Kaufmann

News of Apple’s acquisition of Booklamp is still percolating through the blogosphere but the pundits are already starting to weigh in. Make Cane has taken the position that Apple needs to expand beyond their hardware, but I’m not sure I would agree:

A Kindle book can be read on any damned platform — Kindle device, iOS, Android, Mac, PC.

Books bought from the Apple iBookstore are locked to Apple’s iOS and OS X hardware, period. Who wants book lock-in? No one.

Apple can think better recommendations will help, but if they want to be serious in selling books against Amazon — and with over one billion devices out there, they should — they need to liberate books from their Apple-only grasp.

And on the writer’s side of things, don’t require OS X hardware to submit to the iBookstore.

Yes, Apple would sell more ebooks if they expanded beyond their hardware, but when has that ever been Apple’s strategy?

Apple would sell more music if they released an Android app, and the same can be said for movies and ebooks.  But Apple hasn’t done so, and I think it’s time to acknowledge that the strategy is working for Apple.

That is especially true in the case of ebooks. By my estimate, Apple sells more ebooks than B&N.

According to B&N’s last quarterly report, their annual ebook sales totaled $246 million. We don’t know how much Apple has made from ebooks in the past year, but we do know that their content sales (plus Apple Care fees) totaled $4.5 billion last quarter.

If ebooks account for even 5% of that four and a half billion dollars then Apple would be generating nearly as much ebook revenue in a single quarter as B&N generated in an entire fiscal year.

Now, that estimate of Apple’s ebook revenues is entirely supposition (sadly) so let me present you with another argument.

If Apple developed an iBooks app for Windows and Android they would be doubling their support costs and significantly increasing their development costs (perhaps as much as twice as high as it is now).

Would this double Apple’s content sales? Probably not.

Apple would be going up against Amazon, which is much better at selling content than Apple and already has solidly performing apps on any worthwhile platform. What’s more, Apple wouldn’t be able to put their competitors at a disadvantage; everyone would have in-app purchases.

This is perhaps Apple’s single greatest advantage on iOS, that they have made it difficult for everyone else to sell ebooks. This is probably the main reason why Apple is the second largest ebookstore in the world, and it is an advantage which Apple would not have on other platforms.

Don’t get me wrong, I would like to see Apple competing on more platforms. But the idea that more platforms equate with MOAR COMPETITION, BETTAR REVENUE is false. The real situation can’t be summed up as simply as Mike made it appear.

image found via Photobucket

News is breaking Friday night that Apple has acquired Booklamp, aka the "Pandora for books". Techcrunch broke the story, which was subsequently confirmed by Apple.

Apple’s brief statement said:

"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Booklamp is rumored to have sold in the range of $10 million to $15 million. The company had raised around $900,000 in capital, and up until the acquisition it had been based in Boise, Idaho.

Update: It now seems the deal went down in April when Booklamp closed their Boise office and (reportedly) cancelled their existing contracts.

Booklamp is best known for the unique tech it had developed called the Book Genome Project. 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.

For example, last October Booklamp offered a unique insight into the then ongoing debate over erotica ebooks in ebookstores. Booklamp CEO and founder Aaron Stanton ran a meta-analysis on the ebooks which Booklamp had previously analyzed and showed that:

Over 28% of the 15,000 indie titles which were collated for this comparison were erotica, compared to less than 2% of the 100,000 plus traditionally published titles in BookLamp’s database.

… BookLamp found that around 3% of indie titles involved questionable themes:

The idea of identifying a book’s DNA is the brainchild of Booklamp CEO and founder Aaron Stanton, who has been working on developing the concept since 2007. According to an old story on Slashdot, the first prototype was shown off in 2008, and it was based in part on an idea Stanton first conceived in 2002.

The company had a public facing website at booklamp.org, which was quietly shut down in April of this year, and I had also previously been told by Booklamp that they had also used their tech in B2B deals to help ebook retailers, distributors, publishers, and tech companies understand the titles in their respective catalog.

According to Techcrunch, Booklamp’s services ranged from: "automatic book screening for proper categorization (Apple) to providing a platform for the publishers that they could use for screening manuscripts to consider whether a book would sell well with a particular demographic, or how much marketing budget should be allocated to it".

In 2013 Booklamp also announced a partnership to offer this kind of analysis on books distributed via Lulu, and they also used their tech as the basis for a card game called Game of Books. This last was funded on Kickstarter in late 2012.

