In what was perhaps the shortest beta test in recent memory, the ebook distributor/retailer Smashwords has just officially launched their new Epub only distribution channel.

Smashwords Direct had originally been announced late last year in the response to the requests from quite a few authors, publishers, and ebook pros (myself included). A lot of us take pride in the ebooks we make, and it bothered us that we had to make a DOC file which would then be automagically mangled into a dozen different file formats.  The automatic process is all well and good, but given that we often make a good quality Epub anyway it is galling to watch a poorer quality file be be distributed to iBooks and other ebookstores.

But with Smashwords Direct, the gall is gone.

Authors and publishers can now upload an Epub file and either use it to replace the Epub which had been produced by the MeatGrinder, or, and this is the good part, they can upload an Epub for a new title and not have to make the DOC file to feed into the MeatGrinder.

That second option is going to open up a lot of possibilities for making use of the finer aspects of Epub, which starts at dropcaps and ends with Epub3. But one thing that the second option blocks is the ability to sell in multiple formats, and if an author only uploads the Epub they’ll also lose out on the samples which would be available to any ebook fed through the MeatGrinder. Luckily future plans include allowing for authors to upload PDF, Kindle, and other formats. Support for samples is also planned.

And even in all this good news there is a few serious issues. SW Direct was tested over the weekend and while many of the Epub files looked nice quite a few also failed Epubcheck. Mark reported that nearly a third of the test Epub files failed EpubCheck and thus doesn’t comply with the Epub specification. That is a sign that the ebook is not well made, a detail which is both embarrassing and a aserious issue which will hinder that ebook being sold in all the ebookstores. Apple in particular requires the ebooks to pass EpubCheck.

There was also a few Epubs which reportedly didn’t look as good as the Epub which come out of the MeatGrinder. A survey of the tools used to make the Epub files returned a surprisingly diverse set of answers, including:

• Adobe InDesign
• Nisus writer pro
• OpenOffice
• Jutoh
• Atlantis
• Epubmaker
• LibreOffice
• Writer2epub
• Scrivener
• HTML
• Sigil
• Calibre

The last 3 were the most popular by far, and to be perfectly honest there are at least 2 names on this list that I have never heard of before.

In any case, files uploaded to Smashwords will need to comply with the Style Guide. They will still need to meet certain requirements, some of which are so they can be distributed to the ebookstores (they don’t like you mentioning the competition).

Has anyone tried this yet? How well does it work?

source

What is an ebook blog without ereader reviews? I don’t know, but that’s what this blog has been for quite some time. Today that changes.

Several weeks ago I got a new ereader shipped to me from Europe. It’s the Boox i62HD Firefly, and it’s Onyx’s latest and greatest 6″ ereader with the new HD E-ink screen, frontlight, and pretty much all the same great hardware as  the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Glo as well as a couple things the other ereaders lack, namely a microSD card slot and page turn buttons.

Opinion

I generally found this to be a run of the mill ereader, and given that it costs 30 euros more that the European price for the Kobo Glo I’m not sure I see the point. Also, given the poor quality of the frontlight I feel I must discourage anyone from buying this ereader.

Hardware

In terms of looks, the Firefly would best be described as a cross between the Nook Touch and the Kindle Touch. It matches the gray color of the KT, while adding the page turn buttons of the Nook Touch on the sides of the screen. It also has a single button below the screen like the KT, and on the bottom edge it has a headphone jack, microSD card slot, and mini USB port.

The back is a smooth but largely featureless gray. As I hold it in my hands, I find that it is quite the heavy ereader. It feels like there’s a noticeable difference, even though according to the specs the KPW is only about 30 grams lighter (12%).

The frontlight is best described as splotchy and fragile.  I can see distinct  shadows and bright spots on the screen when using the Firefly, and when I look at the screen edge on the unevenness of the lighting is even more distinct.

This ereader also failed the drop test.  Remember when I reported that you could drop keys on the Nook Glow and damage the frontlight? The Firefly has the same problem. In fact, the first couple dings on the screen happened before I tested this ereader – even though this ereader came with a case.

