Barnes & Noble quietly launched the beta version of a new digital textbook app earlier this month. It’s called Yuzu, and it is currently available for the iPad and for web browsers.

Yuzu is a digital education platform that Barnes & Noble says is going to "make the everyday learning experience remarkably gratifying". Few details are available at this time, but B&N says that the new platform will support "the collaborative, free flow of information between learners and educators".

When it officially launches this summer Yuzu is going to be B&N’s replacement for NookStudy, which according to the website has already been retired. At this point it looks like Yuzu is an entirely new platform, and it would appear that Yuzu does not share the same accounts as the Nook Store or NookStudy. In fact, one of the FAQs I found says that Yuzu is not compatible with NookStudy textbooks.

The app is currently only available for Internet Explorer and Safari 6.1/7 (but not Firefox), and for iPads running iOS7, and it is far from complete. While the app does run in IE, all I can do is play around with the set up process. I can create terms and add courses to a term, but I cannot actually read any content. There’s no option for uploading my own files, and Yuzu’s bookstore has not yet been enabled.

At this point we have little more to go on than B&N’s own description, and it makes Yuzu sound more like a digital textbook app like iBooks or Nook Study than an educational and academic app like iTunes U. Like its predecessor NookStudy, Yuzu offers students a next-generation reading and note-taking experience in a simple app, but it also improves on NookStudy by making it easier for educators to provide course materials.

In addition to launching the Yuzu platform, B&N is also tying in FacultyEnlight. This is a website where educators can assemble academic materials into course packs, and from what I can tell B&N launched it in 2011 (if not earlier). Educators  can search for the textbooks and other academic material they need, and then build a required and recommended textbook list for a class.

FacultyEnlight is very much focused on the college market, so I would bet that it is also tied in to the 600 plus college bookstore websites run by B&N College. On a related note, the site also prompts educators to sell their original course materials via Nook Press, where they will end up in the Nook Store – and probably Yuzu as well.

Yuzu is only available for IE, Safari, and the iPad, but I have been told that B&N plans to have a Yuzu Android app and support for more web browsers by the time the platform launches this summer.

The Digital Reader was the first to report earlier this year that Barnes & Noble was turning their attention to the digital education market (I scooped the official announcement by about 3 weeks). At the time I was hopeful that this pivot could save B&N’s digital division, but now I am not so sure that it will.

Everything I have read today suggests that Barnes & Noble is pursuing a retail strategy where they will sell (or rent) digital textbooks to students. Given the general failure of the digital textbook market, this does not bode well for B&N.

Over the past six months we have seen several digital textbook providers go bankrupt, sell out to their competition, or pivot to serve a new market. Kno was acquired out of bankruptcy by Intel, Coursesmart was sold off to its competitor, and Inkling pivoted to a new business model based on licensing its tech to publishers.

I predicted about a month ago that the future of digital textbooks is in publishers selling to schools, not retail. If B&N is going to ignore that trend then I expect that Yuzu is even more doomed than the Nook platform.

On the other hand, B&N does have an advantage that none of the startups could claim; B&N runs over 600 college bookstores. This gives them a market presence that few other than Follett (which also runs college bookstores) can match.

And in any case, it is too early to say for sure how B&N will generate revenue; they might be planning to use a different model than selling digital textbooks to cash-strapped students. We shall have to wait and see.

• iTunes
• Yuzu website
• FacultyEnlight

It’s been a week since Amazon announced that they were acquiring Comixology , and the surprise deal has left many questions unanswered, including what Amazon plans to do with Submit.

Comixology launched their self-pub platform and/or publishing imprint in March 2013, and over the following year 1,000 titles were accepted for sale.

But now that Comixology is owned by Amazon, it would seem that Submit is redundant. After all, Amazon owns a comics imprint (Jet City Comics launched in July 2013) and a self-pub platform (KDP), so there is little reason to keep Submit around.

Or is there? At least one comics creator thinks Submit will be sticking around, and I agree with him. Bleeding Cool invited Tim Gibson, author and artist on ComiXology Submit title Moth City, what he thought:

I think it’ll affect Submit hugely, though it’s hard to tell how at this stage. I suspect with Amazon’s financial success with Self Published Fiction (a real money spinner for them, as seen here) Comixology’s Submit platform and its recent growth might have been the cherry on the top of the Comixology sundae.

