If you’re frustrated by the delay of the global launch of the Yotaphone and the E-ink smartphone cases then I have some good news for you. Charbax caught up with the Chinese gadget maker Onyx this week and they told him that they will be shipping the E43 smartphone later this year.

The Boox E43 smartphone has a 4.3″ E-ink screen. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on  a 1GHz Freescale  CPU with 512MB RAM, a microSD card slot, Wifi, Bluetooth, and support for EDGE and GSM networks.

It’s been under development for a couple years now, and in that time it’s gotten a lot better. The screen resolution is now up to 800 x 480, and E43 also now has a capacitive touchscreen and a frontlight. This device is going to weigh in at 120g, and according to the video it has a standby time of about 2 weeks.

The first couple minutes of the video show off the E43, but after that Charbax takes a brief tour of the Onyx booth at  the HKTDC Hong Kong Electronics Fair. It’s well worth your time because this video will give you the first ever look at Onyx’s larger and newer Android-equipped ereaders.

As you can see, the video shows that Onyx has a 6.8″ ereader on display, and that means that someone has finally developed an ereader with the screen found on the Kobo Aura HD. And if I heard the video correctly then Onyx also has a 9.7″ ereader that runs Android 4.0. Now that is very cool.

If you’ve been following ebook news over the past few days then you probably know that Amazon, B&N, and Kobo have been scrambling to respond to the news that they were selling questionable content.

While this story had originally focused on the UK ebook market, the fracas later grew to include the international Kindle and Kobo ebookstores, and I have just learned that Kobo’s local ebookstores in Australia and New Zealand have been affected as well.

Dear Author tipped me to the news that Whitcoulls, Kobo’s bookseller partner in New Zealand, has temporarily shut down their ebookstore. They haven’t gone as far as WH Smith and turned off their website completely, but they did remove the ebook section and replace it with this notice:

Due to recent publicity surrounding eBook publishing through automated feeds provided by our eBook partner, Kobo, Whitcoulls has suspended the sale of eBooks through our website.  This suspension will remain in place until we can guarantee that any inappropriate material, that has been available through self published eBooks, has been removed from the Kobo eBook catalogue.

Whitcoulls is joining in the general overreaction to the news last week that Kobo and other ebookstores sell adult content. All of the major ebookstores and Kobo are scrambling to remove the more questionable titles, with Kobo even going so far as to purge their ebookstore of self-published ebooks. Kobo’s UK partner WH Smith has also shut down their website as a result.

According to David Gaughran, Kobo removed around half of the self-published titles available in the Kobo UK ebookstore, including titles from a variety of genres other than erotica:

FYI: If you are not in the UK, you can’t see the Kobo UK store, and won’t know if your books have been removed. My tests show 50% of SP gone

— David Gaughran (@DavidGaughran) October 16, 2013

They also removed those titles from their Australian ebookstore.

I can confirm today that those titles are gone from the ebookstore on BookWorld, one of Kobo’s Australian partners. That ebookstore is still operational but it is missing an unknown number of self-published titles, including SF and nonfiction works by David Gaughran. He uploaded his own titles through Kobo Writing Life so they should be available.

Kobo promised yesterday that they would eventually restore most of the titles they purged, but they have not explained why they felt it necessary to remove inoffensive ebooks like David’s guides for self-published authors.

I have queried Kobo on this but have not received a response. But I assume that they are awfully busy at the moment coping with the mess they have created, which is understandable.

image by eliduke

When Scribd launched their subscription ebook service a couple weeks ago it quickly grew to be the second most popular service here in the US (following the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library). Today Scribd decided to share some details about their success.

They’ve posted an infographic with some highlights, and I have embedded it below.

The infographic tells us that Scribd’s subscribers have so far spent 9.6 years reading ebooks. We don’t know many subscribers Scribd has, but I can tell you that the power readers go through an average of 10 ebooks each month. Scribd has also revealed that one user in Wichita KS holds the record of reading 14 books in 2 weeks after having spent spent over 45 hours a week reading.

When it comes to hardware, Scribd’s records show that the most popular reading device was the iPad – by far. Android devices came in second, with PCs in third place and smartphones rounding out last place.