Software

It works adequately well as an ereader, and the page turn speed is about as fast as on my K4. You can highlight, type notes, and look words up in the dictionary. There’s also bookmarks, search, and TTS, though that last is painful to listen to.

While this ereader should have shown that a nimble smaller competitor could put out a better product than the big guys, the i62HD is actually missing the one thing I was looking forward to.

I have owned past Onyx devices, and I had come to know and love the annotation options. The earlier ereaders had a Wacom touchscreen, and you could use the stylus to write notes on the text. There were certain limitations, but being able to scribble, underline, or highlight relevant notes was really cool.

Absent the note-taking, this is simply a more expensive, heavier, and somewhat less desirable alternative to the Kobo Glo or Kindle Paperwhite.

Update: It turns out I was wrong. The annotation features which I recalled using with past Onyx models only ever worked with PDF and images, not Epub or other text based ebooks. Please note that I tried to fact check that feature before posting this review; none of the Onyx reps corrected my mistaken assumption.

Where to Buy

The Firefly seems to only be available in Europe, where it is sold by eReader-Store.EU.

You will be able to get the same ereader (albeit with a different firmware) from Onyx-Boox.com in January. I would suggest that you buy from the latter site, even though it is more expensive. I have found that eReader-Store.EU doesn’t exactly want to communicate with me. The alternate model is also worth considering because it has a better TTS engine. According to the website it will use the Ivona engine.

Specs

• HD E-ink screen (758×1024)
• Frontlight, IR Touchscreen
• 800MHz Freescale i.MX508 CPU
• 4GB Flash, micro SD card slot
• Wifi
• supported Formats: FB2, TXT, PDF, DJVU, DJV, IW44, IW4, RTF, HTML, PRC, MOBI, CHM, EPUB, DOC, HTML, TCR, CBR, CBZ
• Weight 250g
• Size: 171 ? 124.8 ? 10.9 mm
• Additional features: Text-to-Speech, Dictionaries, Widgets, Web Browser, Music Player

The social reading site Goodreads  had a very good year in 2012, better than me in fact (my traffic only increased by 50%).  They posted the following infographic to share the good news.

The site’s 13 million members have contributed over 20 million reviews and added 210 million titles to their virtual bookshelves this past year.

source

The Pew Research Center has just released the results of their fall surveys into gadget ownership, and it’s a lesson in why you shouldn’t try to compare the results of 2 different consumer surveys, no matter how close the survey topic.

In a seeming contradiction to last week’s Forrester news, the Pew Center reports that tablet ownership is up noticeably, while the number of Americans who own an ereader is only negligibly different from Pew’s January 2012 survey.

Around 2300 Americans were polled in October and November, and 24% now own a tablet of some kind. That’s a nice increase from the 19% of respondents in the January survey who reported owning one, and a significant change from the 10% who reported last December  that they owned a tablet.

eReader ownership stayed at 19%, the same as in January, though that figure is higher than the 10% of respondents who owned one in December of last year. This statistic comes as no surprise, because in spite of the many ereaders which launched this year E-ink repeatedly reported that their earnings were down (link). The market guesstimators at iSuppli concur in the flatline of ereader ownership; in fact they predicted that only 2/3rds as many ereaders would be made in 2012, compared to 2011.

But on the upside, digital reading was up this year. It seems that more people are reading n tablets and smartphones than before, with 23% of respondents saying that they read an ebook, up from 16% last December.  At the same time the number of people who had read a paper book had dropped from 72% to 67%.

All in all, this is good news. eBook adoption continues apace, just not with a similar increase in ereader ownership. Instead it seems that Americans are moving more of their reading on to tablets, smartphones, and the like.

And library ebook are also seeing greater demand. The Pew Center also reported that ebook borrowing was on the rise (now 5% from 3% in December 2011), though it still only represents a very sliver of the population. Of particular interest is the footnote that this statistic was defined by the respondents; some may have included the ebooks they shared via the Nook LendMe program or the ebooks borrowed from the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library.