…

Overall, I’m feeling optimistic. Comics and Graphic Novels make up such a small part of Amazon’s e-book system. Around 1% of e-sales if you believe Hugh Howley’s author earnings data (linked to above), so they’re an untapped market within the Amazon platform. They changed their submission engine to encourage more comic submission in the last year or so, but were hampered by some odd file-delivery fees and a small comic audience.

Comixology Submit was definitely the first priority for interdependent comics creators looking to sell digital comics, and if Amazon absorbs some of their systems and oversight it could open up a whole new audience for creators.

Comixology Submit is a strange beast. It was originally launched as a way for creators to self-publish, but unlike KDP Submit is run with a fair amount of oversight. Not every title is accepted by Comixology, and that in many way’s makes Submit more of a publishing imprint than a self-pub platform (and Amazon already has one of each of those).

But I don’t think it’s going away.

Amazon made it clear last week that Comixology would remain its own platform, and if that is true then Comixology will probably have as much independence as Audible. That audiobook distributor is closely integrated with many of Amazon’s systems, including accounts, the Amazon.com website, and the Kindle Fire Android tablets,  but it is still its own entity with its own distribution network and even a self-pub platform (ACX, which launched in 2012).

It’s more than likely that Comixology will retain a similar degree of independence even after it has been closely integrated with Amazon. And that means keeping its own self-pub channel, apps, and distribution network. And given Comixology’s success so far, it’s probably the right move.

If nothing else, the basic structural differences between prose and comics support the idea that they not be combined into a single ebook format in a single store.

Bleeding Cool

We’ve long known that when games and other enhancements are added to ebooks they can  distract readers from paying attention to the text, and now it appears that enhancements can have a negative academic impact.

Researchers at West Chester University have published a paper which looks at the impact of using digital textbooks on iPads. In a small study they found that students’ reading comprehension  was higher when they read conventional books than when they read enhanced ebook. In a second related study the researchers discovered that the students "often skipped over the text altogether".

The Schugars, a husband-and-wife research team at West Chester University, have been researching this topic for the past 3 plus years. They’ve published numerous papers, including one which I wrote about back in 2012. That paper discussed a study which showed that college students who read on ebook readers performed better on tests than the related group of students who read paper books. That is a markedly different outcome from the two most recent studies, both of which focused on students reading on tablets.

The first study compared students reading ebook apps downloaded from app stores like iTunes to students reading paper books. It focused on just 13  middle school students, so it isn’t possible to draw wide conclusions, but what the Schugars found is concerning enough to merit further study. Students showed a noticeably lower level of comprehension when they read on the iPad. The Schugars attributed the difference to the distractions of the enhancements.

In the second study, the researchers observed students in 18 classrooms where iPads and digital textbooks were in common use. The classes were being taught with enhanced digital textbooks created using iBooks Author. While students were "highly motivated by their interactions" with the enhancements found in the ebooks, they also "often skipped over text, where the meat of the information was."

While it is easy to add game-like elements to ebooks, crafting an enhanced ebook that improves upon the original is much harder. What is more likely to happen is that readers will be distracted from the text, leading to situations like in one study cited by the Schugars, which showed that children spent 43% of their ebook engagement time playing games embedded in the ebooks rather than reading the text.

So is this a sign that enhanced ebooks should be kept out of the classroom? Not exactly.

The researchers also found that some enhancements really did enhance comprehension. The researchers advised parents and educators to avoid enhanced ebooks where the enhancements distract from the text and where the enhancements are time-consuming, lead students away from the page of text they are reading, or don’t contribute academically useful features like understanding difficult vocabulary terms.

"It’s not necessarily that ebooks are bad for reading," Heather Ruetschlin Schugar said in an interview with Education Week. "But teachers need more strategies for teaching kids to use what they know about reading in an ebook environment."

NYTimes, Education Week

It’s widely accepted that the anonymity of the internet can turn almost anyone into a troll, and nowhere is this more true than in the comment section. This unfortunate trend has led a number of sites to respond by either removing any aspect of anonymity or taking a more extreme step of killing their comment section entirely.

