Amazon has long been the parent of a number of publishing imprints as well as a few niche book and gadget blogs, and today they added a weekly magazine to their stable.

Day One, which was initially announced in March as a short fiction publishing imprint, is going to be published weekly and will only be available in the Kindle Store. It will include poetry, works from debut authors, and stories from around the world translated into English.

This magazine, which could arguably be considered a subscription-based extension of the Kindle Single Store, is produced by Amazon Publishing. It will showcase one writer and one poet in each weekly issue. The first issue is available today and features the short story Sheila by Rebecca Adams Wright, and Wrought, a poem by Zack Strait.

Day One will cost $20 for an annual subscription, and is currently available at an introductory price of $9.99.

Amazon has long been rumored to be planning to launch more blogs, but this is probably not what anyone was picturing when that rumor circulated. But even so, Day One will give Amazon a toehold in yet another part of the publishing industry.

Remember how I wrote back in May that if B&N released an amazing ereader it could have revitalized the Nook platform?

Apparently that idea didn’t occur to B&N, because on Wednesday they are releasing a new Nook Glow that features a few anemic improvements but is lacking much of the hardware details that set it apart from the pack.

You don’t have to take my word for it; the new device should be in B&N stores on Wednesday morning. Retail is $119. And if you’re interested, here is the briefing doc (PDF) and fact sheet (PDF).

The new Nook Glow has an improved frontlight, a higher resolution 6″ Pearl E-ink screen (1024 x 758), twice as much storage (4GB, with 2GB reserved for B&N content and 1.5GB taken up by software), and somewhat improved software. It’s about an ounce lighter and it has the Regal screen refresh tech found on the Kindle Paperwhite and the Kobo Aura. B&N also talked up the improved fonts and tweaked reading app.

All in all, this would not have been a bad ereader – if B&N had released it last year. In fact, a release last Fall would have made up for all the hardware features that the new Nook Glow doesn’t have.

The new Nook Glow is still running Android 2.1 and it has an 800 MHz CPU, which is underpowered in comparison to the 1GHz CPU found in the Aura, Aura HD, and the new Paperwhite. And to make matters worse, the new Nook Glowlight is missing the card slot and page turn buttons found on last year’s model.

Oh, and it has a white shell which will attract fingerprints while making the E-ink screen look gray. This is the exact opposite of Amazon and Kobo, both of which went with a gray and then black shell because black makes the E-ink screen look whiter (this is ereader design 101).

Yes, Barnes & Noble has basically thrown away everything that made the Nook Glow special and better than its competition while at the same time releasing a device that is on par with what Amazon and Kobo released last year.

Folks, I know that some might say that it is unreasonable for me to expect a 6.8″ Nook, but wouldn’t that have been cool? Wouldn’t it have been more exciting than this Nook Glow retread?

This isn’t a device from a serious competitor; what we are looking at here is an example of B&N treading water. Stick a fork in B&N; they’re done.

***

Update: I finally got my hands on the new Nook Glowlight.

Barnes & Noble launched their latest and meh-est ereader this morning, but I wasn’t able to get my hands on it until this evening. I’m still not impressed, but I can say that I am no longer quite so as underwhelmed as I was before.

I caught up with the new Nook Glowlight in my local B&N store in Manassas VA. The staff didn’t seem to give a damn about selling any ereaders, but at least they did have the new Nook Glowlight on display. Of course, they also had the wrong pamphlet and they had neglected to configure one of the display units, but at least the hardware was there.

I spent a good 20 plus minutes playing with the new device, and here’s what I noticed. First, it readily passed the drop test. As you might recall the previous model had a fragile frontlight, but B&N has fixed the problem. The NGL2 also has a much more even frontlight, just like the press release said.

I then pulled out my KPW2 and compared the 2 devices. After comparing them from several angles I concluded that the KPW2 has a dimmer frontlight than the NGL2. I also noticed that the KPW2 was faster at turning the page – most of the time. There were times that the NGL2 was nearly as fast, but I could not see a pattern t explain why the difference was so inconsistent.

After that I went noodling around in the menus to see what I could do about the screen refresh. A number of commenters have called me out for dismissing the media claims that "B&N has axed full-page flashing in the new Nook", so I wanted to see just how true that was.

First, there’s no way to alter the screen refresh settings on the NGL2 that I saw in my local store.

