Toshiba might not be a name that many would associate with ebooks, but this gadget maker has just launched their second ereader, the Bookplace Mono.

The Mono has a 6″ HD E-ink screen (1024×758), with Wifi, touchscreen, 4GB of storage, a microSD card slot, speaker, and a headphone jack.

Toshiba is boasting that the Mono has a runtime of 8,000 page turns. This ereader supports Epub and XMDF ebook formats, but is designed to buy ebooks from Toshiba’s ebookstore, Bookplace. It is also going to offer a text to speech feature which will be based on Toshiba’s proprietary Speech Synthesis technology.

When the Mono ships on 16 April it will only be available in Japan. Toshiba has partnered with 5 major Japanese bookstores to sell and promote BookPlace and the Mono ereader. Retail will start at 13,900 yen (about $145 USD).

In other news, Toshiba also announced today that they are relaunching their ebookstore Bookplace, and that it will now be supported by Booklive, a Japanese ebook platform. Bookplace had previously been supported by Blio and sold ebooks in that format, but that will no longer be the case. Along with the relaunched ebookstore Toshiba is also releasing new reading apps for iOS, Android, and (coming next month) Windows.

The Mono is a more limited device than its predecessor, the DB50. That "ereader" was actually a 7″ tablet running Android 2.3. I have a DB50, and I found it to be frustrating and not really worth the expense or the effort needed to convert it to English.

To be fair, the DB50 (and the Mono) was always intended to be sold in the Japanese market. Both devices were only supposed to buy ebooks from Bookplace, though they can support ebooks from elsewhere. So my difficulties in trying to use it in English were largely self-inflicted.

source

The cover image for an ebook is important to its success, but it’s also a rather difficult skill to master. Not everyone has the artistic skills to design a good cover, but in the not too distant future that will no longer be a problem.

There’s been no announcement from Amazon, but I have just learned that they are working on a new tool that will help self-pub authors make book covers cheaply, cleanly, and well.

A reader sent me this screen shot earlier today:

He took the screenshot while using KDP, and as you can see from the title bar Amazon is offering a "Kindle Cover Creator". The service is still in beta, and I have not seen it myself.  But I have been told that the covers shown above were automatically generated by Amazon.

I’m told they can be edited by the author and that the text can be moved and the background image can be edited. Amazon also offers a gallery of royalty-free stock photos that can be used as the background of a cover image. Users can also upload their own images.

These are some pretty decent covers. They’re not quite as good as the work of an experienced cover designer, but on the other hand they are better than the covers of some books published by legacy publishers (example).

They’re also free, which is a plus.

I’ve been wanting to see someone offer a simple tool like this for some time now. While I don’t think the average author has the artistic skill to create a book cover from scratch, I do think that they will manage to make a decent cover with this tool.

I have used similar tools to design my business cards, after a couple ugly designs I finally started making decent cards. They’re not flashy but they are professional looking and do the job.

Amazon isn’t the first to offer an automated cover generator, but they are the first of the major self-pub services to do so. They’ve beaten Smashwords, B&N, and Kobo to the punch.

Update: Readers have informed me that Lulu and Createspace (an Amazon sub) have had similar cover creators for some time now, so my claim up above is incorrect. At least a couple of the smaller self-pub services also offer a cover generator.

If you distribute an ebook via KDP then you might want to check to see if you have this option.

The screenshot at right shows a part of a KDP menu. Amazon isn’t offering this option to everyone, but if you can see the second button then you should be able to experiment with this new tool.

Edit: If you don’t see the option then you can learn more about the tool here.

Has anyone tried it? I would like to read your opinion.

Thanks, Tristan!

Have you ever returned a Kindle ebook? That option might soon be going away, thanks to a petition over at Change.org.

The petition calls on Amazon to change their customer-friendly Kindle ebook return policy. Even though this petition is only 4 days old it has over 2 thousand signatures from authors and publishers, all of whom want Amazon to now block some types of returns.

The petitioners don’t see the return policy as reassurance to readers that we can return a poorly written or poorly formatted ebook. Instead they view it as a loophole that is being gamed by serial returnees.

There is some truth to this idea, but would it surprise you to know that Amazon is a step ahead of serial returnees?

I first read about this petition on GalleyCat, and I was surprised to learn that I was the only one who knew about Part B of Amazon’s return policy.