I have to say that I was surprised; I was expecting smartphones to rank higher due to the simple fact that there are more iPhones out there than iPads. I had also thought PCs would drive nonfiction reading, but apparently iPad users are driving the technical and academic reading. Most people are reading general fiction though business titles, romance, and relationship books are almost as popular.

I am not surprised by Scribd’s success. Their ebook subscription service draws on Scribd’s past experience with document storage and sharing to provide a highly functional service with polished apps for Android, iPhone, and your web browser. Scribd’s ebook subscription service is available globally and includes titles from HarperCollins as well as E-Reads, Kensington, Red Wheel/Weiser, Rosetta Books, Sourcebooks, and Workman.

When WH Smith responded to the news that they were selling adult content by turning off their website and promising to turn it on again "once all self published eBooks have been removed", I thought that they were exaggerating.

Now I am not so sure.

I have numerous independent reports that Kobo is pulling self-published titles from their UK ebookstore. And they’re not just removing erotica; I have confirmation that self-published ebooks from a wide variety of genres have been removed.

For those who are just tuning in, Kobo and their UK partner ebookstore WH Smith are responding to the "news" last week that they were selling adult content. I have already covered that story extensively, and you can find it here.

Kobo remains unavailable for comment, but earlier today Draft2Digital, an ebook distributor, sent out an email to all of their authors (found via TeleRead). They shared the bad news that all D2D titles had been removed from Kobo:

We have discovered that over the weekend Kobo removed all books published through our account. While we have received no official word concerning this issue, we believe this is related to recent articles in the media concerning erotica titles available at WHSmith and Kobo’s storefronts.

However, Kobo’s response to this situation seems to have been removal of all books for any publishers (including distributors) that have offending titles until they find a solution.

And that’s just the beginning.

Update: I have heard back from D2D. They say that Kobo removed all 7,883 titles they distribute, no matter the genre. I was also told that Kobo did not give them any notice whatsoever and that D2D is still waiting for Kobo to explain just what went wrong.

I have reports in the comment section of this blog from three different authors that say their ebooks are gone from Kobo’s UK ebookstore. One report comes from David Gaughran, who as you might know is an SF author. He doesn’t write erotica, but he does publish his own novels via Kobo Writing Life:

All my titles have been removed from Kobo UK, and I don’t write erotica (and I uploaded direct).

On a quick check of about 10 random authors (who don’t write erotica), about half seem to be missing from the UK store – including some big sellers. All Draft2Digital titles, and some Smashwords and Kobo Writing Life titles.

Oddly enough, his ebooks are still available in the US, even though D2D says that the titles they distribute are completely gone. It is only in his home market of the UK that Kobo will not sell his ebooks.

And that’s not all. There are several more confirmations on KBoards (here, here, here), including several that said that they don’t write erotica. One saw 58 titles be removed without notice or warning, while another reported that:

I just lost two Smashwords titles (both crime, not romance or adult in any way). I think they’re just taking time working through it.

At this point Kobo has removed titles from a couple different distributors and from their own self-pub platform. It is not clear exactly what Kobo thinks they’re doing, but right now it looks to me like they really could be planning to remove all self-published titles from the UK ebookstore they share with WH Smith. While that might sound crazy, it is no more insane than WH Smith’s decision to shut down their website.

Update: Kobo has sent out an email to KWL authors with a partial explanation. They do not explain the removal of the Smashwords titles or D2D titles, nor do they answer all the obvious questions, but they do suggest that most  titles will be restored.

And at this point all we have to go on is 2nd-hand reports from authors; no one at Kobo Writing Life is returning emails today so we have no explanation as to what is going on.

If this does come to pass then it will represent a new high point for sheer overreaction to bad press. It would also tell us that WH Smith, which is probably the instigator for this action, is truly out of touch and has decided to throw the self-pub baby out with the adult content bathwater.

image by Hometown Unicorn

Here’s an interesting footnote in the ongoing moral crusade against self-published erotica.

As I am sure you know, over the past few days, Amazon, B&N, WH Smith , and Kobo have all started removing self-published erotica from their ebookstores, with WH Smith even going so far as to shut down their website with the promise that it won’t reopen until all self-published titles have been removed.