The Chicago Sun-Times is the latest media organization to take the latter path; they announced over the weekend that the comments were going to be temporarily disabled.

"The world of Internet commenting offers a marvelous opportunity for discussion and the exchange of ideas," wrote managing editor Craig M. Newman this weekend. "But as anyone who has ever ventured into a comment thread can attest, these forums too often turn into a morass of negativity, racism, hate speech and general trollish behaviors that detract from the content."

The Sun-Times will be launching a new comment section  which they hope will "not only allow for free discussion, but encourage increased quality of the commentary and help us better police the worst elements of these threads".

This paper is not the first to to try to fix online comments, nor will they be the last. Many sites have adopted comment management platforms like Disqus as a way of managing the troll problem, but that solution comes with its own problems. Other sites require that commenters create accounts, but when the bar is set that high it tends to discourage casual commenters. Some sites that use Disqus share this problem; those sites require an account in order to comment, which usually discourages me from leaving a comment (instead I go to Twitter).

TechCrunch stands as an example of a site that went from anonymous comments to Facebook comments as a way to reduce the presence of trolls, and it worked for them. But they might be the exception.

South Korea first started requiring internet commenters use their real names in 2007. The rule initially only applied to sites with more than 300,000 users, but was later tightened to sites with more than 100,000 users.

The rule was scrapped in 2011 because it was deemed largely ineffective at curbing trolls:

The system has been ineffective in preventing people from posting abusive messages or spreading false rumors. According to a study by the KCC, malicious comments accounted for 13.9 percent of all messages posted on Internet threads in 2007 but decreased only 0.9 percentage points in 2008, a year after the regulation went into force.

Another reason to scrap the rule is that it potentially discriminates against domestic companies. Internet users simply post malicious comments on Facebook, Twitter or other international websites, where the rule does not apply.

Talking New Media

image by Cali4beach

Following months-long talks with Swedish firms, news is breaking today that Amazon has signed a deal with Bokrondellen, a Swedish publishing services company.

Given that Bokrondellen runs the central book database for the Swedish bookselling industry, this deal paves the way for Amazon to enter the Swedish book and ebook market. This company is owned by a consortium of publishers, and it is the primary source of information on what book titles are in print and being published in Sweden.

Christer Perslöv, CEO of Bokrondellen, confirmed the news. "Now Amazon can sell Swedish books on all their sites. If they want to make it in the USA, Germany, England – or if they want to start a Swedish site – it’s up to them. Obviously they haven’t shared their plans with us."

There’s not even any rumors about a time frame for Amazon to enter the Swedish ebook market, but when they do they will not be alone.

At the moment there are 3 international ebookstores in Sweden, iBooks, Nook, and Google Play Books. Apple launched there in September 2011, and Google expanded into the country in July 2013. Barnes & Noble also established a presence in that market when the Nook Store went international in November 2013.

I have known that Amazon has been interested in the Swedish market since at least September 2013, when I discovered that Amazon had added support for Swedish to KDP. With a population under 10 million, Sweden might not be the largest book market in Europe but it is also one of the markets with the highest concentration of consumers buying books online.

There’s no information yet on when Amazon will launch a local operation in Sweden, but we do know that they won’t be running the usual local retail site. Amazon has so far been unable to procure the Amazon.se website address. That is reportedly owned by a Swedish marketing firm which has declined to sell the domain to Amazon.

Amazon faced similar issues in Brazil and was able to negotiate a deal for the Amazon.com.br domain. The terms of that deal have not been disclosed.

The Local

image by roger4336

When Entitle first launched in September 2013, one of its stronger selling points was that readers would own the ebooks they acquired through the Audible-like subscription service.

This set the service apart from Oyster and Scribd; both of those let you read as much as you want but cut off your access as soon as you stopped paying, while Entitle let readers continue to read the ebooks – albeit only inside Entitle’s apps.

Today Entitle removed that last restriction. Readers can now download the ebooks they buy from Entitle, and what’s more they can transfer those ebooks to ebook readers.