A lot of authors are bothered by readers who appear to be gaming the system (buying, reading, and returning multiple books) and that is an entirely understandable concern. Amazon is bothered by that as well, and that is why they have long had a policy in place for responding to serial returnees.

If a customer buys and returns too many ebooks, Amazon will put a block on their account and not allow any more Kindle ebooks to be returned. I know this policy exists because I encountered it in 2009.

In December 2009, while I was still blogging for MobileRead, I shared an email that a friend had received from Amazon. It very politely noted that my friend seemed to be buying a lot of Kindle ebooks by mistake:

Hello from Amazon.com.

We’re writing regarding your request of Refunds.

Unfortunately, the number of issues you have sustained with your Kindle Store orders has led us to believe that there might be a larger issue. Since it appears that many of your orders have been accidentally purchased, we ask that you contact Customer Service for troubleshooting in an effort to avoid these issues in the future.

Effective immediately, we are unable to compensate you for any additional issues with your Kindle Store orders.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Account Specialist
Amazon.com

So as you can see there’s no need to change the policy. Amazon already has it covered.

I’m not sure whether Amazon sent the email when the returns hit a certain threshold or whether his buying habits fit the pattern of a serial returnee. But I do recall that this email was sent after 30 titles were returned.  In absolute terms that is really not a lot of ebooks; I’ve bought more ebooks than that in a single month.

But it doesn’t really matter why Amazon sent the email; what matters is that they have a policy in place to cover anyone trying to cheat.

Furthermore, I am a little surprised at the number of authors who don’t realize the importance of Amazon’s return policy.  While a few people use it to cheat, the rest of us see it as a promise that we can return a crappy product. This increases the probability that we will take risks with unknown authors.

Few ebookstores have a return policy as generous as Amazon’s. Barnes & Noble does not allow returns at all and nor does Sony. In fact, Google Play Books (and Kobo, or so I am told) are the only significant ebookstore that let you return ebooks.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I would bet that Amazon’s return policy is at least partly responsible for Amazon continuing to dominate the ebook market all the way through Agency pricing. It is is less risky to buy ebooks from Amazon that anywhere else. And TBH if Amazon did not have this policy I would be far more cautious about spending money there.

That is the point that the petitioners seem to have missed. They are upset about the tiny fraction of people who are gaming the system and in order to stop serial returnees the petitioners want to hurt the rest of us as well.

I would say that the cure is worse than the disease, wouldn’t you agree?

Remember last fall when I reported that Kobo bungled the US launch of their new ereaders, and then followed up 6 weeks later with the shocking report that they had foolishly stopped selling their ereaders on their website?

A number of readers showed up and disagreed with my description of Kobo’s actions, but it looks like I was right all along

Kobo has just announced that they are once again selling their own hardware on their own website. They have ended a 5 month dry spell during which they lost customers to Amazon.

The press release just went out this morning, and it includes the detail that Kobo will only be shipping to the US and Canada. The hardware is available now, and so are accessories like cases, lights, and so on.

I don’t know about you but I am glad to see Kobo finally come to their senses. They had made it very difficult to buy one of their ereaders or Android tablet here in the US. In fact, it’s still difficult to buy a Kobo ereader; they’re not being carried by any major US retailer. Amusingly enough, several of the retailers listed in the press release as current partners don’t actually have Kobo’s hardware in stock. I checked, and Best Buy still says the devices (aside from the Kobo Mini) are coming soon while Walmart, Target, Staples, and other major US retailers don’t list the Kobo hardware at all.

Besides the Kobo website, you can find Kobo hardware at some ABA member indie bookstores including Powell’s and Family Christian Bookstores (a chain of stores, actually).

Kobo isn’t even being carried by sister companies like Buy.com (aka Rakuten Shopping).  While that site does have a page for Kobo products none of the new devices are listed, just the Kobo Vox and the Kobo Touch. This lack of support from Rakuten has been obvious since at least January, but I am still surprised every time I see it.

ReDigi, a startup that in 2011 launched an online marketplace where users could buy and sell second-hand digital music, violates the copyrights of Capitol Records.

US District Court Judge Richard Sullivan handed down a ruling on Saturday that pretty much ended the case with a decision in favor of Capitol Records. The judge was responding to the summary judgement filings that the 2 parties made last year and it seems he thought that Capitol Records presented a compelling argument.