At this point no one knows for sure how Apple plans to use the startup, but I do agree with Techcrunch’s speculation that Apple is stepping up its ebook game:

One option would be to use BookLamp to build a competitor to Amazon X-Ray, which lets readers see where and how often terms or characters pop up in a book. That could be useful for classifying books into categories or flagging ones with sexual or violent content as being unsuitable for kids — or simply providing feature parity with Amazon’s Kindle app, which offers X-Ray on iOS.

Considering Amazon’s headway into self publishing, it’s enticing to wonder whether BookLamp’s technology for screening manuscripts to figure out their market fit, or the other tools they were developing and using, may end up getting implemented under their new owner to determine what it should promote. BookLamp’s algorithms could augment Apple’s human editors who choose what’s highlighted on the iBooks homescreen.

The most obvious way, though, would be to use BookLamp’s content and style analysis to power individualized iBooks recommendations.

It’s too early to say exactly what Apple is going to be doing next, but I do expect that it will be interesting.

–Read an e-book at home or in the library, or a digital comic or graphic novel.

–Maybe even read E to your visiting  child if you’re a jailed mother.

–Use two-way Google Hangouts video to enjoy a virtual book club without leaving your house. Or go to the same event in person and see yourself later on YouTube.

–Prepare for SATs and other school tests, or reserve a meeting room to work with friends on school projects.

–Learn a new language or sharpen your computer skills.

Those are some of the services that BiblioTech, the all-digital library in Bexar County, Texas, is offering. And you can watch in the video embedded below to understand better what BiblioTech is up to. Hear the music throb. The video, a gem from the Film School of San Antonio at Harlandale High School, is right on target for a young Hispanic audience. Perhaps other library systems can come up with variants using local film-making talent.

From afar, I see other good signs. More than eight months after BiblioTech opened, staffers are holding frequent in-library events, especially story times for kids, and are not just parking patrons in front of the computers. The library has doubled its e-book collection from the original 10,000—still a fraction of what national digital libraries could offer, but definite progress.  Go here for LibraryCity’s earlier mentions of BiblioTech.

Jailed moms reading to their kids

Is the BliblioTech model right for all communities? No. But with an Apple Store-like interior, BiblioTech makes young people and minorities feel at home in an area underserved by regular libraries. BiblioTech even enables jailed mothers to read e-books to their kids when the children visit. “Stay connected through reading” isn’t in the above YouTube—the young woman holding up the iPad in the video is narrator Mariah Espinosa, not a prisoner!—but how could I not mention it in the headline? What a wonderful example of a library reaching out to the community.

What’s more, BiblioTech is getting in sync with the schools. In a pilot, 16 students at Carroll Bell Elementary School were loaned Nook e-readers. Both kids and parents received training. So, so clueful an approach. Students had to return the Nooks at the end of the school year, but reportedly “can check them out again from BiblioTech for the summer.”

BiblioTech even lets you read e-books in Braille.

As of February—I intend to get an update at some point—several hundred people a day were using BiblioTech on the average.  Perhaps even localities  with established library systems might consider experimenting with a Bexar-style approach in some library-short and dangerous neighborhoods, where parents don’t want their kids walking home after dark but may not be able chauffeur them. E-books could make a huge difference, whether from a BiblioTech-style  library or a traditional one. The librarians could teach the kids about them during safe hours, and help them stock up with good reading at the library if they didn’t have WiFi at home.

Book clubs via Google Hangouts

Via YouTube I watched the first BiblioTech book club held on Google Hangouts. A hint of the possibilities for my own city, Alexandria, Virginia?

My big hope is that Bexar and other libraries will pay more attention than now to the interests  of male readers and  play up plenty of nonfiction as well as novels. How about real-life adventure stories or biographies of Latino sports heroes, for example? I’m also curious about local high school coaches and other local athletic  figures helping to talk up  books and participating in book clubs.

If that happened, promo videos like Bexar’s could mention sports angles and others of interest of young people. This would be a great way to increase participation in the clubs. Nothing against good literature—just the reverse! But the big priority should be to boost engagement with the community at large, not merely the kinds of people most likely to be library regulars. Interest in literary novels can come eventually for many new patrons. Maybe it’s even time for a graphic novel book club. Besides, who says some popular-level books can’t also be good literature in their own ways?

reposted under a CC license from LibraryCity

A hacker hanging out over at MobileRead Forums has come up with a way to expand the abilities of the two-year-old Onyx Boox M92 ebook reader. He’s modified a version of the open-source Linux distro Ubuntu so it can run on the M92’s 9.7″ E-ink screen.

Initially released last July, Obuntu turns the M92 into an E-ink Linux tablet. With an 800MHz CPU and 256MB RAM, it’s a slow tablet but it is a tablet nonetheless.