B&N and Amazon appear to be slightly more selective; they’re running keyword searches and removing all the results.

But what you might not know is that this isn’t the first time that ebookstores have overreacted to news reports on erotica ebooks. And I’m not just talking about the time that Paypal tried to censor Smashwords; Amazon and B&N are actually repeating one of Amazon’s past mistakes.

Back in 2010 Amazon was swept up in a wave of I don’t know what, and besides removing erotica that features incest they also removed ebooks whose titles simply contained a word that Amazon deemed inappropriate. Here’s how one author defended his ebooks in an email he sent to Amazon:

You pulled my titles because that reporter at the Fox affiliate labeled my book pornography.  If you actually HAD done your research, you’d see that they do not fall under that category.  I can see them being viewed as erotica because the sex is very intense…and not at all sugar-coated…but that’s it.  And they were on Amazon’s website being offered for sale for years without a problem.  So will you also be removing other books once viewed as porn, like "Ulysses" and "Henry and June" and "Lolita"?  Will you continue to offer DVDs of movies that depict the torture and rape of women, like "Straw Dogs" and "A Clockwork Orange"?

Then, like now, Amazon was responding to unfavorable press by a sweeping removal of Kindle ebooks simply based on a keyword search. The 2 ebooks in question contained the word rape in the title, but did not have any actual acts of rape committed by the main characters.

And that’s not the only problem. Amazon has also had a long running neurosis concerning gay and lesbian ebooks in the Kindle Store. In 2009 Amazon removed 57,000 gay-and-lesbian-themed books from the Amazon.com search results.

Amazon has also occasionally tried to ban yaoi manga from the Kindle Store. This is a genre of Japanese comics that feature m/m relationships, and even though most of the stories are less risque that 50 Shades Amazon thinks they are too icky to be sold in the Kindle Store.

Selling them as paper books is fine, but in 2011 Amazon deleted a number of titles from one publisher. And then in 2012 Amazon nearly banned that publisher from the Kindle Store. They later backed down, but only after negative press stories criticized them.

At this point I really have to wonder why we are still doing business with Amazon (or any of the other major ebookstores). It’s pretty clear that these monolithic entities are too unpredictable in how they will respond to the latest hot news story.

And sadly, this time around it’s not just Amazon which is overreacting. Remember, Kobo and B&N have also removed titles, and that means we can no longer count on other ebookstores to counter the insane actions of their competition.

Now might be a good time for indie authors to go completely indie and start supporting the truly indie ebookstore platforms like Gumroad, Indiro, and others.

What do you think?

image by tonyolm

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WH Smith are taking a radical response to last week’s "news" that they sell boundary-pushing adult content in their ebookstores. They are now deleting not just the questionable erotica but are also removing any ebooks that might even hint at violating cultural norms.

This story began when The Kernel discovered last week that, much to their dismay, Amazon was selling legal adult content:

The books are sold as Kindle Editions, the name Amazon gives to books that can be cheaply and quickly downloaded to its portable Kindle device. Available titles include Don’t Daddy (Forced Virgin Seduction) and Daddy’s Invisible Condom (Dumb Daughter Novelette).

As with “barely legal” pornographic films, which seek to satisfy base urges associated with illegal and immoral acts while circumventing laws against depictions of underage sex, many of the titles listed on Amazon protest loudly that rape victims are “over 18”.

Similarly, the “daddy” rapists in many incest stories are revealed in the small print to be “not blood related”. But few reading the titles of these books will be fooled about the supposed erotic intent of the volumes.

Again, this content is legal.

I had planned to simply ignore this as a non-news story, but the major ebookstores were more concerned about legal self-published erotica than I would have expected. The Daily Mail, On The Media, BBC News, and a couple dozen authors on KBoards are all reporting that content is being deleted right and left.

The ebookstores are sweeping a wide broom in the process, with WH Smith even going so far as to shut down their website. They have replaced it with a holder page that explains that:

Last week we were made aware that a number of unacceptable titles were appearing on our website through the Kobo website that has an automated feed to ours. This is an industry wide issue impacting retailers that sell self published eBooks due to the explosion of self publishing, which in the main is good as it gives new authors the opportunity to get their content published. However we are disgusted by these particular titles, find this unacceptable and we in no way whatsoever condone them.