You can find the ruling here. It give Capitol Records everything they wanted.  ReDigi committed copyright infringement, fair use and the first sale doctrine don’t apply, and ReDigi is liable for direct, secondary, and contributory infringement.

The ruling is 18 pages long and quite technical, but there is one point I wanted to call out. Judge Sullivan pins down exactly why the first sale doctrine does not apply, only his explanation is problematic.

According to the ruling, the song you buy from iTunes cannot be resold unless you want to sell the specific chunk of the hard disk it was sitting on when you first downloaded it (I’m paraphrasing page 6). The judge goes on to exclude situations where users might make copies for themselves and limits the infringement to making a copy on someone else’s hard disk.

This raises some interesting possibilities.  First, it leaves open the possibility that you might burn the music to a CD and sell that. This could be legal. This part of the ruling also leaves a loophole open for a shared streaming service. So long as I still control the music file I uploaded, it could be legal for me to let others stream the music. And then there’s the probability that one can have multiple legal copies of a piece of content; which is is the original?

So is this the end of selling used digital content? Nope. Today’s ruling is a blow to ReDigi’s case but not a fatal one. There are always appeals to higher courts, including the US Supreme Court, so today’s loss is merely a midpoint and not the end of case. This case could go on for years, though I’m not sure ReDigi can afford to litigate endlessly.

Nor does this ruling end any chance that Amazon or Apple might open a used content market.  As I explained back in February, Amazon is going to need to get permission from the copyright holders before they start allowing customers to resell Kindle ebooks.  Today’s ruling does not change that.

ReDigi was committing copyright infringement because they didn’t have the approval of the copyright holder.  That is what I said Amazon would have to get before reselling used Kindle ebooks, and I am still not wrong.

It is a shame that ReDigi might not have the funds to pursue this case to the US Supreme Court. There are several serious issues with the ruling that I suspect the USSC might overturn.

While I will agree that this ruling looks to be technically correct, it is also backward looking. It correctly applies current law to this case but it ignores the fact that the existing law and previous court decisions did not envision the market situation we find ourselves in today.

Thanks to this ruling, there is a significant difference in the rights you might have over the content you purchase. A significant amount of content was sold in digital form in 2012, including over 40% of the music sold in the US and about 21% of the book market. The sales that make up these market segments come with far fewer rights than if, for example, you bought physical media.

My question is whether that is fair to the consumer. Is it reasonable that the content should come with fewer rights just because it was sold in digital form?

Folks, this question needs to be answered by the US Supreme Court. We are at a watershed moment in the history of copyright, the likes of which has not been seen since Sony vs Universal (the Betamax case).

I want this before the US Supreme Court because a strong argument can be made that a customer should have the same rights over the content they purchase no matter the form it was sold in.

Yes, that goes against the accepted interpretation of current copyright law. But is the intent of the law to block resale of legally purchased content or to allow it?  I say that the precedent points to allowing the resale of content that is legally purchased; that has been clear for over 100 years – for physical media. I think it is time to extend that precedent to digital content as well.

image geetarchurchy

Several dozen editorials have been written in the 2 days since Amazon announced plans to buy Goodreads, but one in particular caught my eye today.

James McQuivey, writing over at Forbes, laments over the fact that no one in publishing bought Goodreads:

I have an important question to ask, one that I am stealing from author Nick Harkaway (@Harkaway) who wrote this on Twitter the morning after:

The point isn’t that Amazon bought GoodReads. The point is why GoodReads wasn’t snapped up by a publisher years ago.

The obvious reason is that based on the rumors of a purchase price in the “low eight-figures” as some are confidently whispering, most publishers weren’t really in a position to buy Goodreads. Unless they had seen this coming and had bought it many years ago. Let’s say back in 2010, when I first urged one of the Big Five (are there five now?) publishers to buy it. It was a riskier proposal back then, I’ll admit, and one that I couldn’t put a price tag on, so I won’t claim that I pushed hard or that the publisher was foolish not to take my advice.

He’s possibly correct about publishers not being able to afford the rumored $150 million that Amazon paid for Goodreads, but they probably could have afforded it when it was smaller.

It’s funny that he should mention 2010. That was the year that 3 major publishers got together and announced a new site that would give them a direct digital connection to readers. That site launched earlier this year, after over 2 years in development.

It’s called Bookish, and it does give Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster a direct connection to readers. But the connection it offers is so very, very different from Goodreads that the differences tell us quite a bit about these publishers' priorities.