I didn’t see any full page flash while reading (or any ghosting for that matter), but I did see it in the menus. While that does agree with what B&N said in the press release, it is a far cry from what the media is saying. It’s also completely different from what B&N’s defenders have written in the comments below.

Based on what I have seen, I think B&N is using the same Regal waveform tech found in the new Aura and the KPW2, only B&N has decided to take it to an extreme. Rather than minimize the full page flash, they disabled it when you are reading. Some people are going to like that, but I prefer the flash because it guarantees me a whiter screen.

Remember earlier this month when Adobe revealed that someone had hacked the software giant’s servers and stolen info on 2.9 million customers? It turns out the leak was significantly larger – by over an order of magnitude, in fact.

Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security is now saying that the leak has impacted at least 38 million users, a group 13 times as large as previously announced. And that’s not all.

Besides the hacked accounts, Krebs' sources at Adobe are saying that the hackers made off with some or all of the source code for Photoshop. This is in addition to the massive (over 40GB) amount of source code already uncovered, including source code for  Acrobat, Cold Fusion, Adobe’s web app platform, and Reader.

Yes, someone made off with a copy of the source code for a PDF reading app that has grown uglier and less useful with each release. If we are lucky the hackers might be planning to release a new and improved version of the app.

Over the weekend AnonNews.org posted a 3.8 GB file online that Krebs says looks identical to the stash of stolen Adobe info he stumbled upon earlier this month. It contains more than 150 million username and hashed password pairs, raising serious questions just how many accounts were compromised.

Adobe has been contacting all the customers that might have been affected with a warning and a request that passwords be changed. Pretty much everyone who has bought an ebook with Adobe DE DRM got that email, including me.

They have also offered a free year of credit monitoring for any customer whose credit card info may have been stolen. Of course, this offer is only good via Experian, which has its own history of selling consumer info to an online identity theft service.

The latest word from Adobe is that there was no sign that there has been any unauthorized activity on any Adobe ID involved in the incident. “So far, our investigation has confirmed that the attackers obtained access to Adobe IDs and (what were at the time valid), encrypted passwords for approximately 38 million active users,” Adobe spokesperson Heather Edell said. “We have completed email notification of these users. We also have reset the passwords for all Adobe IDs with valid, encrypted passwords that we believe were involved in the incident—regardless of whether those users are active or not.”

The investigation is continuing, so the number of affected users could still grow.

Amazon was embarrassed in publishing news circles a couple days ago when the news broke that Larry Kirshbaum, the high profile head of Amazon Publishing, was going to leave the company next Spring.

Shelf Awareness broke the news, adding:

In connection with his departure, the most ambitious part of Amazon’s publishing operations will be scaled back. Already several editorial people have left or been let go, and Amazon has not been a factor in bidding on major books the way it had been just two years ago.

This lead to a flurry of news stories about how Amazon’s publishing performance in New York has failed to meet the initial expectations as well as headlines proclaiming Barnes & Noble Is Now Amazon’s Biggest Publishing Problem and Amazon Publishing reportedly retreating in NYC, with the addendum that the new head of AmPub is now located in Seattle.

I disagree with most of what has been written about Friday’s story.

First, I am frankly surprised that so many journalists have forgotten that we live in the Internet age. The idea that the head of a publishing house has to be in NYC is a false assumption; it was inherited from the legacy publishing industry and reflects a different era. Physical location has almost nothing to do with how a company operates; all that is necessary is a fast internet connection (and a decent airport).

But more importantly, since when is a staffing issue an example of retreating?

To use a military term, replacing the general in command of an army isn’t a retreat; it’s a personnel issue. And in this case we might have the publishing equivalent of Grant replacing Halleck.

Tell me, have you looked at Kirshbaum’s replacement?

Her name is Daphne Durham, and based on the coverage of this story I think I was the only one who checked out her work history. Update: No, DBW covered the basic facts in their follow up post.

A brief glance at Durham’s LinkedIn profile tells us that she has worked for Amazon for 14 years, starting first as an assistant book buyer and then working her way up to Editor of AmPub and now Publisher of Adult Trade and Children’s Books.

Durham is replacing a fellow who had previously headed a Big 6 publisher. Until 2006 Kirshbaum ran Time Warner Books (or Hachette, as they are called since being sold to Lagardere in 2007).

