If you’ve been thinking about buying the dual-screen Yotaphone smartphone, you might want to hold off. A Russian tech blog has reported, and Yota Devices has confirmed, that a new model Yotaphone will be unveiled at Mobile World Congress next week.

Update: Here is the announcement (link).

The new Yotaphone is said to have larger screens and a more polished design.  Yota Devices isn’t sharing any other info, but they did confirm that a new device will be announced next week. They will have it in their booth for everyone to see.

The current Yotaphone is an odd looking beast with 2 screens: an E-ink screen on the back and an LCD screen on the front. The screens measure 4.3″ diagonally, and have resolutions of 720 x 1280 (LCD) and (E-ink) 360 x 640. It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, non a 1.7 GHz dual-core Qualcomm SparDragon CPU with 2GB RAM and 32GB Flash storage.

The phone has been under development since 2010 and was first unveiled in late 2012. Thanks to the dev costs and the extra screen it’s a rather pricy device. It retails in Europe for 500 euros. That’s a rather high price for a new device from a relatively unknown company, but it has found a market. Kommersant reports that 12 thousand Yotaphones have been sold since it shipped in early December 2013.

And now, just over 2 months after the first model shipped, Yota Devices is ready to announce a new model.

Barnes & Noble has just received a buyout offer from G Asset Management, a little-known private investment firm. This firm is looking to acquire a 51% stake in the bookseller, and they’re willing to put up $672 million, or about $22 a share.

The firm has stated that they plan to spin out the Nook division as a separate venture apart from the retail stores and the college stores. If G Asset Management cannot buy B&N, they made a second offer for the just a controlling interest in Nook Media at $5 a share.

Barnes & Noble stock price jumped at the news, but it is still trading below $18 a share at this time.

If you’ve been following bookselling news for any length of time then G Asset Management is a name you might recognize; they made a similar offer in 2012. At that time they wanted a 51% interest in B&N College, the division that runs college bookstores. That deal fell through, with B&N instead choosing to form Nook Media by combining the Nook unit and B&N College, and selling a chunk to Microsoft and Pearson.

And last November, G Assett Management proposed separating the Nook business in a deal that would have valued the retailer at $20 a share. That deal also fell through.

Len Riggio, chairman of B&N, made his own attempt to take control of B&N and split the company in 2013.  he wanted to take the retail stores private and let the rump of B&N go its own way. He later withdraw his plans after winning some unknown internal power struggle.

B&N has yet to comment on the offer, but they have confirmed that they received it.

IMO, they would be fools not to accept. I think they should have take the earlier offer. This would have set them free from their most toxic asset, the Nook platform, while also giving the retail chain an infusion of much needed capital.

B&N’s revenues have continued to decline over the past few years, with the most recent holiday season showing a 6.6% decline in sales, with the digital sales showing an even steeper decline.

But B&N being B&N, I am also going to put money on their declining to sell the Nook unit. I also don’t think that G Asset Management has much of a chance of gaining a controlling interest in B&N; Len Riggio is the single largest stockholder and at one point last he controlled around 45% of the company. That’s going to make it really easy for him to block this deal.

Update: And it looks like Riggio might not have to offer. According to Bloomberg, GAsset Management only has a few million in assets, not the nearly $700 million it would take to carry out this deal.

As far as the wider ebook market is concerned Epub3 is a dead format, but it still has its uses. That’s why I was pleased to read yesterday the the Readium for Chrome extension received a major update.

Readium for Chrome builds on the work of the open source Readium Foundation, and it enables readers to view Epub3 ebooks in either ChromeOS or their Chrome web browser. The new update brings behind the scenes improvements, including updates to the codebase, as well as  a more modern user experience.

There are in fact many apps which will let you read an Epub ebook in Chrome, but Readium is the only way to read an Epub3 ebook (so far as I know).

And BTW, the post which announced the update also reminded me that this extension, like the Readium project as a whole, is still in pre-release development. This latest version of the plugin, like previous Readium for Chrome  should be considered alpha-level software that’s not suitable for the end user. if you encounter bugs, they would like you to report them here.

P.S. If you’re looking for a source of Epub3 ebooks to read in Readium, you can find an archive collection here.

Readium for Chrome

A cursory glance at the statistics for the US ebook market will tell you most people are sticking with paper, and there’s a good reason for that. As the following infographic will show you, paper books fill many uses which ebooks cannot.