Their statement ends with the conclusion that the website will be operational again "once all self published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available." When that will be, they did not say.

Update: It appears that WH Smith wasn’t exaggerating when they said that all self-published ebooks were going to go; there are numerous reports that Kobo is removing most if not all of the self-pub titles in their UK ebookstore. Click here for more details.

WH Smith is not alone in their overreaction. Barnes & Noble was only peripherally mentioned in this story, but they too have started removing content and released an official statement:

When there are violations to the content policy that are brought to our attention, either through our internal process or from a customer or external source, we have a rapid response team in place to appropriately categorize or remove the content in accordance with our policy.

Amazon has not officially commented on the story, but I do have numerous confirmations from KBoards (I can’t figure out how to link to specific posts, sorry) that Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble have been removing whole swathes of self-published erotica from the Nook Store and Kindle Store. And they are not just deleting the more questionable titles; B&N and Amazon appear to be performing keyword searches in the erotica section and removing everything they find.

Many authors have reported that their titles had been pulled from the Kindle Store with little explanation beyond the statement that the titles in question violated Amazon’s policies on "Description, Cover Image". Many don’t have a clue what that is supposed to mean, including the author who forwarded one of the emails to me.

For example, one self-published title that was swept up in the crowd was Babysitting the Baumgartners. This ebook was unquestionably erotica, but based on the listing on Goodreads it is not in the least bit questionable (other than the word babysitter in the title). This title is not listed in either the Kindle Store or Nook Store any more.

And then there is Riding the Big One, a gay novel which was originally published years ago and subsequently re-released by the author in 2010. And suddenly Amazon decided they won’t sell it anymore as an ebook, possibly because the description mentions the word teenager.

There is also The Nun’s Lover, which appears to have been removed simply because the description mentions the word sister.

Curiously enough, B&N and Amazon have yet to remove The Bible, V.C. Andrews' Flowers In The Attic, Alyssa Nutting’s Tampa, Judy Blume’s Forever, or Lolita.  No, they’re just removing self-published erotica. And that brings me to what I see as the more important story.

This story has already gotten a lot of press, but so far as I can tell everyone from the journalists to the ebookstore staff has made the same assumption that only the self-published titles are an issue. As you can see from that list of titles above, that is simply not true.

Unfortunately, I may have been the only one who noticed. And I might be the one only one who cares about the authors who have been harmed in this moral panic.

It is not easy to get a title restored to the Kindle Store after the staff removed it. Said title has to be approved by some faceless drone inside Amazon before it can be sold again, and thanks to the minimalist explanations provided by Amazon it’s going to be exceptionally difficult for authors to comply.

And that means that this overreaction on the part of Amazon, B&N, and WH Smith is affecting the livelihoods of more than a few authors, none of whom have done anything worse than write and sell what readers want to buy. The overblown response to a couple of news stories is actually causing more damage than the content being vilified.

And that, frankly, is ridiculous.

Further Reading

• Amazon removes abuse-themed e-books from store (BBC News)
• Why Amazon Should Keep Publishing Rape and Incest Porn (On The Media)
• Warning: KDP banning old and new erotica titles en masse from self-publishers (KBoards)
• WHSmith removing all self-published titles; Offline Statement (Kboards)
• How Amazon cashes in on Kindle filth – Jeremy Wilson (The Kernel)
• WHSmith’s vile trade in online rape porn: Bookseller apologises after sales of sick ebooks are revealed (Mail Online)

 image by victoriapeckham

The iPad is now known as one of the best-selling gadgets of of all time, so it might surprise you to learn that at one point Steve jobs didn’t think there was any market for it.

This dates back to 2003, when Mr Jobs was interviewed at the first AllThingsDigital conference. Walt Mossberg asks about Apple’s plans for mobile devices, namely tablets. Mr Jobs first says that Apple has no plans for a tablet and then goes on to explain why the tablet market was doomed.