What Durham might lack in industry connections and prestige she more than makes up for in having survived a Darwinist working environment for the past 14 years. Furthermore, she lacks Kirshbaum’s industry blindspots but instead has a decade of retail experience. She knows what sells and will be able to use that knowledge to run AmPub.

Replacing Kirshbaum may have doomed Amazon’s plans to have a quote unquote Major East Coast Publishing House, but that’s okay. Instead Amazon is going to have a publishing startup with all the same staff and funding, and run by a publishing industry outsider. Now things can get interesting.

In fact, I would say that the news of Kirshbaum leaving could not have been leaked better if Amazon had tried. His departure was going to look bad no matter what happened (unless he left for medical reasons), but at least this way Amazon gained the maximum benefit from the public shame of AmPub being a failure.

Yes, Amazon benefited from all the bad news. The word of the day, folks, is disinformation.

While I don’t know for sure that this was a deliberate operation on the part of Amazon, I do think that the resulting fallout from this story has created a meme. Many people in publishing will now be thinking, on a subconscious level, that "Amazon Publishing is a failure".

This could lead to underestimating Amazon’s publishing efforts – not just the one publishing imprint that Durham is running but all of Amazon’s other publishing imprints as well.

P.S. And if nothing else, let me remind you that Amazon’s publishing efforts are intended to disrupt the publishing industry simply by existing. Exhibit A: Amazon’s decision to pay royalties monthly.

image by St_A_Sh

The Kindle Fire HDX sports a high resolution screen, a very fast processor, and generally excellent media abilities, but one thing it lacks is support for Google apps.

Update: This post is originally from 2013, and it won’t work with the latest models. But if you simply want to install free apps from Google Play, I have another post that will help.

Luckily for us Amazon still lets users install apps downloaded from sites other than the Amazon Appstore, because one blogger going by Android Cowboy has found a way to add Gmail and a few other Google apps to Amazon’s tablet.

His trick is similar to the hack which let me install Gmail, Google Reader, and other Google apps on the Kindle Fire HD last year. He’s gotten Gmail, Google Play Books, Chrome, and Google Search working on the Fire HDX, but at this point Google Play Store and Google+ still don’t work.

Here’s how you do it.

First, you’ll need a file manager or some other way to access the install files on your Kindle Fire HDX. Amazon won’t let you do this via their setup, unfortunately, so I recommend that you head over to this post and install the 5 apps I suggested for the Kindle Fire HD. Or you could skip that and install ES File Explorer, an app which you can find in the Amazon Appstore on your Fire HDX.

1. Download the following files and transfer to your Kindle via USB connection to your PC. I suggest that you copy them to the “download” folder of the Kindle Fire HDX; it will be the easiest to find again.
   • Google Account Manager
   • Google Play Services
   • Google Service Framework
   • Gmail
2. Open the ES File explorer app and then open the download folder. Select and install Google Account Manager.
3. If you are prompted by a warning that app installs are blocked, follow the prompts to go to the settings menu and change the appropriate setting. Then go back to ES File explorer and try to install Google Account Manager again.
4. Reboot your Kindle Fire HDX by pressing and holding the power button and then selecting the shutdown option.  Then restart it.
5. Install Google Services Framework.
6. Reboot.
7. Install Google Play Services.
8. Reboot.
9. Install Gmail.
10. Reboot.

At this point you should be able to open the Gmail app and log in to your account. You can ignore any warning messages.

Once you’ve logged into your Gmail account you can then download and install other Google apps. If you need help finding the apps, check out the 1Mobile app store. That is one of the better sources of free apps, including reading apps, utilities, and even Google apps.

Last year I reported on a similar trick which let me add Google apps to the Kindle Fire HD, but unfortunately it turned out to be less useful than I had hoped. The Kindle Fire HD (2012) didn’t support notifications and running Google apps in the background, and as a result some apps (Gmail, for example) would only check for new content when they were open.

I am concerned that the HDX might have the same issue. I’d love to hear back from anyone who tries this. How well did it work?

Liliputing

Kobo’s 6 month reign as the only ereader maker with a 6.8″ ereader is about to come to an end. A friend has just sent me the spec sheet for the T68, Onyx’s not-yet-announced 6.8″ ereader.