The infographic is based on a poll conducted recently by Fatbrain, a UK-based used book marketplace. Over 1,000 Fatbrain users responded, and they revealed that the most popular reason for staying with paper reflected their emotional attachment, and not any practical use.

However, right behind there are two down-to-earth reasons: learning (61%), and sharing (58%), and those are 2 answers that I can fully understand. Paper textbooks are still more useful that digital textbooks; even I will say that.

eBookFriendly

Amazon might not be releasing any interesting details about Kindle Store sales in 2013, but luckily for us Rakuten is more generous. This international retail conglomerate held their annual stockholders meeting on Friday, and they released a few details about Kobo.

Rakuten bought Kobo in late 2011, and while they’ve always been somewhat cagey about financial details they have in the past shared a few nuggets of info. For example, in their 2012 annual report Rakuten told us that Kobo revenues were up 143%, and that at the end of 2012 Kobo had 12 million users.

On Friday Rakuten revealed that Kobo’s Q4 content revenues were up 44% over 2012.  They also shared that Kobo now has 18 million users.  This we already knew from the news a couple weeks ago about longtime Rakuten exec Takahito Aiki taking over as CEO of Kobo, but it is good to have confirmation that the stat is current.

You can find the annual report online, as well as a copy of the video of the meeting. (Thanks, Fbone!)

The 2013 year end stats may not have been as impressive as what Kobo shared in 2012, but they’re still a sign that Kobo is seeing enough growth that they want to boast about it. That’s better than what Amazon has seen fit to share.

And that’s not all Rakuten shared with us on Friday; they also revealed why Takahito Aiki stepped in as CEO of Kobo earlier this month. I speculated at the time that Aiki was brought in because he was Japanese and because he had experiencing in running a not too dissimilar international company, but it turns out that Rakuten had a more specific purpose in mind.

The tl;dr version is that Mr. Aiki is viewed as a turnaround specialist. He previously ran Fusion Inc, one of Rakuten’s telecom subs, but we knew that from the press release. What we didn’t know at the time (no one reported it, so far as I can tell) was that Fusion was a money pit when it was acquired by Rakuten, but by the time Mr Aiki left it had generated over 1 and a half billion yen a year in operating income (aka operating profit) in 2012, and 1.9 billion yen in the first 9 months of 2013.

That’s only about $19 million dollars, which is chump change to Rakuten. It’s probably even chump change compared to what Kobo generates in term of revenue, but if Mr. Aiki can have a similar effect on Kobo it’s potentially very good news for Kobo’s customers (as well as anyone who hates Amazon’s dominance of the ebook market).

Kobo is believed to have a negligible share of the US ebook market, but they’ve always said that they had an international focus and as you can see from the year end stats that focus has continued to pay off. Can you name another ebook vendor who can boast of similar growth?

With Mr Aiki at the helm, Kobo’s healthy growth rate has an excellent chance of continuing.

Don’t look now, but Barnes & Noble has retired the Nook Touch. This ebook reader, which initially launched in 2011, is no longer mentioned on the B&N website, and according to my sources all mentions of it are being removed from B&N stores today.

The Nook Touch is still available on the Nook UK website, and you can still find it via 3rd-party retailers and on Ebay, but so far as B&N is concerned this model has been discontinued here in the US.

On a related note, the 2012 Nook Glow is also gone, but that should come as no surprise. That ereader was replaced in late 2013 by a newer model, and was subsequently retired.

The Nook Simple Touch was B&N’s second ebook reader, and it was released in late May 2011. It ran Android 2.1 on an 800MHz CPU with 256MB RAM, Wifi, a 6″ E-ink screen, and an IR touchscreen. It had 1.2GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot.

For a while there the Nook Touch proved quite popular among hackers; once B&N’s interface was bypassed hackers quickly began to appreciate having a 6″ E-ink Android tablet, and they came up with new ways to use it including by playing Angry Birds, running a MacOS emulator, reading Kindle ebooks, playing videos, and some truly weird tricks like word processing and wireless printing.

The Nook Touch hadn’t received significant updates in some time the 3 years since it launched, so I am not surprised that it’s now gone, but I do wonder whether this was the best move.