Frankly, these publishers would probably not have bought Goodreads even if it had been up for sale and even if they had the funds. It does not do what they want.

Note: I am only going to critique the 3 publishers behind Bookish and not everyone in publishing. Some, like Macmillan (see the postscript), have a clue.

So how are the 2 sites different?

The first and most important difference is that Goodreads was launched not with the goal of forming connections. The goal was to build a community of (first) readers and then authors and to a lesser degree publishers.

Edit: Let me correct myself. As Google+ has shown us you cannot set out to create a community. Instead you give users a reason to come to a site and stay.

Goodreads was launched to encourage readers to show up and be bookish. The community formed around them.

Bookish, on the other hand, was launched in order to provide Hachette, S&S, and Penguin with "direct digital customer relationships". The publishers got to build it from the ground up, and the manner in which it functions says a lot about the type of "direct digital customer relationships" these publishers want
to have.

The thing is, they don’t actually want a relationship – not the relationship that James McQuivey (and I) think that publishers could benefit from.

The word relationship implies that there is more than one party speaking, and that is not the point of Bookish. This site exists to be little more than yet another marketing channel for publishers.

I have spent time on Bookish since it launched (including an hour today), and I frankly cannot see how I (as a user) can contribute. I can write a review, yes, but I can’t build a virtual bookshelf of books I own, I can’t communicate with other users, nor can I do anything that would benefit me and not the publishers.

Most importantly, I cannot even leave a comment on the blog posts on Bookish. That, folks, is an example of just how completely the communication flows in exactly one direction.

The internet offers many vast opportunities for collaboration, and Bookish flushes them down the drain. This could not be more different from Goodreads, which uses almost every chance to encourage users to participate, add content, and build value for each other.

To be fair, Bookish never pretended to be anything other than a one-way street. It was pretty obvious from the launch press release that the publishers were going to use it to sell books and that all the communication would flow one way. I have no problem with this, but if Bookish is really these publishers' idea of a "direct digital customer relationship" then their thought process is stuck in the last century – some time in the 1950s by my estimation.

These publishers don’t want to hear from readers. They want readers to listen passively while the publishers control the message.

And that, more than anything, is why these 3 publishers probably would have passed on Goodreads if it had been offered to them.

—

P.S. In creating Bookish these 3 publishers only invested in what would benefit them, and that is probably why Goodreads will succeed while Bookish flounders – unless Bookish goes through a radical change in focus.

P.P.S. Giving out book recommendations is the only reason for Bookish to exist, but it is just one of a dozen features that Goodreads uses to draw in readers. And it is that dozen other related features that both draw in users and combine to make Goodreads' book recommendations richer and more valuable than what Bookish can offer. There is a synergy in the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of active members writing reviews, rating books, and creating unique connections that cannot be replicated by the single channel, one way communication offered by Bookish.

I suppose some might say that the comparisons between Goodreads and Bookish are irrelevant because the sites serve very different purposes. This is not true. These 3 publishers could have used Goodreads for the same purpose as Bookish (to sell books) – only Goodreads would have done a better job.

P.P.P.S. Macmillan stands as an counterpoint to the 3 publishers behind Bookish. This publisher supports Tor.com, the SF community and blog. Tor.com is an example of how to a publisher can have a relationship with readers.

Feedly is rapidly becoming my preferred replacement for the soon-to-expire Google Reader, so I was pleased today when I learned that there was a way to make Feedly look more like Google Reader than I had hoped.

The tip I am sharing in this post goes far beyond the GR-inspired changes that Feedly has made to their service. It won’t result in a perfect match, but if you already use Feedly then I’m sure you can see how much it now looks like GR:

This is a pretty simple tip and if you know how to install an app then you can do this. I’m going to have you install something called a userscript. This will change the behavior of your web browser.

The userscript is called Readly. I tested it with Firefox, and I am told it works with Chrome. I cannot say for sure f it works with other web browsers.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is install GreaseMonkey. This is an addon for Firefox and Chrome that lets you run your own little bits of code.  You can find it with the other addons for your browser.
2. Reboot your browser so GreaseMonkey can start running. You’ll probably also need to enable GreaseMonkey so it knows to runs the script.
3. Click here and download the script. It should install automatically.

Once you have GreaseMonkey and the script both running in your browser, refresh Feedly. Then set the theme to Modern Gray. You will be amazed at the difference.