Entitle has apps for the iPad, iPhone, Android, and the Kindle Fire, and today they are announcing  support for a broad spectrum of ereaders from manufacturers like Sony, Pocketbook, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. This support was actually added in late December 2013, shortly after I complained about its absence, but Entitle is only officially announcing it today.

The Kindle is of course not supported, but that comes as no surprise.

The  process of downloading the ebooks works much the same as from most other ebook retailers whose names don’t start with A. The ebooks are encumbered by Adobe DE DRM, so you’ll need either Adobe DE or a compatible app like Nook Study running on your PC. The ebooks can be downloaded from the Entitle website, and once on your computer they can be transferred to your ebook reader.

You will need to follow Entitle’s instructions; they’re not quite the same steps as with other ebook retailers.

Entitle has changed a lot since they launched 7 months ago. The service now offers a 2 title per month subscription for $10 a month, down from the $17 a month in September.  The catalog has grown to include around 150,000, or about 50,000 new titles from 10 publishers. This including both backlist and frontlist works published or distributed by HarperCollins, HMH, IPG, Ingram Content Group, and Simon & Schuster.

The Entitle catalog is smaller than what you would find in a leading ebookstore, where you would expect to find millions of title. It is larger than the catalog offered by Oyster, but smaller than the catalog belonging to Scribd. Both of those services offer a buffet style subscription service for $9 to $10 a month.

TechCrunch

Coming nearly 2 weeks after rumors broke about the deal, Amazon announced today that they were acquiring the leading digital comics distributor comiXology.

In one fell swoop Amazon has bought a strong position in yet another digital market.

comiXology is the leading digital comics distributor; it dominates a market where Amazon only has a token presence, and that is probably why Amazon bought them.

With partnerships with over 75 comic book publishers including Marvel and DC, comiXology sells digital comics to millions of readers. They have apps for Android,  iPad, Windows 8, iPhone, and the web browser, as well as the largest digital comic catalog anywhere.

comiXology has been selling digital comics since July 2009. Amazon, on the other hand, only started selling digital comics in the Kindle Store in November 2011. Amazon’s digital comics efforts launched at the same time as the Kindle Fire, and at first were only available on that device.

Amazon has never disclosed how many digital comics they’ve sold, but it is safe to say that comiXology sells quite a few more. In many ways, comiXology is like Audible, the audiobook distributor Amazon acquired in 2008. Both companies secured control of a market via early investment in tech and aggressive pursuit of partnerships with publishers.

Update: I finally heard back from Amazon, and they told me that, like Amazon’s many other acquisitions, comiXology is going to be operated as a standalone business, with its brand, management team and headquarters in New York City intact. "Amazon, when it buys a working company that’s doing a good job, tends to let them spread their wings," said comiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger. "It gives them resources and lets them go on the same path, only faster, better and stronger."

P.S. This deal had to have been in the works for 6 months or more, and negotiations may even have started before I predicted last July that Amazon should be interested in comiXology. I wish I knew which came first.

When the Pocketbook Ultra leaked in early March I had my doubts as to whether the images were real rather than the product of some designer’s daydream, but now it would seem that I was wrong.

Details are still scarce on the Pocketbook Ultra, but new leaks have confirm that this ebook reader really exists.

Several product listings on German retail websites have turned up online today. They are incomplete, and they still leave many important details unanswered, but it now looks like Pocketbook plans to launch the Ultra by the end of May 2014.

The Pocketbook Ultra has a Carta E-ink screen, making it a rara avis among ebook readers. When it ships it will be only the third device to use that screen, along with the newer Kindle Paperwhite and the recently launched Tolino Vision.

The listings also confirm that the Ultra will have a rear facing camera as well as OCR software, which I expect will be supported by a note-taking app of some kind. The Ultra will be available in Green and have a retail price of 199 euros.

The listings don’t mention the page turn buttons on the rear of the ebook reader, nor do they give the dimensions, weight, or other specs. One listing does indicate that the Ultra will be available by 30 May.

Pocketbook has yet to confirm or deny the Ultra, but at this point I would say that we are looking at their next ebook reader. The Ultra is the most innovative ebook reader design I have seen in several years now, and I can’t wait to learn more about it. Stay tuned for the official announcement.