And on a sidenote, the Pew Center has changed how they define library users and ebook borrowers.  That means the news from back in June that 12% of Americans had checked out a library ebook is no longer relevant; the current statistics are defined differently. (more to come on this point; I want to better understand what changed)

source

image by Keith Williamson

There are companies that like to be coy when they leak news, and then there are companies like Google Asus which like to use the exact same leaks with each of their new tablets, just to make sure the leaks are noticed by tech blogs.

Take the promotional campaign for the Nexus tablets, for example.

The first step is to leak the specs and possible release date to Digitimes. Step 2 involves posting the benchmarks online, and step 3 involves using the new device to take photos which are posted to Picasa – from an official account, no less.

That’s the pattern Google Asus laid down when the Nexus 7 launched in June and Nexus 10 launched this fall. And today it seems pretty clear that they are once again repeating these steps in preparation for the launch of the new $99 Nexus tablet.

I’ve just found a set of photos on Picasa which look to have been taken by a not-yet-released Asus gadget, the ME172V. While we only have unsubstantiated rumors concerning this device, the pattern of rumors and leaks suggest that this is the new Nexus tablet.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the ME172V is going to be the highpoint of CES next month. The photos leaked today don’t have any other purpose other than to prep the blogosphere for a launch event.

And while Asus may not have a booth at CES, Google has a meeting room in the back of South Hall. I expect that we’ll find the new tablet there.

According to the benchmarks and the leaked specs, this tablet will be running Android 4.1.1 on a 1GHz CPU provided by WonderMedia. It also has a 400MHz Mali GPU, screen resolution of 1024×600 (the size is assumed to be 7″).  One of the leaks included other details about the specs, including a mention of 1GB of RAM, a 1MP front-facing camera (this was confirmed  by today’s Picasa leak), and a microSD card slot.

The current rumors say that this tablet will cost $99, and given the pattern I think the price is correct.

Picasa

Way back in January I was inspired by the launch of iBooks Author to post on how poor students will get left behind in the so-called digital textbook revolution. I lamented that school districts with limited funds  won’t be able to take advantage of the benefits of digital textbooks (I still believed in the hype back then) because of the sometimes expensive hardware costs.

Recent events now suggest that the bar for adopting digital textbooks is a lot higher than I expected, and it turns out that even a well-to-do suburb of D.C. can face insurmountable issues – ones so bad that they have to go back to paper textbooks.

According to the Washington Post (and confirmed on an official website) Fairfax County Public Schools is currently in the process of replacing some recently licensed math textbooks with even newer paper copies.

FCPS has always been at the forefront of adopting new tech in classrooms, whether it is  setting up 1:1 classrooms or pushing for greater participation in BYOD programs, and this school year they decided to go into digital textbooks in  big way. FCPS signed up 3 publishers, Pearson, Holt, and McGraw/Hill to provide online math textbooks for all students in all grades, K-12.

That’s an ambitious project, no? It would save students the effort of carrying the textbooks around while avoiding the need for expensive hardware like the iPad. I mean, almost everyone has a computer with internet access at home right?

Well, no, they don’t. And even for the ones that do have access, it turns out that access alone is not enough.

One or more of the digital textbook platforms (I’m not clear on which one) apparently requires not just an internet connection but a fast DSL connection, which not all households have. They don’t need it otherwise and frankly because not everyone can afford the more expensive fees.

And even when students did have a fast internet connection at home, sometimes they were unable to use it due to other connection issues such as the time that storm damage from Hurricane Sandy took out Pepcom and parts of the local telecoms coverage.

And so the school district has decided to replace some of the online textbooks with paper textbooks. This is expected to cost around $2 million, and the new copies should be available for students by the time they return to school in January.

As we can see from FCPS error, one problem with rushing forward in pursuit of same great idea is that someone is always going to be left behind. This might not be an issue in most endeavors, but education is supposed to be the great equalizer. Public education is supposed to give people the chance to pull themselves up by enabling more opportunities.