A couple months ago I reported on the tale of an academic publisher suing a librarian and a university over a critical blog post by the librarian.

To make a long story short, Edwin Mellen Press was using a bogus defamation lawsuit in an attempt to silence a critic who had described that publisher’s books as poor quality and not worth the cost.

That case was a pretty clear example of legal bullying, so when I read today that a lawyer for Edwin Mellen Press had made more legal threats against yet another blog I was not surprised. Appalled and angry, yes, but not surprised.

I’ve just read a new blog post over at The Scholarly Kitchen. That academic publishing blog has covered the Edwin Mellen Press legal shenanigans in the past, but today’s post by Kent Anderson did not cover new details in the story. Instead it was a short explanation that TSK had received a couple threatening letters from an attorney and as a result had removed 2 blog posts:

Earlier this week, we received two letters from the attorney for Edwin Mellen Press. We have subsequently removed two posts by Rick Anderson discussing Edwin Mellen Press and all comments emanating from those posts.

You can read the letters over at The Scholarly Kitchen, but the tl;dr version is that Amanda Amendola, acting as Edwin Mellen Press’s lawyer, threatened one of the commenters with a libel suit. She also threatened The Scholarly Kitchen with a lawsuit if that blog should

"publish or provoke any statement about our company or authors that is in the slightest bit defamatory".

In case you missed it, this is a threat to sue over comments.

BTW, if you want to read the posts that were removed you can find them over at thew Wayback Machine (here, here). You can find the "libelous" comment on the first link.

Later in the letter Amendola goes on to claim that The Scholarly Kitchen has "a legal obligation to monitor these types of comments".

This is legal bullying, clear and simple. The goal of this letter was to scare the writers and publisher at The Scholarly Kitchen, and to that end this lawyer made an open threat which was backed up in part by a lie. Edwin Mellen Press wanted to silence one of their critics, and they succeeded.

Please note that I am not criticizing The Scholarly Kitchen for removing the blog posts; threatening letters from lawyers are scary and the safer path is to remove the posts. I support The Scholarly Kitchen in their decision.

But this letter is still legal bullying and Amendola still lied. In particular, she was lying when she claimed that The Scholarly Kitchen had a legal obligation over the comments left on that blog.

That is nonsense. Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code covers secondary liability for internet service providers, and it has repeatedly been interpreted in ruling after ruling that this section protects a blog from any legal liability for the comments left by readers. You could make whatever nasty comment you wanted about this publisher or their lawyer and I have no legal liability what so ever.

On a related note, Edwin Mellen Press is still suing Dale Askey, the librarian mentioned in the first paragraph, though they have dropped the lawsuit against the university. In other words this vanity press is only attacking its critics with legal threats and not unrelated parties.

How nice of them.

Amazon announced today that they had bought another book-focused social network, Goodreads.

This 16 million member strong community is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2007 by Otis Chandler. It’s built on the idea of encouraging members to create bookshelves of titles they’ve read, would like to read, and so on. Readers can rate books, write reviews, and discuss the details of the titles they liked.

It’s not clear yet exactly why Amazon bought Goodreads, but the most obvious reason would be the Goodreads Recommendation Engine. Goodreads has been building this engine since well, since it launched, but they doubled down on their efforts in 2011 with the acquisition of Discovereads.com. That site was integrated into Goodreads and ever since then has been the basis for the Goodreads Recommendation Engine.

It is also possible that Amazon wants to gain access to the more than 23 million book reviews that have been posted by Goodreads members, as well as the book summaries they may have written. That would make a lot of sense for Amazon, and it is similar to one of the ways that Amazon has used Shelfari. Amazon has drawn on the book summaries that have been created by Shelfari members and used them for the X-Ray feature which Amazon launched with the Kindle Touch in the Fall of 2011.

But no matter how much Amazon gains from Goodreads, it comes at a loss of the site’s reputation. The news may only be a few hours old but there has already been pushback from users. The response from twitter leans heavily towards the negative, and some users are already deleting their accounts.

This is a shame, because until yesterday Goodreads had enjoyed a good reputation for being a neutral party. It wasn’t under the influence of any retailer of publisher, and it even broke ties with Amazon in early 2012 when Goodreads decided that Amazon’s rules for accessing Amazon’s book data API were too restrictive.