Lesen.net

The frequently leaked Tolino Vision ereader officially launched today in Germany.

At 178 grams and 8mm thick, this device is both lighter and thinner than its predecessor, the Tolino Shine, and it is going to be only the second ebook reader to feature E-ink’s newest Carta screen tech.

The Vision will be running a closed version of Android on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX6 CPU with 512MB RAM and 2GB of available storage. It also has a microSD card slot, Wifi, and access to 25GB of cloud storage.

The 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024 x 758, the same resolution as on the Kobo Aura, Tolino Shine, and other 6″ ebook readers. And like many other ereaders, the Vision has both a frontlight and a capacitive touchscreen.

But unlike most other ebook readers, the Vision has the latest in E-ink screen tech. The spec sheet specifically mentions that the Vision has the Carta E-ink screen, which  features both improved contrast, faster refreshes, and extra geek points. (This last is not a practical feature, but it can be useful when a Vision owner is playing a game of one-ups-manship against other ereader owners.) The Carta screen also has the Regal waveform refresh tech integrated. This tech also launched last Fall, and it reduces the need for a full page screen refresh.

There’s little English language coverage so far, but I did find this hands on video posted earlier today. The narration is in German, but at least the images will give you a good idea of what the Vision can do:

The Tolino Vision is going to be available at a number of German retailers on Saturday, 5 April. Retail will be 129 euros, or about 30 euros more than the Tolino Shine. That cheaper ereader is going to continue to be available as a more budget-priced compliment to the Vision.

This device will also have a number of accessories, including a screen protector as well as several cases.  The accessories leaked yesterday, revealing prices between 10 and 30 euros.

The Tolino Shine and Vision are supported by a consortium which included four media retailers and Deutsche Telekom which pooled their resourced in March of last year to launch the Tolino platform. Collectively the 5 companies accounted for 35% to 40% of the German ebook market.

After a year’s worth of marketing and development at a cost of millions of euros (and even the bankruptcy of Weltbild), the Tolino consortium believes they have 37% of the German ebook market.

BuchReport.de

Sony announced in February that they were shutting down the NA branch of the Sony Reader Store and transferring their customers to Kobo, but that process really only started about a week ago – and it’s not going very well.

Numerous former Sony customers are reporting that store credits and some ebooks did not make it from one retailer to the other, while some are reporting an even more worrisome tale. What’s worse, several readers have shown up in the comment section of this blog with reports that they still have not received an email with instructions on how to transfer their account.

Many of those who have gotten the invite email report that most but not all of their ebooks have transferred:

• I checked my gmail account this morning at about 3 AM and there were my instructions. When I finished the click trail, 31 out of 37 books transferred to Kobo.
• 38 of my 41 books transferred. 3 didn’t. 2 of those that didn’t transfer automatically are available for purchase at Kobo.
• I finally got my transfer email. 621 out of 729 books transferred over in a matter of minutes. The list of ones that didn’t make it looked suspiciously large though, so I took a closer look. Over 40 of the books that didn’t transfer are available on Kobo.
• 92 out of 110 transferred successfully. It claimed the others didn’t transfer because they are not in the Kobo store.

On a related note, Kobo has also confirmed that not all of the existing store credits have transferred; they are working on fixing this issue.

Readers are getting mixed reports for why certain titles didn’t transfer even though Kobo sold the titles in question, with Kobo CS telling some that the titles would be added to their account manually while others have been told that it simply wasn’t possible for the ebooks to be added manually:

I just had a long talk with Kobo’s help desk. I was told that they CAN NOT add these two books to my Kobo account manually. When I told them that others (such as yourself) have reported that books are being added to their accounts manually, the customer service agent went off-line to talk to a supervisor, and then stated once again that if the automatic transfer failed to transfer some books, then the missing books CAN NOT be added manually to the Kobo account.

Furthermore, the service agent stated that they (Kobo) have a list of books; titles and authors; that they have determined are not eligible to transfer from Sony to Kobo, and that my two books are on this ineligible list. (Note: I made up the name ‘ineligible list’ Kobo’s service agent didn’t call it this.)