This model was priced to compete with the basic Kindle, and now that it’s gone B&N won’t have an ebook reader for the budget conscious consumer. Sure, there are any number of models on the market which will work with the Nook Store, but I was under the impression that one goal for the Nook hardware was to try to lock readers in to buying their ebooks from B&N.

Perhaps B&N isn’t so interested in the bottom of the market any more? Given that they were probably losing money on each Nook Touch sold, that would make some sense.

In any case, the Nook Touch is still available at a variety of retailers, including Walmart, Target, and Ebay.

Microsoft might be boringly monolithic at times, but their sheer size often lets them throw several teams at a single market.

Take ebooks, for example. In addition to investing in Nook Media and developing a textbook-focused Reader app for MS Office, Microsoft is also working on another ebook app as part of the Xbox division.

The hot story this morning comes via a Chinese gadget blog. LiveSino discovered that Microsoft is looking to hire a developer to work on "a groundbreaking interactive reading app on Windows, which incorporates books, magazines, and comics." The engineer hired in this position would join the same Music, Video, and Reading (MVR) team that has already shipped two Xbox branded apps for Windows 8.

It’s not clear why Microsoft is investing in a third ebook parallel ebook effort, but I’m not surprised to learn that they have. As I pointed out in October 2013, the acronym in the title of the Xbox MVR unit stands for Music, Video, and Reading. That unit had already released a music app and a video app, so at some point I was expecting it to spawn a reading app on Windows 8, and possibly the Xbox.

If I had to guess, the Office and Xbox reading apps are going to be targeted at 2 different markets. The still-unannounced Office Reader will likely focus on academic, technical, and educational content, while the Xbox MVR app will more likely focus on fiction, including both novels and graphic novels. There is also a possibility that this new job posting is a sign that the work on the Nook Windows 8 app will be shifting to MS, but it’s too early to say.

I know that many refer to the ebook market as a single unit, but in reality it is still segmented based on content. It might make sense for Microsoft to develop a couple different apps which each focus on a different segment and have different features and abilities.

If nothing else, this new job listing shows that Microsoft is getting their money’s worth from their  $300 million (plus a promised $300 million) investment in Nook Media in 2012. They already got the international Nook Store, which launched in late 2013 in 32 countries (including Australia) – but is only available for Windows 8.

The Verge

Have you been interested in the alternate Android and Linux tablet firmwares for Kobo’s ebook readers, but not enough to completely replace the existing firmware?  Then I have some good news for you.

There’s a new hack over on MobileRead Forums that lets users install Android on the external microSD card, saving them the effort (and risk) of cracking open the ereader and removing the internal microSD card.

I haven’t had a chance to try it myself, but I’ve been following the topic on MobileRead ever since the first proof of concept photos were posted in early November. That work was based on porting the firmware originally developed for the Tolino Shine and adapting it so it could run on kobo’s hardware, and for the past few months hackers have been working to make the alternate firmware run better and easier to install.

The Tolino Shine runs Android 2.3, so if you try this on your Kobo device you won’t exactly be getting a new version of Android. Android 2.3 Gingerbread is close to 3 years old and lacks many of the refinements of later versions of Android, but on the plus side this firmware was adapted to run on E-ink screens, so what it lacks in modern features it makes up for in screen optimization (or so it appears based on user reports on MobileRead).

This new trick has been shown to work on the Kobo Aura HD, Glo, and Touch, but not the Kobo Aura (no files have been posted for that model). That latter ereader doesn’t have an internal microSD card slot, so the earlier hack didn’t work on it either.

Directions on how to setup the dual-boot card can be found over on Angor’s blog, along with the download files. He’s posted files for the Aura HD, Glo, and Touch, as well as instructions on how to set up and install the Android firmware image.

Check out MobileRead for tech support and more details.

MobileRead via my competition

Most ebook ereaders sold in the US are not accessible to the visually impaired, and thanks to a recent decision from the FCC things are going to stay that way for at least the next year.

The FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau granted a waiver on 28 January which allows ereader makers to continue to avoid complying with a federal regulation on accessibility.

Back in August 2013, Amazon, Sony, and Kobo filed a petition which asked that their ebook readers be granted an exemption to a new accessibility regulation. They weren’t trying to avoid complying with all regulations, just one which was crafted in 2011. The companies wanted to avoid the requirement that Amazon et al comply with:

Sections 716 and 717 of the Communications Act of 1934, as Enacted by the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010

This particular regulation (parts A and B of a single rule) requires that makers of "advanced communications services" make sure those services are accessible to the disabled. It’s a generally good idea, and the rule was written broadly enough that it covers everything from ISPs to mobile devices like tablets and some ereaders (ones with Wifi or 3G).