If you are like me and were pining for the rumored Android-powered Nook Glow HD then you might want to sit down.

The Boox T68 is running Android 4.0 on a 1Ghz Freescale i.mx6 processor. It comes with 512MB RAM, 4GB of Flash storage, and a microSD card slot. This ereader has the same 6.8″ Pearl HD E-ink screen as on the Aura HD, and it also has a capacitive touchscreen and a frontlight.

According to the spec sheet the T68 also has an audio jack, Wifi, and Bluetooth. That last detail brings this ereader closer to being a true E-ink Android tablet, IMO.

In terms of content, the Boox T68 maintains Onyx’s standard for broad format support. In addition to Epub and PDF, the T68 also supports FB2, Mobi, CHM, PDB, and DJVU ebook formats. It can also read txt, html, RTF, and MSWord Doc files, and it can play mp3 and wav music files.

I’m told that the T68 will let you install apps, and that it also comes with a reading app that supports text-to-speech, annotation, and dictionary look-up. This ereader weighs in at 230 grams, or slightly less than the Aura HD.

I have been looking forward to reading about new 6.8″ ereaders ever since Kobo announced the Aura HD back in April, but so far this is the only model I have seen. I first discovered that it existed a couple weeks ago when Charbax visited the Onyx booth at a trade show. He happened to catch a demo unit for this ereader on film, and he  spent a few minutes playing with it:

Onyx is reportedly ready to make this ereader, but before they can do that they need to get orders. They are quoting a price of $145 for a minimum order of 1,000.

I really hope that someone picks up this model and offers it in Europe; I want to buy one. Can you say E-ink Android tablet? Swoon.

When Oyster launched their ebook subscription service last month it was widely hailed as a boon to readers, who were now able to access a large selection of ebooks for only $9.99. Much less was said about how authors were going to be compensated, with many wondering if this service would be as good of a deal for creators as it is for readers.

Today I can lay their fears to rest.

Earlier today Smashwords sent out an email to their author and publisher partners with details on Smashwords' deal with Oyster. SW was one of the launch partners for Oyster last month, but it wasn’t until this week that all the technical bugs had been worked out so the deal could move forward.

The contract terms are much better than I had expected, and if I had written a book it would definitely be included in this deal. Mark Coker of Smashwords informed SW authors and publishers that the titles would begin rolling out to Oyster in the next 72 hours. He also shared the payment terms:

A single Oyster user could conceivably read multiple books by the same Smashwords author in a single month, and the author will be paid for each book. As a Smashwords author or publisher, you’ll earn 60% of you book’s retail list price whenever an Oyster subscriber reads more than 10% of your book, starting from the beginning of the book forward.  It’s an author-friendly model.  That’s the same rate Smashwords authors earn when we sell ebooks through the major retailers such as Apple and Barnes and Noble.

That is fairly author-friendly (especially when compared to Spotify), but I am also not sure whether it is financially sustainable.

I can picture myself starting and abandoning a handful of books each month, and that would be more than enough to eat away at the $9.95 monthly subscription.

On the other hand, Pew reported in June that half of American readers reported consuming 6 or fewer books in the previous year, and that book readers as a whole consumed an average of 15 titles in the previous 12 months.

This tells us that Oyster’s success will depend on signing the lighter readers, obviously. But it also suggests that Oyster does have a real chance of success.

Amazon has quietly dropped another hint about their expansion plans. The-eBook.org reported today that KindleGen, one of Amazon’s tools for generating Kindle ebooks, now lists Russian as a language option (for the interface).

See the bottom line for the new language option:

Update: A reader has informed me that, even though Russian isn’t yet listed in the KDP supported languages list, the KDP support team no longer blocks Russian language ebooks. Thanks, Vladimir!

There has been no official announcement from Amazon on their plans for the Russian ebook market, but I do know that Amazon has had a presence in Russia since at least April 2013. That’s when they hired Arkady Vitrouk, the former CEO of the Russia’s Atticus Publishing Group, to head the Russian Kindle Store.

Amazon has never been one to broadcast their expansion plans but they have in the past dropped hints. For example, the Kindle Touch shipped in 2011 with support for Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese, and the Kindle Paperwhite launched in 2012 with support for Chinese and Japanese. All of those countries eventually received a local Kindle Store.