That last bit about a list of titles which Sony and Kobo have refused to transfer is new to me; Kobo has not shared that list publicly nor even mentioned it on their website. What they do say is:

Most of the Reader Store catalogue is available in the Kobo Store, so there are very few eBooks that won’t transfer to your Kobo library.

That is by no means the same thing. I have queried Kobo for an explanation, and I will report back with their response.

In spite of the bumps in the road, anyone whose books have transferred is in a much better position than some former Sony customers. Several people have left comments as recently as last night with reports that they not received an email notifying them of the option to transfer their account to Kobo.

Given that Kobo explicitly states that emails were sent out in late March, anyone who has not gotten an email should probably start panicking. I would suggest that you contact Kobo and ask them about it.

While the deadline for the transfer is still a couple months away, there is a concern that anyone who didn’t get an email from Kobo in late March might also miss later warning emails about the deadline. This is a matter which should not be left to the last minute.

Over the next couple months Sony and Kobo will be sending out other emails with new details, including news about firmware updates. The Sony Reader will be getting a couple firmware updates in April and May which will tie the device in with Kobo’s bookstore.  The update is only going to be released for the T1, T2, and T3, but not any of Sony’s earlier models.

With the exception of the PRS-9xx models, Sony’s earlier models lacked wireless connectivity and thus will not be affected by the transfer. Kobo ebooks can be loaded on to those older models by transferring the ebooks over USB, just like with any other Epub ebook.

It’s long  been known that publishers (and even some authors) have bought their way onto prestigious best seller lists, but until now it hasn’t been very easy to pull off the same trick in digital best seller lists.

My Buying Community wants to change that. This site launched some time back with the simply goal of helping authors game the Kindle Store best seller list, and it just crossed my desk this week.

Like the MyKindex site which operated for a period of time last year, MBC connects authors with a willing pool of book buyers. The site looks to be entirely author funded, and from what I can tell as a reader it works along the same lines as the services that sold reviews to authors like John Locke.

A user signs up, request to purchase a book, and after the purchase is verified the user is credited the price of the ebook plus an additional 30%. After a user buys enough books to pass the minimum payment threshold, they can request a Paypal funds transfer.

Or at least that is how the site is supposed to work; I just signed up today and I am still waiting for the credit for the ebook I bought. It’s a $.99 title in the Kindle Store with 4  five star reviews.

It’s not clear yet whether this site will have any effect on the Kindle Store best seller list, nor does the site claim it can do that. Instead it merely says that it connects readers to new authors.

But the site operates in a shady manner, and I learned of it via the developer of My Kindex,  which did boast of manipulating the French Kindle Store’s best seller list, so I am more than comfortable with attributing nefarious goals to this otherwise nondescript site.

My Buying Community claims to have 10,000 members, and if that is true and the site marshals all of its members to buy a single title then they well could affect that ebook’s rank in the Kindle Store.

Hopefully Amazon is already aware of this site, and is taking steps to thwart it.

BooksOnBoard may have abruptly gone out of business last April but that doesn’t mean it’s completely gone. Some remnant is still active, and last week it filed an antitrust lawsuit.

Abbey House Media, the Texas-based company that owned and ran BooksOnBoard, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan last Friday. The lawsuit alleges that Apple colluded with 5 publishers, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, to raise the price of ebooks and artificially restrict competition via price controls.

They’re basically making the same argument as the one Diesel eBooks made when that ebookstore filed its suit a couple weeks ago. Both parties are pointing to the lawsuit which the Department of Justice filed against Apple and the publishers in April 2012. The 5 publishers settled before trial, but Apple lost in July 2013.

BooksOnBoard (and Diesel eBooks) are arguing that they are two of the parties harmed by conspiracy, with BooksOnBoard even going so far as to claim that Agency is what killed it. (Diesel eBooks isn’t quite dead yet, but it is shutting down 5 days from now.)

According to the complaint, BooksOnBoard says that before Agency took effect in April 2010, they were the largest independent ebook retailer in the United States, with revenue behind only Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (I think they are exaggerating for effect.)