You can catch his answer starting at about 7:30:

He’s not wrong.

While some might post this video so we can point a finger and laugh, I’m sharing it because it shows just how much everything has changed in the past 10 years.

Almost all of what made the iPad possible was invented after this interview, and very little was invented just to be used in a tablet.

For example, the original iPad’s price and battery life both came about as a result of the rise of netbooks. That was a market segment that didn’t exist in 2003, so there was no way to foresee how it would drive manufacturers to improve battery life and reduce the cost of components and manufacturing.

The iPad also benefited from smartphones and the way they drove improvements in touchscreens. Again, that is a market that largely didn’t exist in 2003, so there was no way to predict how smartphones would make onscreen keyboards possible.

Did you catch the part of the video when they discuss writing on a screen? That tells me that in 2003 they were assuming that you couldn’t type on a touchscreens, which means you needed a physical keyboard. That matches with what I can recall from that era.

If you have the time, I recommend watching the entire interview. It is a window into a different era, a time when there was no MP3 market, no Youtube, and almost no mobile device market (compared to today, at least).

The above video shows us just how wrong we can be when trying to come up with a simple explanation for things like Jobs being wrong when he said that tablets would fail. He wasn’t wrong in 2003, and it’s not valid to say he was wrong based on trends which didn’t happen until after he made the statement.

France’s answer to Walmart has just announced that they will be getting into ebooks and ereaders in a big way.

Carrefour, one of the leading hypermarket retailers in France (and globally), has introduced a pair of ereaders which they plan to start selling next week.

The NolimBook and NolimBook+ are rebranded ereaders which were originally designed by Bookeen.  Both models will have a 6″ epaper screen (600 x 800 resolution), Wifi, a touchscreen, 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, and on-device access to the Nolim ebookstore. The Nolimbook+ will also have a frontlight and a slightly faster CPU.

They will be sold at 2 price points, 69 euros and 99 euros. Carrefour is going to start selling the NolimBook next week, and according to the announcement they also plan to remodel all 230 Carrefour stores in France with a new dept intended just to promote the new ereaders. This will be a place where potential customers will be able to try the new ereaders and seek assistance and support from a salesperson.

The NolimBook will also be supported by Carrefour’s new(?) Nolim ebookstore, which Carrefour is promising will be stocked with 100,000 French language titles from major French publishers. That is a considerably larger supply than the 36 thousand or so French language titles Amazon now offers in the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.

In other news Carrefour is also launching reading apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android. The apps appear to be brand spanking new, with the iOS app showing that it was just released yesterday. The Android app is showing that it has fewer than 10 users.

Carrefour is entering a crowded ebook market where all the major international ebookstores are present and actively trying to grow their market share. Based on what little solid info I have, the French ebook market is dominated by Amazon, Kobo, and Apple, with the 3 ebookstores accounting for about 85% of the market. Apple is in third place with Kobo and Amazon in a tight race for the lead.

On a related note, Amazon has dropped the price of the Kindle in France. They’re now selling the basic model for 59 euros, down from 79 euros.

eReaders.nl

Update: This post is now 10 hours old and in that time I have been told by at least 20 different people on 5 different websites that I am wrong in how I interpreted this contract. You might want to take this with a grain of salt.

Jeff Bezos likes to say that Amazon is agnostic on the topic of DRM, but if the boilerplate contract I have sitting in front of me is any indication then I think he might not be telling the whole truth.

I have a copy of an Amazon contract which says that Amazon will use DRM on Kindle ebooks unless they agree otherwise. This contract, which I am told originally came from an ebook distributor, was passed along to me by the editors of Actualitte, a French media blog. They had posted a detailed analysis of this contract earlier this week but were unable to share the contract publicly because of pressure brought by Amazon.

I have posted a copy of the contract as a PDF, and I want you to look at it and read the section on DRM:

Unless we mutually agree otherwise, we will use DRM in connection with the download of the eBooks, and we may use any available digital book DRM technology.

Please note that this is an Amazon contract and that Amazon is the one who is insisting on the DRM. That makes this an interesting contrast, IMO, with Bezos' statements that "If the rights owner wants DRM, we do DRM. If the rights owner doesn’t want DRM, we don’t do DRM."