This great rush to adopt more and more gadgetry is actually going to have the opposite effect, and I’d say that is a good reason to take a step back and reconsider what a school’s priorities really are.

image by rob.wall

Ookbee, a 2-year-old startup, has recently announced that they just hit a major milestone. As of October 2012, this southeast Asian ebookseller was counting over 2,500,000 registered users.

CEO and founder Natavudh Pungcharoenpong spoke to Tech in Asia in Tokyo last Friday where Ookbee won top prize for the startup pitch section. According to Natavudh, "Our first million took 13 months, the second million took six months. We will hit three million in about three to fours months."

This startup is as well-known in Thailand as it is unknown outside of the region. They reportedly control over 85% of the ebook market in Thailand, and sell ebooks via Android and iOS apps. Ookbee also offers local publishers a suite of authoring tools to convert their content into interactive digital magazines which can then be sold via Ookbee.

Ookbee recently secured $2 million in funding from InTouch, a Thailand based venture capitalist firm InTOuch acquired a 25% stake in Ookbee, putting it’s current market value at around $8,000,000. I would say that puts it in an excellent position to be snapped up by Rakuten, but Ookbee’s management aren’t talking about that. Instead they’ve discussed plans to expand into neighboring Vietnam as well Malaysia.

source

image by puuikibeach

There are a number of also-ran companies in the ereader industry, but one in particular deserves the label as an "also-walked", and that is Sony.

This ebook competitor has just launched a new ebookstore today.  It’s not exactly clear why they did it or how much money they plan to lose, but local sources are reporting that the store is now live.

German owners of Sony Reader T1, T2, or older models can now buy ebooks from Sony rather than the plethora of ebookstores competing in the German ebook market (Thalia, txtr, to name a couple).

Rude comments aside, there might actually be a reason to buy from Sony. The press release mentions that not all of the Epub ebooks sold by Sony come with the onerous Adobe DE DRM. Some of the ebooks, numbering in the "thousands", use digital watermarks instead.

Apparently several German publishers have decided to go with this low-hassle security, including Bastei Luebbe Verlag, which publishes novels by Ken Follett, Andreas Eschbach, and Dan Brown (it is not clear that any of these authors' novels are DRM free).

Digital watermarks work by burying traceable information inside an ebook, info which can be used to identify the original purchaser. Because this is often times little more than a few extra lines of text hidden in the file, it is a minimal nuisance for the legitimate purchaser while still being as equally effective at preventing piracy as the more painful forms of DRM.

The leading company working to provide digital watermarks for ebooks is Booxtream. They are best well-known for providing this service to Pottermore, the official ebookstore for Harry Potter.

According to Huub van der Pol, the founder of Booxtream’s parent company iContact, the official release of the Harry Potter ebooks saw a decrease in piracy of the series. Once the titles were available legally, and were easy to use, pirates saw little reason to post copies of the ebooks online.

You cannot make that claim about any other ebook, whether digital or paper, except for the ones which are DRM-free.

source

As any self-published author can tell you, it’s hard to get the attention of readers when you’re just one author among many. That is why I am glad that booksellers like Target keep an eye out for new talent and take time to make sure their  customers notice the new authors. Towit, Leo Tolstoy.

This author was born in 1828 in the Russian Empire. He was relatively unknown until Target selected him as an emerging author, and had written only a few classic novels and short stories which had only been translated into dozens of languages. Before Target selected him as an emerging author, he had influenced hardly anyone besides Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and other peaceful activists.

I’m glad Target brought him to my attention, otherwise I wouldn’t know that he was one of the great novelists of the 19th century.

P.S. There’s another movie adaptation of Anna Karenina coming out in a few months. Don’t anybody tell me how it ends; I want to be surprised.

source

As you could probably guess from E-ink’s quarterly statements, this has not been a banner year for ereaders. The screen tech company has reported a marked drop in income, indicating that fewer ereaders were being made this year than last.

And if iSuppli’s projections prove true, next year’s ereader market is going to look even worse.