But as popular as the site may be, Goodreads is not without its issues. After a number of conflicts in the Summer of 2012 between authors and their reader-reviewers, Goodreads laid down a new review policy that sided with authors.

This focus on authors over readers could be one of the reasons that Amazon bought Goodreads, but that is unlikely.

Goodreads is far larger than at least one of the other 2 book community sites owned by Amazon. LibraryThing (Amazon has owned a 40% share since 2006) has a membership count around 1.6 million, but Shelfari (acquired by Amazon in 2008)  has not disclosed their membership numbers – not in any location I can find.

Edit: It occurs to me that Amazon also owns a 4th social network, though few may think of it that way. That network is focused on the Kindle.

I wonder if the lack of info on Shelfari membership might be a sign of Goodreads' future. Goodreads is known for sharing insights into their community in blog posts and conference presentations, but now that they are owned by Amazon they could be be as close-mouthed as their corporate parent.

I think we now know why the CEO of E-ink stepped down last week. According to Digitimes, Amazon has cut their orders for E-ink screens:

Amazon Kindle e-book reader panel shipments reached about 750,000 units in January 2013 followed by 420,000 units in February. The shipments are expected to drop even further to 20,000 units in March and April, which is expected to affect E Ink Holding’s (EIH) revenues for the two months, according to industry sources.

E-ink is quoted as saying that this was not unexpected; the first quarter is usually the quiet period in the calendar, with sales picking up later in the year. E-ink’s revenues were down 33% and 44% in January and February, respectively, and the following 2 months could even be worse.

I wonder how accurate the production rumor really is? When you consider the scale of Amazon’s worldwide operations, a supply of only 20 thousand components is effectively the same as not producing any Kindles at all. That 20,000 is barely enough to repair returned units, so unless Amazon is in the habit of sinking money into excess stock this rumor suggests that they’re going to stop making Kindles for at least part of 2013.

How long will Amazon stop? That’s another question, and that depends on whether they have actually stopped producing Kindles. I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon is planning to start producing Kindles with Liquavista screens.

That would make sense, would it not? Amazon is reportedly buying Liquavista, and that implies Amazon wants to use Liquavista’s low-power screen in the Kindle. Starting production in, say, May would guarantee a sufficient quantity of color Kindles to ship in October – more than enough, in fact, to supply a worldwide launch. Amazon had supply issues last Fall when the Kindle Paperwhite launched, so I can see them wanting to avoid repeating the problem with a new color Kindle.

On the other hand, it is almost as likely that I have Liquavista on the brain and am reading too much into this small piece of production news. Let’s see what is leaked over the next few months.

Google Reader might not have the largest userbase of Google’s products but we are probably the most vocal, with over 143 thousand users signing a change.org petition requesting a stay of execution.

And now there are signs that Google may be listening. I just got an email from a reader a few minutes ago, and he pointed out a quiet change that Google has made without telling anyone.

Google has restored Reader to the menu bar found on most Google pages. I know this might not sound like much, but after it started disappearing last week (first from Gmail, then the Google Homepage and elsewhere) everyone took it as a sign that Google was taking early steps to discourage users from lingering.

Google Reader always was accessible (though the Google Reader Android app has been removed from sale), so really the removal was little more than a minor nuisance that frustrated users who were already pissed at Google.

Google has been taking flack over the imminent demise of Google Reader, and the move today could be a sign that Goole might be reconsidering. But I think I will hold the celebration for a little while. At the very least I will wait for the Android app to be restored. Now that would be a positive sign.

Thanks, Joe!

And Amazon wants to buy it.

Bloomberg is reporting this morning that Samsung is looking to sell Liquavista, their Netherlands-based screen tech research firm. According to Bloomberg’s unnamed source the rumored asking price is under $100 million. Amazon is also rumored to be interested in buying Liquavista.

I told you so.

Way back in January I reported that Amazon was interested in buying Liquavista, and a couple weeks later I reported on the rumor that Samsung was interested in selling.

Bloomberg is also reporting that "Samsung is considering a sale of the business after the acquisition didn’t meet its expectations", or so their source said. That fits in closely with my supposition that Samsung wanted to sell Liquavista because Liquavista’s low-power, sunlight visible screen tech would never be an equal replacement for the high quality LCD screens now on the market. That was in the comments section of one post, which you can find here (scroll down).