Of course, there’s a problem with applying this rule to ebook readers; by the time the regulation was written numerous models available on the US market could not comply. Amazon, Kobo, and B&N all had at least one ebook reader which lacked the sound capability that would clearly be a basic requirement. The basic Kindle, the Kobo Touch, and the Nook Touch were each completely incompatible with the new regulation, putting the device makers in the position of either junking their existing models and investing in new hardware , or requesting an exemption waiver.

Given the cost of compliance, and the limited value it would generate, I can understand why they asked for the waiver. And they succeeded – to a limited to degree. The waiver was carefully written so it only covers mobile devices that meet certain criteria. Tablets are excluded, and so are any devices that don’t meet certain limitations:

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

Those restrictions were spelled out in the original request, and the FCC basically gave Amazon et al the exact waiver they asked for.

The FCC shared their reasoning behind this decision. To put it simply, ebook readers might have email and other web functions but they are designed for reading:

After a review of the record, we find that basic e-readers are capable of accessing ACS, are designed for multiple purposes, and that consumers do utilize them for ACS, but, at present, we find that they are designed primarily for the purpose of reading, which makes such devices eligible for waiver under section 716(h)(1)(A) and (B) of the Act and section 14.5(a) of the Commission’s rules. To begin  with, we consider the design of these devices. The current relatively slow refresh screen rates, the absence of apps for integrated e-mail clients,82 the inability of basic e-readers to display video for any purpose, including video conferencing, and the lack of high powered processors on these devices support a finding that these devices at this time are not designed for ACS,

It’s worth noting that this is a limited waiver that only affects a single regulation, and does not exempt ebook readers from all accessibility regulations. (For example, libraries and other public institutions are still going to have to buy devices that are accessible to the disabled.) That’s a nuance many missed when this story broke in August 2013.

This waiver is going to be in effect until 28 January, at which point it will either be extended or allowed to expire. I would bet money on Amazon et al getting an extension; whatever new ebook readers introduced over the next 11 months won’t be terribly different from the models we can buy today, and I don’t see a reason why the exemption wouldn’t be allowed to stand.

image by kodomut

I’m sure you’ve read the news today about Sony and Kobo. The former is bailing on the US ebook market, and as one last kindness to their customers they’ve convinced Kobo to take them in, while the latter is going to gain a few thousand more customers.

This deal is generating a lot of debate and punditry, including a new article over on Forbes. Jeremy Greenfield thinks it would be a good idea for B&N to follow in Sony’s footsteps and simply walk away. While at first I thought it sounded like a horrible idea, it’s actually not all that implausible:

Sony and Kobo are both thought to be very minor players in the U.S. ebook market. I doubt the move will add too many readers to Kobo’s rolls. The company wouldn’t tell me how many accounts are being transferred but in its press release announcing the move, it claimed the same 18 million worldwide users as it has claimed in other recent announcements.

This could be a good model for Nook, which many in the publishing industry expect to be shuttered or sold before the end of 2014. Nook is Barnes & Noble’s device and ebook business and it has been faltering badly for nearly two years. While it still brings in over $100 million in revenue every quarter, it loses much more than that and revenues have been shrinking rather than growing.

That’s a terrible idea and it is also wildly improbable, but as much as I might hate it I am afraid it might actually happen.

And just to be clear, I’m not referring to the possibility that B&N might sell out (I wish); I want to examine the Forbes proposal that B&N might simply walk away.

The thing is, Sony didn’t sell out; they threw in the towel. They bailed on the US ebook market because the revenue probably didn’t meet their expectations, and on their way out the door they asked Kobo take in the soon to be orphan customers (Sony’s last friendly act of customer service).

The US Sony Reader Store isn’t going to be transferred to new ownership; it’s going to be dismantled. I’m sure no one thinks that would be a good solution for B&N’s problems with the Nook, but they could still do it.

All it would take would be for B&N to perform a cold cost benefit analysis and decide that the ongoing hemorrhage of money outweighed the negative publicity. I would have reached that conclusion months ago, so it’s not impossible for B&N to reach the same conclusion in the near future.