This retailer launched in 2006, before the Kindle, and they built their customer base via aggressive pricing of their large ebook catalog. But all of that changed in 2010. "Once Apple and the publisher defendants entered into their price-fixing agreement, however, BooksOnBoard was no longer able to offer its favorable pricing," the lawsuit states. "After years of steady growth, in April 2010 — right after the imposition of agency — BooksOnBoard quickly went under for all intents and purposes."

While I do believe that they suffered under Agency, I also think that the claim that Agency killed BoB in April 2010 is rather hyperbolic. The retailer didn’t cease operations until April 2013, so their demise was not nearly as sudden as they would make it sound. Rather, the death of BooksOnBoard more closely resembles a case of slow strangulation rather than a sudden act of violence.

But how BooksOnBoard died isn’t really that important; what matters is that Agency made it much more difficult for this retailer to compete effectively. Rather than foster competition, as many in publishing industry have claimed, Agency pricing discouraged buyers from shopping around, thus making it harder for the smaller retailers to attract and keep customers.

And I’m sure it didn’t help the indies that shortly after Agency came to pass, ereader prices dropped through the floor. That encouraged readers to buy a device tied to one of the majors and then primarily shop with that major ebook retailer.

As ex-retailers, BooksOnBoard and Diesel eBooks have no further need of publishers as a source of content. This removes what little disincentive remained  to discourage the retailers from filing suit, which means that they can keep pursuing this lawsuit until they either lose or their lawyers quit.

I do not expect the publishers or Apple to settle this lawsuit, so this is probably going to drag out over several years. Barring some unexpected ruling, I would place the over-under at 3 years.

Thanks, Anne!

When I reported the speculation yesterday that Diesel eBooks might be shutting down in 5 days, I was hoping that I had gotten the story wrong. Sadly, that’s not the case.

I have just received official notice from Diesel eBooks that they are turning off the lights at the end of March. It basically said the same thing as the message on the support page:

Diesel eBooks will be closing at the end of this month. It’s been a great ride!  We’re exploring our options – eBooks are still in the infant years and there are many opportunities opening up now and in the future.

IMPORTANT: you must download your eBooks by month end. Downloads will not be possible on April 1st.  We want to thank you for being such loyal customers. Understand this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t see Diesel in another form in the near future.

If you have not received an email yet, I can explain; Diesel eBooks’s email system is broken. I in fact got 16 copies of this one email, all sent within a single minute. Chances are the system is eating as many emails as it is sending, so some Diesel eBooks customers may never get a notice.

If you want confirmation, go check out the home page over at Diesel eBooks. Earlier this morning they posted an announcement banner with the news that they’re shutting down.

Diesel eBooks was founded in 2004, during the pre-Kindle ebook era. It sold a number of ebook formats over the years, including eReader, Mobipocket, MSReader, PDF, and Epub. Most of those ebook formats predeceased Diesel eBooks, which says something about how much the ebook market has changed over the years. This retailer also expanded into selling ebook readers from 2009, and they also offered a rewards program and ebook bundles.

I’ve bought ebooks from them over the years (mainly in the pre-agency era). It was an okay site with decent prices, customer service, and tech support, and that should have been enough to keep it competitive. Unfortunately, Diesel eBooks is one of the smaller indie ebook retailers that never really recovered from Agency Pricing.

When the 5 publishers started the agency era in early 2010, the first thing they did was cancel existing contracts with ebook retailers and renegotiate. Guess who were the publishers' lowest priority for signing the new contracts? Indies like Diesel eBooks. It took some indies months and months to get the new contracts signed, and that cost them a competitive disadvantage.

And under the new system, the ebook retailers were unable to lower their prices on any of the titles published by the big 6, which limited their ability to attract and keep customers. Yes, fixed ebook prices may have prevented Amazon’s price-gouging, but it also helped discourage customers from shopping around. That made it a heck of a lot harder for indies to pry customers away from the majors.

Diesel eBooks is now the second indie ebookstore to fail in the past year. The first was BooksOnBoard, which abruptly ceased operations last April. I doubt they will be the last.

Edit: I should also add that Diesel eBooks may not be totally dead. A few weeks ago its owners filed an antitrust suit against the 5 publishers and Apple that made up the Price Fix 6.  Should they win the lawsuit they might be able to reopen.