This new support for Russian is almost certainly a sign of Amazon’s intentions, just like last month when Amazon added support for a couple dozen additional languages in the Kindle Store, including everything from Afrikaans to Icelandic.

I have no guess as to when Amazon will launch the Russian Kindle Store, but I suspect that it will happen as soon as they can make it happen. There already are two international ebookstores in Russia (iBooks and Play Books); Apple and Google both launched in Russia in late 2012. Kobo is also interested in that market, and there were also hints that Barnes & Noble was interested in expanding into Russia, though that does not seem likely at this point.

Update: Apple hasn’t launched in Russia; they support the Russian language in iBooks but do not yet sell ebooks in that market.

When the mainstream media made indie publishing into a synonym for pornography last week I was both appalled and infuriated. Many sites, including The Daily Mail and The Kernel, were reporting on the news less because it was news and more for the tabloidistic shock value.

But as annoying as that may be, today I am going to have to admit that there was more than a grain of truth in the reports. It’s not just media hype; indie publishing has a porn problem.

Or rather, indie publishing has a far higher concentration of erotica and adult content than is found in traditionally published content. I personally don’t see that as a problem, but I can see how others might.

Aaron Stanton, the founder of BookLamp and the Book Genome Project, was the first to really look for data which could shed light on this topic. Over on Digital Book World last night he posted some details from an analysis in which he compared a slice of the indie published titles that BookLamp has analyzed with the traditionally published titles that have been fed through BookLamp’s system.

Aaron found some rather startling results:

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.

As you may know, BookLamp has developed a way to analyze the text of a book and identify details like the writing style and major themes. They call this the book’s genome, and it is that genome that was used to classify the ebooks as erotica.

To be more exact, BookLamp searched each book for sexual content and then created a chart like the one above. Each green square represents 1,00 words with no sexual content, yellow means some, and red, well. As you can see 50 Shades clearly belongs in the erotica category, and it was not alone.

Getting back to the survey group as a whole, Aaron also reported that BookLamp found that around 3% of indie titles involved questionable themes:

Now, one could argue that this single source does not reflect the actual titles available, which is true. In fact there’s really no way to know for sure without feeding a sample group the size of the entire Kindle Store through BookLamp’s servers and collating the results.

Given the cost and logistical issues involved, that is probably not going to happen. And that’s why I went looking for another source of data:

Smashwords

This ebook distributor carries all types of content, including erotica, so I took a moment to see just how many titles they carried in the erotica section. I found that the SW website listed 48,000 titles in that section, out of a total 256,000 titles.

That is around 18% of all titles in the Smashwords catalog.

And these are just the self-identified erotica titles; there could be more listed in other sections. I was debating this issue with Aaron last night, and he pointed out that:

I don’t think it’s necessarily accurate to make the assumption that a book with erotic content will always be in the erotic section, or classified as such.  Many times books that statistically should be categorized as erotica by their amount of sexual content (and would have been by a traditional publisher) are not when published independently.

But even though there is a demonstrably higher concentration of erotica among indie-published titles, I still think that it is a misnomer to label the group based on a minority of the content. And I think it is wrong to punish a group for the actions of a minority.

But that’s what happened last week both in the media and in ebookstores when Kobo, Amazon, et al purged a wide variety of indie-published ebooks from their ebookstore, including titles which were not questionable nor even vaguely resembled erotica.

Now that we can see the scope of this issue  I think it’s even more clear that last week’s purge was a solution out of proportion to the problem at hand.

What do you think?

Digital Book World

Barnes & Noble has had a troubled history with hardware development, sometimes releasing a device that was ahead of the market (Nook Color) and sometimes releasing gadgets no one wants to buy (Nook HD) but that hasn’t stopped them.

Their latest gadget cleared the FCC last night and it looks to be an ereader.

B&N has taken the cautious step of hiding all the images and the more interesting details, so all I know at the moment is that this device, the BNRV500-A, was tested for Wifi and has a rectangular shape. According to the tests it has 4GB of storage and a 1.5Ah battery.

I can’t find any mentions in the test reports of screen size or resolution, frontlight, or card slot, but one report does include a diagram which suggests that the new device has the same general proportions as the Nook Touch and Nook Glow. The model number is the same as that of the Nook Touch, which is a sign that we are looking at an ereader.

B&N is probably going to replace the existing Nook Touch with the new model, and they are probably going to launch it in the next few days or weeks.