This market research firm has released a new set of projections today that predict that there will be a 27% decline next year. They’re projecting that only about 15 million ereaders will be shipped this calendar year, down by over a third from last year’s peak of 23.2 million units. Next year’s shipments are projected to total around 11 million units.

It seems that no one wants to buy ereaders anymore, and given the rise of decent sub-$100 Android tablets I am not surprised. And iSuppli isn’t surprised either. They’re projecting tablet sales to hit 120 million units this year, with shipments continuing to rise until at least 2016, when they project 340 million tablets will be shipped.

Of course, little of this comes as a surprise. I predicted way back in January that apps (running on tablets) would eclipse ereaders (in some ways they already had), but I dismissed the possibility that ereader shipments would drop. TBH I just thought that the total number of sales would be eclipsed by tablet sales, not that the latter would rise at the expense of the former.

If you’re looking for proof about how the ebook market has changed in the 5 years since the Kindle Store launched, today’s news concerning Baen Books will give you a clue.

Hints have been circulating for some time now that Baen is about to distribute ebooks outside of their ebookstore (the shrinking Baen Free Library was one clue), and recent changes to one free ebook site were the cluebat I needed to confirm my suspicions.

Baen is finally joining the modern ebook era. Some time in the next few days months I expect that you’ll be able to find their ebooks in the major ebookstores.

Baen Books was one of the pioneers in adopting ebooks. Ever since 1999 they have been selling DRM-free ebooks, in multiple formats, in their own ebookstore. They had their own store so they could go DRM-free, and (like I have written before) it was the only way to provide a decent user experience. This was before the Kindle Store launched, of course.

One of Baen’s other endeavours was to bundle CDs into the first edition hardbacks. These CDs were chock full of free Baen ebooks from a variety of authors and included a wide variety of formats.

Those free CDs bring me to today’s news. Since Baen was using them to promote paper book sales, they were fine with the CDs being passed around online as ZIP files, ISO images, or what have you. They even winked at one site, Fifth Imperium, hosting copies of the CDs which could be browsed and downloaded.

But not anymore. Joe Buckley, the webmaster at Fifth Imperium, announced last night that he would not be hosting the CDs anymore due to a request from Baen. For the near future he will be hosting the CD images (ISO files and ZIP files), but the CDs themselves will not be available to browse from your computer. Here’s how he put it:

Baen is now on the verge of launching a new ebook distribution deal with an 'unnamed third-party'.

This third-party regularly crawls the web looking for ebooks it markets and, if found, matches their price to the new-found lower price.

Finding it free tends to knock the wind out of the ebook’s sales (so to speak).

Obviously the name which everyone is careful not to mention  is Amazon, and it is equally obvious that Baen is finally going to venture beyond their own fiefdom.

That’s great. They’re going where the customers are.

image by RachelH

There’s only so many times that the Canadian government, which is notoriously hostile to foreign investment,  government can "lose" your paperwork and make you resubmit it, and something tells me that Canada has hit that point with Amazon.

Early this morning David Gaughran tipped me to the news that Amazon was now mentioning a Canadian Kindle Store in their correspondence with KDP authors. After doing some digging of my own, I can see that he is correct.

Update: The Kindle Store is live on Amazon.ca.

Have you ever spent some time looking at the report pages at KDP? There’s a lot of different ways to generate sales reports: date, title, and most importantly, by market. Amazon will let you generate a sales report for each of their local Kindle Stores (amazon.de, amazon.co.uk, amazon.com.br, etc).

And as of today, Amazon will let me generate a sales report for Amazon.ca. Given that Amazon does not yet sell Kindles or Kindle ebooks on their Canadian website, this is a rather curious detail.

Update: Amazon has not yet updated the entire Amazon.ca website, but I can now see Kindle ebooks on the site. There’s no mention of the Kindle hardware, though, just the ebook and the apps. I also have not yet gotten a press release announcement from Amazon.