Samsung is now using screens with 300 dpi and offering incredibly rich colors on their mobile devices. As cool as Liquavista’s screen tech might be, the most recent demo video showed that the screen tech was nowhere near able to offer a screen which looked as good as even the newer mid-range LCD screens. And since it is far too expensive to compete with the cheap LCD screens, there is not much of a market for it.

Pretty much the only possible market left is ereader, and that is likely why Amazon wants Liquavista.

Thanks, pauli!

Google’s new note-taking service launched last night and it’s been catching a lot of flack from bloggers. If the early responses are any indication, Google Keep is going to fail not because of any of the service’s shortcomings but because no one trusts Google.

When I reviewed Google Keep last night I pointed out that Google Keep’s biggest flaw had nothing to do with its features; the problem was the company behind the service. And from the posts I’ve read so fat it would seem I’m not the only one who thinks that.

That doesn’t invalidate my opinion of Google Keep, but it does remind me that we can’t trust Google not to rip the rug out from under us. If anything the demise of Google Reader reminds us that it is much safer to use a third-party app that isn’t dependent on Google’s servers.

There were already a couple editorials online last night who are just as annoyed with Google as I am. Om Malik, writing over at GigaOm, put it thus:

It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.

I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. I sent feedback, used it to annotate information and they killed it like a butcher slaughters a chicken. No conversation — dead. The service that drives more traffic than Google+ was sacrificed because it didn’t meet some vague corporate goals; users — many of them life long — be damned.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt hits the nail on the head:

I use a variety of Google products, and normally, this might interest me, but I’m seriously having doubts about bothering, following the abrupt shutdown of Google Reader. Is it worth entrusting data to a service that might be killed abruptly? It seems fairly bizarre to violate users' trust so much, and then days later ask for it right back.

It all comes down to trust, in the end. When you think about it, our chief objection to Google Keep is that no one trusts Google anymore. If they’re willing to kill a tool like Google Reader at the drop of a hat then how do we know they won’t repeat that betrayal?

Popularity? That wouldn’t stop Google; it certainly has not stopped them in the past.

I have been told that Google Reader had more active users than Google+ the week before it was killed. I can’t name my source but I trust them enough to repeat the claim. Also, in spite of what Google reps claimed when GR was killed, I’m told that GR usage had not declined.   Growth had stagnated when Google shredded GR’s sharing options in order to integrate Google+, but Google Reader was still more popular than Google+.

Just to put things in perspective, Google+ reportedly had 343 million users in January (assuming the external estimate is correct). Gmail, another immensely popular Google service, had 450 million users in June 2012.

If Google is going to simply ignore the interests of a group of more than 350 million users just because the service doesn’t fit some vague corporate ideal then how do we know that they won’t do it again?

Amazon has already responded to the rumor that Techcrunch invented a few hours ago. In an email to Business Insider, an Amazon spokesthing is quoted as saying:

"It’s not happening–we are already at the lowest price points possible for that hardware."

They’re probably correct that the current Kindle Fire hardware is as cheap as it can be. As FJTorres pointed out in the comments of that post:

The current FireHD has several premium features (the tuned audio system and speakers, for example) that could be deleted to produce a cheaper tablet.

..

I could see them hitting $119 and $179 with ads. $99? I doubt it. Not in HD, this calendar year. For that they’d have to stick with the WSVGA screen of the original Fire.

One problem with deleting the premium components from the Kindle Fire HD is that if you take too much away you’ll end up with just a Kindle Fire.  As I wrote in the previous post, why not save the trouble and just cut the price on that tablet?

 Amazon is never one to pass up an opportunity to try to get you to read on a Kindle.  They launched the Kindle in 2007 with a free conversion-by-email service, and since then they have added easy-peasy apps, web browser plugins, and even a printer driver  that let you send content with but a single click.

And today they are extending their efforts beyond users to include websites. Amazon has just announced a new "Send to Kindle Button" that can be installed on a website.  Here’s more from Amazon:

Have you ever encountered news, blogs, articles and other content on the web that you want to read but don’t have time to do so immediately? The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.

You can see this button in action at BoingBoing, where they have added it to their Sharebar (the image at right).

From what I can tell it works much like the buttons that Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket have released. Clicking the button will send the body of whatever blog post you are reading to Amazon where it will be converted to a Kindle ebook and sent to your Kindle.

You can find the Send to Kindle Button here.  There is also a WordPress plugin which can be downloaded here.