I am also expecting to see a new tablet from B&N. I have seen numerous leaks including listings for a BT keyboard, a new Nook for Dummies book, and new accessories, and I also have numerous inside sources that say that a tablet is coming. The latest info is that this time around B&N’s tablet will have at least one camera.

There’s no new info on when the gadgets are going to launch, but my sources had told me that it was supposed to have happened already.

FCC (XHHBNRV500-A)

There has been an explosion in ebook subscription services over the past year, with new services launching in the US, Denmark, Brazil, and Denmark (there are 2 competing services in that one small country).

And now a new service has launched in Spain. It hasn’t gotten much attention in the English-language media but a new ebook subscription service launched last month in Spain.

Nubico is a collaboration between the Bertelsmann publishing conglomerate, the Spanish publisher Planeta, and Telefonica. It launched with around 3,000 titles, most of which came from Planeta.

Subscribers pay 8.99 euros per month for access to up to 5 titles at a time, and there is also an additional charge of .99 to 3.99 euros in order to read certain front-list titles. According to press reports the ebooks can be read on Nubico’s apps for Android, iPad, and iPhone as well as on your PC or ereader. The ebooks are encumbered with Adobe DE DRM, though it is not clear exactly how Nubico enforces the removal of ebooks from the ereaders (expiration, perhaps).

I am reporting on this story second-hand and am working from a number of Spanish-language news stories, so there are details I cannot verify. Unfortunately, the Nubico website has been unavailable whenever I checked over the past several days so I have been unable to confirm details, a detail which should concern anyone looking to sign up.

Nubico is Bertelsmann’s second ebook subscription effort, following the early 2012 launch of Skoobe in Germany. There’s no word on the number of subscribers Skoobe has, but I do know that they have a catalog with 25,000 titles.

That is a far smaller selection than offered by the Kindle owner’s lending library, Oyster (US-only), or Scribd (globally), but it is also a larger selection than the Madrid-based 24Symbols.

Xataka, El Pais, BuchReport.de

New estimates from the Câmara Brasileira do Livro show that the Brazilian ebook market saw stellar growth in 2012. Their research revealed that over 4 times as many ebooks were sold in Brazil in 2012 as in 2011.

But that doesn’t really matter much because ebooks were still less than 1% of the overall Brazilian book market. While that is obviously a minuscule figure, the other details from CBL are much more interesting.

CBL’s research also included a survey of Brazilian publishers which showed that 68% sell ebooks, and that 59% are still unsure as to what format they should be selling. Of the total who answered the question, 70% reported selling DRMed ebooks. As for distribution, 52.4% of use digital distributors and 58.7% use other sales channels.

Most of the publishers also reported that ebook revenues were negligible, with 54% saying that their digital revenues were less than 1%. That provides a contrast for the 10% of publishers who reported that ebook revenues accounted for over half of total revenue.

It’s not clear from my sources, but I suspect that the 1% market share is based on a survey of publishers and not market research. There is also no information on which ebookstore had what share of the market in 2012.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo all launched a local ebookstore in Brazil very late in 2012, so local competitors like Gato Sabido, Saraiva, BajaLibros, and Librara Cultura (now Kobo’s local partner) probably dominated the market.

Brazil has a population of around 200 million, most of whom speak Brazilian Portuguese.

eBook Portugal

image by F H Mira

I have been saying for a few months now that the most interesting ereader launches were coming out of Europe and this latest device is no exception. The Finnish startup Leia Media is going to be testing their first ereader next month, and they have high hopes that it will become the basis for a new subscription based content platform.

Details are still thin on the Leia Reader, but I can tell you that it is built around a 9.7″ color E-ink screen. The prototype will have wireless connectivity and is reportedly going to be solar-powered. Leia is claiming that the usage time will be infinite because this ereader will charge off of the ambient light in a house.

Or at least that is what Leia hopes will happen during the upcoming pilot. Starting next month the Leia Reader will be distributed to several hundred users. During the pilot these testers will be getting the morning and evening editions of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, and if the pilot is successful Leia plans to expand availability both in Finland and around the world.