As you can see in the video below, Obuntu includes many common parts of Ubuntu as well as calibre, all of which can be access via the M92’s Wacom touchscreen. Obuntu also supports Bluetooth and Wifi, opening up opportunities for browsing the web and using a Bluetooth keyboard.

The following video shows off the install process and takes the Obuntu firmware through a couple tricks. You might want to turn off the sound.

Even though it was first shown off last year, this project only crossed my desk today. It is currently in a semi-finished state, and several of the early testers have struggled to get it to install correctly so you might want to avoid it. Obuntu is currently in hiatus, but the developer insists that he hasn’t abandoned it. In March he said that he planned to revisit the Obuntu and finish his work so that it would be easier to install.

I can’t see any sign that he has returned to the project, alas, but even if he does I do not know that this hack will be worth installing. One early tester commented that the hardware was too slow:

Although the idea is pretty cool, it is almost useless due to the weak hardware. Try to install the Firefox, Chromium Browser. The installations are smooth but the versions are too outdated to be practical. Even I can not open the Hotmail or Google Mail. The Google Docs takes forever to load the file I want. DO NOT expect too much! But still thank seaniko for his great job.

This isn’t the first time someone has used Linux to turn an ereader into a tablet, and I can report that the other project has had more success. Late last year another developer revealed an unrelated project to develop a Debian Linux firmware for Kobo ereaders. That project went much better and the software is currently being used by several Kobo owners.

The Kobo devices have smaller screens but otherwise similar specs, and they run Debian Linux just fine.

Earlier this month Amazon added a new beta program to their ebook publishing platform. KDP Pricing Support takes the guess work out of pricing a new ebook by offering authors and publishers predictions on how many copies would be sold at a given price.

The service draws on Amazon’s vast database of past sales data and analyzes the relationship between price changes and number of copies sold. KDP Pricing Support factors in each title’s length, category, rank, reviews, price history, and its author’s related sales in order to provide a suggested price range for a newly listed ebook.

The price suggestion is shown as a graph which reflects how many sales would be made at each price point, and will look something like this (Thanks, Steve!):

The service is still in beta, but a number of authors have already tried it and posted their experiences on the KDP support forums. Not all of the authors are pleased with the pricing suggestions; while one noted that "I don’t know what all it uses to determine this, but it suggested that I price my book at $6.99. With a projected +5% earnings and -25% sales", others noted that they were told they were underpricing their ebooks:

I have two books in a series. The first one is .99 at the moment and for the past two months, (89,000 words) and the second is 2.99 (85,000 words). They suggest I price them at 6.99 each, and the other book, not in a series, I have at 2.99, (85,000 words). They suggest 4.99.

And

The pricing beta suggested that I increase my book from $2.99 to $5.99. I don’t think anyone will buy a new author’s book at that price, but I am willing to give it a try based on feedback.

And one author reported that their book was marked as part of a series, leading KDP Price Support to suggest that the price be reduced (the first title in a series is often cheap or free to attract readers).

KDP Pricing Support is available to all authors and can be found in the Rights and Pricing tab for each title. It works with both existing and newly published ebooks, and is available to all authors during the beta. Amazon wants everyone to try it so they can see which features are used the most.

You can find more details on the KDP Support Page.

Kindle Unlimited may have only launched on Friday but it’s already having an affect on the Kindle Store rankings. A check of the Kindle Store "paid" best seller list this morning has revealed that 45 of the top 100 titles on the list were included in Kindle Unlimited.

Among the 45 titles were 17 titles from Amazon, 15 traditionally published titles which are included in Kindle Unlimited, and 13 titles which are part of the KDP Select program. The best seller list also included 14 self-published titles which are not part of KDP Select and thus not exclusive to Amazon.

This is a marked change from the week ending July 13, which Publishers Lunch says had 14 titles from Amazon Publishing and KDP Select on the list (as well as 25 additional self-published titles and 1 traditionally published title which is now part of Kindle Unlimited). And the week before that the best seller list included 7 titles from Amazon Publishing and KDP Select, 26 additional self-pub titles, and a single traditionally published title which is now part of Kindle Unlimited.

Kindle Unlimited launched on Friday with a catalog of 640,000 plus titles which Amazon customers in the US can read for a fee of $9.99 a month. Most of the titles (over 550,000) are drawn from KDP Select, with a levening of titles from traditional publishers including Wiley, Scholastic, WW Norton, HMH, and more (but no titles from the Big 5).

That program is only 5 days old but it is already having an effect on Amazon’s best seller list.