And here’s how the result of that analysis might play out.

B&N’s first step would be to fire nearly everyone working at Nook Media. Not counting the people who have left over the past 6 months, that’s somewhere around 600 people, most of whom work in either Palo Alto or NYC. This would take the development teams that B&N spent years and a ton of money putting together and cast them to the wind, completely throwing away all that work, but if B&N is walking away from ebooks I don’t think they would care.

Next, B&N would have to find another company to take over the customer accounts. (Actually, this would come first, but I wanted to be melodramatic about the firings.) This could be Kobo, but Apple and Amazon are out. The latter would never get regulatory approval, while the former wouldn’t deign to support customers that didn’t own Apple hardware. And I doubt Kobo would be able to take over the accounts; I think Amazon would do their best to block regulatory approval for a B&N-Kobo deal.

As a result, that leaves just one company as the most likely candidate to take over the charred remains of the Nook Store: Microsoft. Remember, MS already owns a chuck of Nook Media, and the international Nook Store appears to operate under Microsoft’s auspices (it’s Windows 8 only). And that makes MS the best candidate to keep the Nook customer accounts from going in the shredder.

Update: A reader has pointed out that MS can be multi-platform when it suits them; they already have iOS and Android apps for Xbox Music and other apps. Thanks, Commons!

MS would probably abandon the Android apps, the iPad and iPhone apps, the OSX app, and maybe even the Windows apps, but they would at least keep the Windows 8 app going. And MS would keep many readers from suffering the same fate as Fictionwise’s international customers (left in the cold when B&N shut Fictionwise down).

Sure, almost no one would be able to read their ebooks because they didn’t run Windows 8, but at least their investment wouldn’t be completely gone.

But I’m not sure that would matter much on the larger scheme of things, because if B&N simply abandoned their Nook customers to MS I think most of those customers would flee for a safer harbor.

They would go running to Amazon.

Sure, they would keep reading their existing ebooks (assuming they still had access), but future purchases would be made in the Kindle Store – where it’s safe to assume that the ebooks will not vanish in the night. After all, many people might hate Amazon but who would you trust more, Amazon or MS?

In short, if B&N followed in Sony’s footsteps Amazon would come out a huge winner. And for that reason alone we should all be hoping that B&N doesn’t simply throw in the towel.

What do you think?

There’s been a story building over the past week about self-published ebooks. According to Chuck Wendig, the massive volume of self-published titles has resulted in a "shit volcano" of worthless content. Another blogger picked up the story, and then yesterday Mike Cane jumped in with the prediction that Amazon would eventually take steps to clean up the Kindle Store.

If you have time today you might want to read these posts. But if you don’t have time, don’t worry. This line of reasoning is arguably flawed in that it is focusing the wrong problem, and it is safe to simply ignore it (especially since Chuck Wendig’s post is so long).

• Slushy Glut Slog: Why The Self-Publishing Shit Volcano Is A Problem — which the people who are the problem will never think they’re the problem.

• Why the self-publishing shit volcano isn’t going to stop erupting any time soon — which the people who are the problem will never read to the end because they can’t understand it.
• The Self-Pub “Shit Volcano” Will End – which the people who are the problem get booted from the Kindle Store.

That last link leads to one of Mike Cane’s post which was published yesterday. Mike is usually right about these kind of things, which is why I posted that article last night.

But in this case it’s much more likely that he is wrong. As Mackay Bell pointed out in the comments, this is the new normal:

We heard the exact same arguments about blogging and You Tube. How can Blogger continue to allow anyone to create a site for free? They will have to start charging. Not yet. Same with You Tube. Google can’t possibly continue to allow people to post any video on line, they’ll have to start limiting it. Didn’t happen. (Same arguments about photo sharing sites, as I recall.)

Welcome to the digital age. It costs almost nothing to allow people to post this stuff, and the benefits to the companies that allow it are enormous for the small portion of stuff that turns out to be valuable.

This is true, and the same generalized comment could be made about every platform that is built on user-generated content, including Tumblr, Facebook, WordPress, Flickr, etc.

And now that we have a new perspective on the problem, I have a question for you: Would you describe the many, many Youtube channels with poor quality video as a shit volcano? Would you say that about the many badly written blogs?