The contract clause mentioned above is by no means agnostic on the topic of DRM. It unequivocally tells us that Amazon is the one who gets to decide whether the ebooks have DRM. It also tells us that Amazon _will_ be adding DRM to Kindle ebooks unless the other party can talk them out of it.

Amazon’s position (on DRM) in this contract is far from agnostic, and it is in fact much closer to their stated position for audiobook DRM. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, Amazon requires DRM on audiobooks and does not give content creators a choice in the matter:

Audible audio files cannot be converted to MP3 or any other file format because of security technologies used to protect both the intellectual property rights of our Content Providers as well as the Authors.

…

Audible justifies their policy with the statement that their proprietary audiobook format was required to provide the best listening experience for customers. This might be true, but it’s also not relevant to the fact that Audible doesn’t give creators the option of not using DRM. And that same policy applies to audiobooks sold on the Amazon website, so it’s not like Amazon can claim that a subsidiary was making different decisions.

I have contacted Amazon for a comment, but they have not responded. If they respond I will update this post.

Thoughts?

It seems Amazon’s 9.7″ ereader is back on sale again today, and that raises questions about just what Amazon plans to do with it.

The Kindle DX (graphite), an ereader which launched in July 2010, is now available for a mere $189.

That’s over a third off the asking price when I last checked in June, but don’t let that convince you to buy it. My competition was the first to catch the sale, and he thinks that this device is too old and too limited in functionality to be worth buying. I agree with him, and it’s not just that I think a $200 tablet would be a better value.

No, my main objection is the poor PDF support and the fact that this ereader is missing nearly all of the features found on current Kindles. The DX hasn’t been updated since 2010, and that means it doesn’t have cool features like KF8, X-Ray, Kindle Cloud, or Whispersync for Voice.

Heck, the Kindle DX doesn’t even make a decent digital textbook platform. That was why the first model was launched in 2009, and Amazon made sure to arrange for a number of pilot programs to promote the idea. Unfortunately for Amazon those pilots uniformly concluded that the Kindle DX was too slow and too feature limited to work well with textbooks. In fact, at this point it’s not nearly as fast as your average textbook app on Android or iOS, and it also has fewer features.

I think you’d be better off with a Kindle Fire 8.9 or some other tablet.

But even though I don’t think you should buy the Kindle DX in this sale I am still excited to see it go on sale. I am hoping that this is a sign that Amazon is going to release a replacement.

This goes beyond the usual tech blogger speculating on the latest news; I’m hoping for a new Kindle DX because one, new gadgetry is cool, and two, it would explain why Amazon brought the Kindle DX back from the grave earlier this year.

Amazon discontinued the Kindle DX in October 2012 and then revived the ereader 8 months later. This made little sense at the time, but today I have a theory to explain it.

I wonder if perhaps Amazon brought back the Kindle DX because they were responding to the Kobo Aura HD.  Kobo’s ereader has a head-turning 6.8″ screen with a jaw-dropping resolution of 1440 x 1080. I could see the possibility that Amazon might not want to be upstaged by Kobo so they decided to launch a larger Kindle again.

If I am right then the current Kindle DX is just a placeholder for the new model (we can call it the Paperwhite XL). I would further speculate that the new model would have a 9.7″ screen with a touchscreen and a resolution higher than 1536 x 2048. That is the screen resolution that Bookeen teased us with in their contest a couple months ago.

The interesting thing about that screen resolution is that if it belonged to a 9.7″ screen then the screen would have sharpness about the same as the Aura HD (265 ppi).

Doesn’t it make sense that Amazon would want a Kindle with a screen bigger and sharper than the Kobo Aura HD?

I think so, but what do you think?

Update for 18 July 2014: With Amazon having launched the Kindle Unlimited service this morning, it was high time that I updated this post to reflect the changed market.