The Leia Reader is supported by a consortium of 5 Finnish companies, each of which are contributing a different part of the platform. In addition to Leia Media, Sanoma News, Bluegiga, Anygraaf, and DNA are assisting in the pilot. Based on their websites, I would guess that BlueGiga provided technical expertise for the wireless connectivity, and Anygraaf probably built part or all of the back end.

Leia Media

Alles-eBook.de

India’s billion plus populace has a new ebookstore option today.

Kobo has just signed 2 Indian bookstore chains as their partners. WH Smith India, a subsidiary of the UK bookseller, will be selling Kobo’s ereaders and tablets in their 24 stores in India. Crossword, WH Smith’s larger and more successful competition, will also be carrying  the hardware in 84 stores across the subcontinent.

In addition to the new partners, Kobo is launching 3 ereaders and the Kobo Arc Android tablet in India. There’s no mention of Kobo’s newest products, but the press release does mention that the Kobo Touch, Kobo Glo, and Kobo Aura HD will sell at a rang of prices from 7,999 rupees ($130 USD) to 13,999 rupees ($229 USD), and the Kobo Arc will sell for  11,999 rupees, or about $195 USD.

Crossword already has some of the hardware on their website, where it is discounted by 12% to 16%. They don’t list the Aura HD,  yet. They also have yet to integrate a Kobo ebookstore but are instead sending customers to Kobo’s website. WH Smith India shows no sign of Kobo, but their website would best be described as underdeveloped. I don’t think it’s an ecommerce site so much as it is a placeholder.

Kobo claims to have 4 million titles in their ebookstore in 68 languages, including 95% of India’s bestselling content featuring work from top-selling Indian authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Ramachandra Guha, and Sachin Garg.

I hope that’s true, because Kobo is going to be facing steep competition in India. Amazon, Apple, and Google all having launched a local ebookstore in the country last year, and Amazon has even signed a couple local retail partners, including Croma. This gadget retailer is also going to carry Kobo’s ereaders but I don’t think they will also be a partner in the ebookstore.

But in spite of Kobo’s late entry, their practice of signing local partners is probably going to give them an advantage.  This was certainly true in France, where Kobo is in 2nd or 3rd place.

In a survey commissioned by Kobo and conducted by Ipsos India, 93% of self-identified readers, said they are familiar with reading devices or apps that allow for reading across a variety of devices and 56 percent said they would prefer to read digital content on a dedicated reading device. Furthermore, 54 percent of respondents said they would read more if they had an ereader that provided them with access to their own digital library anytime, anywhere, anyplace.

Over the past few days Microsoft has been teasing new platform updates that will ship with Windows 8.1, and I think they may have dropped a telling hint about their ebook plans.

In addition to posts on Bing Smart Search, a post on SkyDrive, and a recap of everything new coming to the Windows Mail app, Microsoft has also published a post which happens to mention that one of Microsoft’s development teams was called Xbox MVR. According to the blog post MVR stands for "Music, Video, and Reading".

The post in question was written by the head of the Xbox MVR team, and it focused on the changes coming to Xbox Music (and how it would look on Windows 8.1), but almost as an aside the post happened to mention that Xbox Music was one of the projects being developed by the Xbox MVR team.

I think they just gave us a hint just how much Microsoft cares about ebooks, and I think we now have a second explanation for why MS invested $300 million (plus a promised $300 million) in Nook Media last year. Of course, B&N had already indicated that MS would launch ebookstores in 10 countries but now we have an idea which team at Microsoft is doing the work.

If I am right then this is  a sign of a second parallel ebook effort inside MS. In addition to the new Reader app for Windows 8 which is being developed by the Office team, we now have a hint that there is also an ebookstore under development by the Xbox MVR team.

My source thinks that this might be a sign that MS is going to release a handheld reader of some kind, but I’m not so sure. Remember, this hint came from a post about Windows 8.1, which tells us that the Xbox MVR team develops for Windows as well as the Xbox.

But I could be wrong. There have been rumors in the past that indicated that Microsoft’s future Xbox might have a 7″ tablet style controller similar to the one found on the WiiU, but aside from a leaked and possibly fake spec sheet all we have are rumors. That device was called the Xbox Surface in the rumors, which of course means nothing.

If that Xbox Surface (or something like it) does show up then we’ll probably find that it has an ebookstore, but I also don’t expect to see an ebookstore on the Xbox One. I’m not convinced that anyone will want to read for any length of time on their TV screens.

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