What about the many podcasts in iTunes, or the excessive number of duplicate apps in iTunes, Google Play, and elsewhere? Surely those are shit volcanoes which need to be cleaned up, right?

I wouldn’t say so; all that content is merely the dross which I ignore while searching for the good stuff. In fact, I hadn’t even thought of the unwanted content on Youtube, et al until Mackay left that comment, that’s how well I have ignored it. All that excess and possibly bad content isn’t a problem for me, much less one deserving of the title of shit volcano.

And if we don’t call that other user-generated content a shit volcano then is it really correct to apply the term to self-published ebooks?

Again, I would say no.

I think Chuck Wendig’s original argument is flawed. The problem we should be looking at isn’t the volume of content or its quality; the problem is how to sort through the dross and find the good stuff.

The term we’re looking for now is discovery, which basically means connecting readers with their next read, and I’m not convinced discovery is a problem, either.

This whole discussion started with Chuck telling us to go look at 10 ebooks at random in the Kindle Store so we cans see how many are terrible.

Okay, we can do that but does anyone really use that as a way to find new content?

I don’t. Like most other readers I listen to recommendations, check free ebook sites, and read descriptions and reviews in order to tell whether I might like a book. I don’t usually grab ebooks at random in the Kindle Store, so the enormous mass of ebooks don’t bother me at all.

In short, the "self-pub shit volcano" is no more of a problem than my current dilemma of deciding whether I should get my morning sandwich from McDonalds, Panera, or the local coffee shop.

It’s the new normal, so there’s little reason to complain about it.

Good news! Adobe announced late this afternoon that they won’t be breaking a lot of ebook readers in July.

According to the Datalogics blog, Adobe has decided to revise the adoption timeline for their new DRM, and they will no longer be requiring all ebook retailers, app developers, and device makers to upgrade their DRM support by July 2014:

After receiving feedback from customers and webinar attendees, Adobe has revised the migration timetable for customers.  “Adobe does not plan to stop support for ACS 4 or RMSDK 9.  ACS 5 books will be delivered to the older RMSDK 9 based readers”, according to Shameer Ayyappan, Senior Product Manager at Adobe.  “We will let our resellers and publishers decide when they wish to set the DRM flag on ACS 5, thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers.”

If you’re just tuning in, news broke yesterday that Adobe was going to require ebook retailers and developers to upgrade to the recently release Adobe Content Server 5 by July 2014. ACS 5 supports a new type of DRM which is not compatible with existing ebook apps and ereaders, thus forcing everyone to upgrade or replace their hardware, or they will lose access to their legally purchased content.

This would have hurt readers, indie ebook retailers, and probably helped Amazon, Google, and Kobo. Yesterday I was the first to report about the many problems this would cause, both to me and to other readers, so I am especially pleased that Adobe changed their mind.

Will readers be willing to subject themselves to ads just to read free ebooks?

Readfy set out to answer that question today. This "Spotify for ebooks" opened to the public today, launching a beta test for their ebook subscription service.

German ebook readers will now have the option of reading ebooks from a catalog of 15,000 titles for free, on the condition that they subject themselves to ads. The ebooks are available via Readfy’s own Android app, and include ads along the lines of:

The ads interrupt the reading experience and are displayed over the text, including both as a footer and centered in the middle of the screen. They also require that readers stay online so the reading app can stay connected with the ad server.

Readfy plans to offer text, image, and video ads which will be sold via an ad network at first; the startup would like to launch their own direct ad sales in the near future. They are also going to release an iOS app later this year, and they are working on plans for paid services that will have fewer ads and, at a premium price of 10 euros per month, be completely ad-free and offer an offline reading mode.

And that’s not all that might be coming. Once Readfy has worked out the bugs they will be doubling the catalog to 30,000 titles, and they already have their sights set on international expansion. In 2015 the service is expected to expand to other European countries and the US. And of course Readfy plans to add English-language and Spanish-language books to their catalog.

Readfy, which is affiliated with the Dusseldorf-based 1stMover startup incubator, was founded about 7 months ago by Felix Bauchspiess, Ryan David Mullins, and Frank Großklaus. It first came to my attention last November, but has been operating in stealth mode both before and since.

—

So do you think this service will prove to be popular?

I don’t think so, but then again I dislike ads so much that I have them blocked in my web browser. (Yes, the irony of a blogger subsisting on the ads he hates has not escaped me.) As such I might be an outlier.