Far from being a simply tally of units sold, Amazon has long used many different factors to generate their best seller lists. At one point free ebooks affected the rankings, but their influence has lessened with time. Loans made via Kindle Owner’s Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited, on the other hand, can have a significant effect, and the free ebooks given away as part of the Kindle First program also can cause a spike in sales.

As you can see from the data summarized above, the launch of Kindle Unlimited is having a positive effect on any titles included. Whether this translates to actual sales is another matter.

It’s not clear how the rankings affect the revenues of indie authors, who are paid shares out of a pool of money, but the traditional publishers with titles in KDP Select are probably quite pleased. At least some of those publishers, including (at a minimum) Scholastic, are paid full price for each loan made via KU and KOLL. Others were recruited to the program and are paid when 10% of an ebook is read.

This does unfortunately relegate self-published authors to second-class status, but that is not new. The payment terms for Kindle Unlimited are identical to the terms for KOLL, including how the traditional publishers are reimbursed. In other words when sites like DBW make claims like "Kindle Unlimited’s Two-Tier System Makes Some Authors Second-Class Citizens", they are wrong from the get-go.

Are self-published authors treated as second class citizens? Maybe(*), but if that is the case then it’s certainly not a new situation. There are several privileges that the majority of indie authors don’t have (including pre-order buttons) which are available to traditionally published authors. So if you really want to label them second class citizens then they’ve always been mistreated by Amazon.

On the other hand, self-pub authors have the option of removing their titles from Kindle Unlimited, and traditionally published authors do not.  Also, indie authors get 70% (ish) of retail, while traditionally published authors do not. So who exactly is the second-class citizen?

I find that term absurd, and that goes double when you consider the current debate in its historical context. As Hugh Howey pointed out yesterday, much of the hand-wringing going on right now is a repeat of the debate surrounding KDP Select in 2011:

I’m having a Groundhog Day moment, here. Indies are getting screwed. Exclusivity is death for authors. We are in coach and Big 5 authors are in first class. Our pay is going down.

The same discussion exploded on KBoards back in 2011. They were the Kindle Boards at the time, and self-publishing was a lot more stigmatized than it is today. Amazon launched a program called KDP Select, and if you went exclusive with them, you gained two marketing advantages: Your ebooks became part of the Kindle Lending Library, and you were granted 5 “free” days for every 90-day period of Select.

There is really little to differentiate between the treatment of indie authors in KOLL and KU, aside from perhaps the fact that the increase in the number of publishers participating in Kindle Unlimited.

That increase might negatively affect the net gain an indie author sees from Kindle Unlimited, in which case they might be better off if they pull out. But as I pointed out on Sunday, there is no one size fits all for the ebook market and there never has been.

Publishers Lunch

P.S. Do you know the absolutely crazy part about the idea of indie authors being second-class citizens? It’s that traditional publishers would have treated those authors worse, including shutting out the majority of authors.

image by Emily Carlin

Apple released their annual report last night, and mixed in with the generally good news were a few misleading statistics.

With revenues of $37.4 billion for the June quarter, Apple generated a profit of $7.7 billion dollars. Apple sold 35.2 million iPhones in the third fiscal quarter, up 13% from last year, and they sold 13.3 million iPads, down 9% from last year.

All in all Apple’s news was mixed but not necessarily bad (not unless you are an analyst). But there are a few details that I would like to quibble over. In particular, during the earnings conference call following the release of the quarterly report, Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that:

In education, iPad remains the tablet of choice with 85% share of the U.S. education tablet market according to the latest published estimate from IDC. We’ve now sold 13 million iPads to education customers globally.

While that is strictly true, it’s not the complete story. Yes, Apple leads the academic market for tablets, and schools are buying tablets by the truckloads to equip classrooms and launch 1:1 programs. But not all schools are buying iPads to give to students; they’re also buying laptops, including Chromebooks.

Google has been interested in the educational market since 2011, and their primary focus is on a type of laptop called the Chromebook. Chromebooks run ChromeOS on what would best be described a cheap laptop hardware (although there are a few premium models like the Pixel) with an Intel CPU. Google has a number of hardware partners, including Acer, which lead the pack with 30% of the Chromebook market last quarter.

Google has been so focused on laptops that they only belatedly added tablets, including the Nexus 7 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, to their Google for Education program in November 2013.

Given how Chromebooks and iPads are used in schools, they are direct competitors. So while Apple is dominating the educational tablet market, that is only because one of their leading competitors for school district dollars isn’t focused on tablets.