—

Amazon has been selling Kindles and Kindle ebooks to Canadians since the Kindle Store went international in 2009, but in spite of the fact that Canada is America’s closest neighbor, Amazon has not opened a local Kindle Store there. Even though Amazon has launched local Kindle Stores in the UK, France, Germany, and even Brazil, there’s never been any sign that Amazon was about to launch a Kindle Store in Canada.

Oh, I’m sure that it was in the works, but I would also put money on the launch being delayed due to the Canadian govt dragging their feet. In fact, I would bet that Amazon started working to launch the Canadian Kindle Store at the same time that they started on the UK Kindle Store.  It just took a while to get government approval.

It’s my guess that the Canadian Kindle Store will launch in the next month. I am guessing a month because the last time Amazon leaked details about a Kindle Store launch was with Brazil, and in that case it was about 26 days between the earliest leak and the launch.

Actually, I am expecting the launch to happen some time in the next week. The Christmas season is upon us, and I’m sure Amazon doesn’t want to pass up any chances to sell Kindles.

Amazon got a lot of attention yesterday for Kindle FreeTime, the new paid service which lets kids access a curated selection of content, but that’s not all they did.

They’ve just rolled out a new update for the 7″ Kindle Fire HD, and it adds a couple useful features:

• Camera app. You can now use the front-facing web camera to take pictures of yourself with an included camera app in the Photos library.
• Swype. Swype is a keyboard feature that provides a fast way to enter text. It lets you create a word by drawing through letters. Swype also provides additional keyboard functions like copy and paste and the ability to change the keyboard language.
• Kindle FreeTime Unlimited. Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is a subscription service you can choose to sign up for within Kindle FreeTime. Parents can subscribe children’s profiles to a wide variety of videos, apps, and games appriate for ages 3-8. For more information, see www.amazon.com/freetimeunlimited.

Swype is a pretty useful feature. Rather than typing in the individual characters, Swype lets you drag your finger across the onscreen keyboard to spell out a word. Each time you pause your finger, a new character is added, and when you pick up your finger the word will shop up on screen.

Speaking of the camera app, I’ve been told that the KFHD 8.9 already had one. Like the new app for the KFHD you could access it from the photo album. Apparently the larger KFHD has had this feature ever since it shipped, which makes sense given that it has a rear facing camera.

Amazon

As an inveterate gadget-lover I am used to buying stuff from overseas sellers and paying to have it shipped. This is often the only way to get rare devices like the Kyobo Mirasol eReader, so I really don’t mind the often weeks long shipping delay. China in particular can take up to 3 weeks, so naturally I have had to learn a little patience.

But then there are the services which seem to just sit there with a thumb up their ass, and that is when my patience wears thin. To wit, DHL.

I’m now waiting on a package which was shipped via DHL. It’s an ereader which I bought from Europe, and since I don’t want to embarrass the seller I won’t say who sold it to me.

But I will say this. I’ve been tracking the package, and according to DHL it has spent the past week just sitting in some distribution center somewhere in the US. Why? I don’t know. It’s just sitting there, gathering dust.

On a related note, DHL’s tracking service sucks. I cannot track the shipment I am getting on DHL’s international website, DHL’s US website, or on any site other than DHL.de. Having multiple websites and systems which do not communicate is a design decision on par with DHL’s inability to process a shipment.

What’s more, this is not the first time that DHL ignored a package for a week. Earlier this year I bought a different ereader from that same seller, and with that shipment DHL decided to let the package sit in Germany for a week. There was no explanation for that, either.

Some might choose to defend DHL and claim that a week’s delay (even unexplained) is not bad. That would be true if not for the fact that DHL is slower than the post office. A package shipped USPS Priority Mail will make it to Germany in 9 days. I know this because I just shipped an ereader to Germany a few weeks back.

And speaking of tracking, I can use the USPS website to track shipments sent to me from Korea, China, and Europe (and probably elsewhere).  So not only is the USPS faster, it also has a better website.

Given that DHL costs more than the post office and takes longer to deliver, I have to wonder why people still use it.

Can someone explain that, please?