But as I noted when I wrote about Readfy in November, this service has to walk a careful tightrope. It has to bring in the right amount of users, advertisers, and content, and failing on any one of those could doom this effort if Readfy isn’t careful.

BuchReport

Update: Adobe has backed down.

When Adobe announced their new DRM a couple weeks ago some said that we would soon see compatibility issues with older devices and apps as Adobe forced everyone to upgrade.

At that time I didn’t think Adobe would make the mistake of cutting off so many existing readers, but now it seems that I could not have been more wrong on the issue.

The following video (found via The SF Reader) confirms that Adobe is planning to require that everyone (ebookstores, app and device makers) to upgrade to the new DRM by July 2014.

http://youtu.be/9qb-sXVlK_o?t=24m47s

The video is a recording of a webinar hosted by Datalogics and Adobe, and it covers in detail aspects of how and when the new DRM will be implemented (as well as a lot of other data). If the embed link doesn’t work for you, here’s a link to the video on Youtube.

The tl;dr version is that Adobe is going to start pushing for ebook vendors to provide support for the new DRM in March, and when July rolls Adobe is going to force the ebook vendors to stop supporting the older DRM. (Hadrien Gardeur, Paul Durrant, and Martyn Daniels concur on this interpretation.)

Update: Adobe has backed down and removed the July deadline.

This means that any app or device which still uses the older Adobe DRM will be cut off. Luckily for many users, that penalty probably will not affect readers who use Kobo or Google reading apps or devices; to the best of my knowledge neither uses the Adobe DRM internally. And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies' wise decision to use their own DRM.

But everyone else just got screwed.

If you’re using Adobe DE 2.1, come July you won’t be able to read any newly downloaded DRMed ebooks until after you upgrade to Adobe DE 3.0. If you’re using a preferred 3rd-party reading app, you won’t be able to download any new DRMed ebooks until after the app developer releases an update.

And if you’re using an existing ebook reader, you’d better plan on only reading DRM-free ebooks until further notice.

One thing Adobe seems to have missed is that there are tens of millions of ebook readers on the market that support the older DRM but will probably never be upgraded to the new DRM. Sony and Pocketbook, for example, have released a number of models over the past 5 or so years, most of which have since been discontinued.

Do you really think they’re going to invest in updating a discontinued (but otherwise perfectly functional) device?

I don’t, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not only will millions of existing readers be cut off, there are also hundreds of thousands of ebook readers sitting on store shelves which, as of July, will no longer support Adobe DRM.

And do you know what’s even better? All signs point to the ebook reader market having peaked in 2011 or 2012 (I have industry sources which have said this) so the existing and soon to be incompatible ereaders will probably outnumber the compatible models for the indefinite future (years if not decades).

If you look hard enough you can still buy many of the ebook readers released in 2010, 2011, and 2012 as new, and you can also find them as refurbs or used. They work just fine today (albeit a little slowly by today’s standards) but when July rolls around they will be little more than junk.

And that includes ebook readers owned by libraries and other cost conscious institutions.

If you’re beginning to grasp just how bad this move could be, wait a second because I’m not done.

Not only will readers be affected, but so will indie ebookstores. They’re going to have to pay to upgrade their servers and their reading apps. That cost is going to hit them in the pocketbook (potentially driving some out of business), and that’s not all.

Many if not most of the indie ebookstores are dependent on the various Adobe DRM compatible ebook readers on the market. They cannot afford to develop their own hardware so they rely on readers buying and using devices made by other companies including, Pocketbook, Sony, Gajah (a major OEM), and others.

Once those existing ebook readers are abandoned by Adobe the indie ebookstores will probably lose customers to one or another of the major ebook vendors.

In other words Adobe just gave Amazon a belated Christmas present. After all, everyone might hate Amazon but we also know we can trust them to not break their DRM.

Folks, the above scenario spells out all the reasons why I didn’t expect Adobe to completely abandon support for the older DRM. It is so obviously a bad idea that I thought they would avoid it.

With that in mind, I would also like to add an addendum and apply Tyrion’s Razor. Perhaps Adobe has internal data which says that this won’t be a serious issue.  I seriously doubt it, but it’s possible.

P.S. But if this turns out to be the utter disaster I am expecting, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Adobe for on yet another occasion giving DRM a bad name.