Google reported a few days ago that they sold a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter (another 800,000 were sold to consumers). While that might not look nearly as impressive as Apple’s 13 million iPads, the numbers suggest  that Google could be selling as many Chromebooks to schools as Apple is selling iPads.

We don’t have specifics on how many iPads Apple sold to schools last quarter, we do know that Apple last reported in February 2013 that they had sold 8 million iPads to schools around the globe.

A quick back of the envelope calculation tells us that schools bought 5 million iPads in the 17 months since February 2013, which means Apple averaged under a million iPads sold to schools each quarter – an average which is less than the million Chromebooks sold.

So while Apple may be dominating the education tablet market, they’re not dominating the larger educational gadget market. And that is the real story here, and it comes as no surprise.

Based on what I saw at the Computers in Libraries conference a couple months ago, Chromebooks are getting a lot more buzz in edtech at the moment than iPads. Clearly that has translated into sales. For example, only today a school district in MD announced that they would be spending $15 million to buy 40,000 Chromebooks.

But will it continue? I think so. Chromebooks are cheaper, they are supported by educational publishers, and iPads are great but they lack keyboards, which limits what you can do with them.

With analysts predicting 5 million Chrombooks sold by the end of the year, I am expecting that Chromebook sales will outpace iPad sales for at least the next year and possibly even longer.

Question

Have you used a Chromebook? What did you think?

Amazon is regularly cast as the bully in coverage of its contract dispute with Hachette, but a new survey shows that all the negative press is not having much effect.

Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group recently released the results of a survey of 5,300 book consumers in the US, and it turns out most respondents  had never heard about the unresolved contract negotiations. Over 60% of those surveyed indicated that they were unaware of the standoff, and of the 39% who had read or heard about most didn’t care.

Of that 39%,  a sizable number (39%) had no opinion, while 37.5% said that the dispute had not changed their buying habits and 4.4% said they were buying more books from Amazon. Only 19% of those book buyers aware of the contract dispute said they were buying fewer books from Amazon.

In other words, all of the media coverage has only managed to convince around 8% of book buyers that Amazon was at fault. That is a lot of ink spilled for not much effect.

The indifference does not bode well for groups like Authors United, which recently formed with the goal of pressuring Amazon to acquiesce to Hachette in the negotiations. Organized around authors who had signed the open letter drafted by Douglas Preston, the group plans to continue their campaign with a full-page advert in the New York Times (funded out of their own pockets). I would wish them luck, but the results mentioned above would suggest that they are wasting their time and money.

This survey confirms earlier reports from early June that Amazon’s brand image was largely untarnished by the press coverage, although it does seem to have had an increasing effect over the past 7 weeks. Perhaps if the dispute drags on for a few additional quarters, Amazon might begin to feel the pinch.

Publishers Lunch

The Dutch ereader retailer Icarus is back again today with their second device launch in as many weeks.

Icarus is launching a 9.7″ ereader called the Excel 2. It improves on the model launched last year with a faster CPU and more RAM, but it is still unfortunately using the same screen and touchscreen panel.

The Icarus Excel 2 sports a 9.7″ E-ink screen with a screen resolution of 1200 x 825. It runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM and 4GB internal storage, and it has a Wacom touchscreen, Bluetooth, Wifi, and a microSD card slot.

In short, the Icarus Excel 2 is a rebranded Onyx Boox M96 and thus has the same limitations (no frontlight, undesirable touchscreen, etc). Like the M96 Universe which was announced earlier this month, the new Excel is on my don’t buy list.

Here’s why I recommended avoiding the M96:

To put it simply, the M96 Universe is hobbled by the fact that it is really an updated version of an older Onyx ereader – one that was developed before frontlights and capacitive touchscreens were readily available.

If measured spec for spec, the M96 Universe would come up short when compared to the T68 Lynx. The larger device sports a screen with a resolution of 825 x 1200, which is a significantly lower resolution than the 6.8″ screen on the T68 Lynx. The smaller device has a screen resolution of 1440 x 1080, and I think you would appreciate the difference.

As I reported earlier, I would suggest you get the T68 Lynx. I reviewed it a couple weeks ago, and I have found it possible to turn it into a nifty little E-ink Android tablet.

Of course, that is simply my opinion which is an opinion and not a decree.

But if you do get the larger ereader I would recommend buying the M96 Universe, and not the Icarus Excel 2. I plan to avoid buying from Icarus because I have had a couple bad experiences with their retail operation.

The M96 Universe is sold by Arta Tech, a Polish company, and can be pre-ordered from Onyx-Boox.com for 309 euros. That alone makes it a better buy than the Icarus Excel 2, which is going to sell for 399 euros.

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