The following post matches up 5 different services that are available in the US or globally:

• Kindle Owner’s Lending library
• Kindle Unlimited
• Oyster
• Scribd
• Bookmate

Content

• Oyster offers 500,000 titles, but few are frontlist and few are bestsellers.
• Amazon boasts that the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library stocks over 550 thousand titles, most of which were added via KDP Select.
• Scribd has a catalog of over 400,000
• Kindle Unlimited has 650,000 titles at launch, many of which are also found in KOLL. There are also 7,300 audiobooks.
• Bookmate offers 400,000 titles, but they tend to be concentrated in certain markets.

Cost

• Oyster costs $10 a month for unlimited access.
• Kindle Owner’s Lending Library comes as part of an Amazon Prime membership, and in the US that costs $79 per year but includes other extras like free 2 day shipping and free streaming video. You are limited to borrowing a single ebook title each month.
• Scribd costs $9 a month for unlimited access.
• Kindle Unlimited costs $9.99 for unlimited access, but limits you to only having 10 titles at a time.
• Bookmate costs $5 a month, which is usually billed through a subscriber’s cellphone company.

Availability

Oyster and Kindle Unlimited are only available in the US. Scribd is available globally, and the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library is only available to Kindle owners in the US, UK, and other select markets.

Bookmate is technically available globally but the company is concentrating its attention on certain markets: Russia, the Ukraine, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. They plan to expand into Scandinavia and Latin America by the end of 2014.

Apps

• Oyster launched their pilot with an iPhone app, and later released iPad and Android apps.
• Scribd has iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and iPad apps, and you can read in your web browser.
• Kindle Owner’s Lending Library is only available on a Kindle.
• Kindle Unlimited is available on any Kindle device or app.
• Bookmate offers apps for Android and iOS.

Europe is rapidly replacing the Far East as the source of the most interesting ereader news and the ImcoV6L is no exception.

This ereader might look rather ordinary but it is running Android on 1GHz Rockchip CPU. It has 256MB RAM, 4GB of Flash storage, and a microSD card slot. It’s built around a Pearl HD E-ink screen with a resolution of 1024×758. It also offers a capacitive touchscreen, frontlight, speakers, a headphone jack, and Wifi.

According to the press release, this ereader will include support for DRMed ebooks and audiobooks (via the eLibrary WMA App). It will also let users install their own apps, though I am not sure that will be worth much. This ereader has a CPU comparable to a cheap tablet and a limited amount of RAM, so I am not convinced that anyone will really be that interested in installing apps.

The imcoV6L is expected to be available soon, and it will be sold in Germany at eBook.de with a retail of 99 euros.

That is the same price as the Tolino Shine, the 6″ ereader launched earlier this year in Germany. Both devices have about the same hardware specs and can similar support for DRMed Epub ebooks. They can even buy ebooks from all the same ebookstores.

eBook-Fieber.de

Newscorp’s entry into the education market, the Amplify tablet, didn’t receive a lot of user reviews before being sold to waiting school districts; that may have been a mistake.

One school district in NC put their 1:1 program on hiatus just one month into the school year. They discovered that some 10% of the Amplify tablets issued to students were being returned with cracked screens or suffering from malfunctioning power supplies. Guilford County Schools, a public school district that serves 71,000 students in and around Greensboro, NC, announced on their website on Friday that they had withdrawn all 15 thousand Amplify tablets that had been issued to students. The tablets were distributed as part of the PACE pilot program, and were funded by a $30 million grant from the Dept of Ed. Race to the Top-District program.

GCS says that they pulled the tablets after receiving 175 complaints of malfunctioning power supplies, some 2,000 complaints about defective cases, and after 1,500 Amplify tablets were returned with broken screens. That is a 10% breakage rate, and it is almost unheard of in consumer tablets.

Of course, that 10% doesn’t mean anything without context, so I did a little digging.

SquareTrade, the 3rd-party warranty service, reported in early 2012 that 9.8% of iPad 2 and 2.8% of original iPad tablets broke in their first year of use. This means that the Amplify tablet broke at a rate 12 times as great as that of the iPad 2, and yes you can draw a conclusion about the relative build qualities.

Update: A couple people have taken me to task for my misuse of statistics. Clearly I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did.

On a related note, I have also been told that Worldreader, the nonprofit that distributes Kindles to remote schools in Africa, saw a 30% breakage rate when they first distributed Kindles in Ghana in 2011. Susan Moody Pietro, a spokesperson for Worldreader, told me that in order to fix the durability issue:

So we did a couple of things.  We did in class exercises to teach the students that e-readers are delicate devices (one example is that we had the kids drop an egg and we showed them that the screens were breakable, like an eggshell.  And we sent the broke Kindles to Lab 126 and they got to see that the screen needed reinforcement, which came out in the next launch of Kindles.  I should mention that the breakage rates we were seeing at the time matched a similar school program in Clearwater Florida, so it wasn’t a developing world vs. developed world issue.

Amazon responded to Worldreader’s high failure rate by figuring out how to build a better Kindle, and between that and Worldreader’s training program I was told that Worldreader’s breakage rate was now under 4%.

In the end most accidental damage to tablets is caused by either user error, random bad luck, or poor construction. And that brings me back to the Amplify tablets bought by GCS.

According to the product page, the Amplify tablet has a 10″ screen and runs a modified version of Android 4.2 on a Tegra 3 CPU with a 5MP rear-facing camera, wifi, and a microSD card slot. It is leased to schools at a princely $200 per year for 3 years, but curiously enough only comes with a 1 year warranty.

This tablet was always intended to go into schools, and that is why it was supposed to have been built with a layer of Gorilla Glass over the screen. This was in the contract that GCS signed, and it was also mentioned prominently in the early news coverage of this tablet. According to the school district, none of the Amplify tablets that they bought had that protective layer, which might help explain why so many tablets broke.

Or to put it another way, the absence of Gorilla Glass is a sign that someone cut corners on the build quality for this production run. Given that there were also complaints about misfitted cases and defective power supplies,  I am not terribly surprised.

But do you know what does surprise me?

I was frankly surprised to learn that the Amplify tablet is supposedly based on the Asus MeMO 10″ tablet, and that Asus was supposedly involved in producing the tablet. Asus isn’t known for such obviously shoddy build issues, so I have to wonder just how much they had to do with producing the Amplify tablet.

Also, that MeMO Pad 10″ tablet costs under $300, which means that schools are paying at least an extra $300 just to get the software from Amplify. I wish I could say that I was surprised.

As I reported when the Amplify tablet debuted in March of this year, this tablet is NewsCorp’s "solution" to the "problem" of education:

This 10″ Android tablet is the focal point of a new educational platform whose goal is to move more money from the $500 billion K-12 education sector and put it in Newscorp’s pockets.

And here I thought I was being snidely cynical when I wrote that back in March. Nope.

If you got an email from Adobe this weekend with a subject line that mentioned something about a password, I suggest that you take it seriously.

That email wasn’t a phishing attempt or some attempt to trick you; Adobe revealed late last week that they had suffered a security breach which affected up to 2.9 million customer accounts:

Cyber attacks are one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today. Given the profile and widespread use of many of our products, Adobe has attracted increasing attention from cyber attackers. Very recently, Adobe’s security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of customer information as well as source code for numerous Adobe products. We believe these attacks may be related.

I haven’t bought anything from Adobe so I haven’t given Adobe any credit card info, but I still got an email on Saturday. I am taking it seriously, and so should you.

If you have ever downloaded a DRMed Epub ebook and then transferred it from your computer to another reading app or ereader then you have probably used your Adobe ID somewhere in the process. This ID consists of an email and password, and it is this info that may have been compromised when Adobe’s server’s were hacked.

And now that password may or may not be in the hands of a hacker.  This is no reason to panic, but a prompt response is warranted. I suggest that you read the email from Adobe and follow the instructions. I don’t think it’s very likely that your financial info will be compromised but I also believe that it is better to be safe than sorry.

Update: And while you’re at it you might want to also consider whether you also used the same password/email combination on other sites. You should change those as well, especially if they have credit card or other payment info attached. Thanks, Alexander, for the suggestion!

P.S. I know that many in the anti-Amazon crowd like to talk about how the Epub ebook market is not locked down to a particular ebookstore, but the reality is that all the ebookstores, apps, and ereaders that support Adobe DE DRM all have the same weakpoint: Adobe. Tell me, how exactly is this better than being locked to a single ebookstore?