Here’s a bone-headed maneuver for you.

Remember how Waterstones was going to sell the Kindle and take a sales commission on the hardware and any ebooks bought from that device? Apparently they decided that the subtle but positive relationship of simply making money off the Kindle wasn’t good enough; now they’ve turned the Kindles they sell into billboards.

The Kindles sold by Waterstones got a firmware update in early November. This update wasn’t rolled out to all the Kindles, and for good reason. According to a couple different users (story has also been confirmed by Waterstones) the only change in the update was a new screensaver.

I have not yet seen it myself, but the Kindle owners are reporting that all the screensavers have been replaced by a Waterstones logo. Furthermore, there’s no way to disable or replace that screensaver, so every time these Kindle owners pick up their device they will be reminded where they purchased it.

Apparently Waterstones thinks their customers are stupid.

You would have to think your customers are stupid if you assume they won’t do the math, realize they paid full price, and be pissed about the advertising. And it is advertising. This is just as much an advert as the ones found on the Kindles wSO, only Waterstones' customers didn’t get a discount on the price.

You would have to think your customers are stupid if you think they won’t return the Kindle and then go buy one (without the advertising) direct from Amazon.

Rude comments aside, that is exactly why this was a poor decision. Waterstones takes a commission on ebook sales, so they should be doing everything they can to draw in customers and not be giving them reasons to abandon the chain.

P.S. For those who are interested, here is the email which Waterstones sent out to one customer:

Thank you for your email regarding your Kindle Paperwhite from Waterstones.

I am sorry you are disappointed by the addition of a Waterstones screensaver after the recent software update to Kindle. It is our view that this screensaver does not constitute advertising and differs substantially to the advertising-supported Kindles available to the US market. The Waterstones screensaver is a non-dynamic, static image that will change infrequently and not advertise any specific product, offer or website.

It is not possible to remove the Waterstones screensaver to replace it with the former Amazon screensaver. We apologise that this change was made without consultation, and hope it does not detract from or alter your reading experience. However, if you feel it does, please let us know and we will arrange for the return of the device and a full refund.

I am sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

Yours sincerely,

**********
Customer Service Team
Waterstones.com

source

Remember 3 months back when HarperCollins and S&S abruptly renegotiated their ebook contracts to allow ebookstores to set their own prices?

It looks like Hachette has followed suit. I’ve just noticed that a number of Hachette titles in the Kindle no longer say that the prices were set by the publisher. Instead they say that the ebooks are sold by Hachette Book Group (example, example).

What’s more, Amazon is discounting the ebooks by $1 to $4 from the list price, and both Barnes & Noble and Apple are making similar discounts. Kobo does not seem to have joined the party just yet.

It’s taken quite a bit longer than I anticipated, but it seems Hachette has finally complied with the settlement agreement. Wow. It only took them 3 months. Judge Cote approved the anti-trust settlement in early September, and the other 2 US publishers who agreed to the settlement HarperCollins negotiated new contracts in under a week.

Hachette took quite a bit longer to adjust to the inevitable, but they are still moving faster than Simon and Schuster,  the third publisher to agree to the settlement. eBooks published by S&S still show that they are covered under the agency contract, even though that contract was supposed to have been canceled in 7 days.

And Hachette is also moving faster than the other 2 publishers and Apple which are still planning to fight the antitrust prosecution filed against them in federal court earlier this year. That case won’t go to trial until June 2013, and that means we’re going to be looking at a bifurcated ebook market for at least the next 12 to 18 months, and that could even stretch out for several years before all the appeals are filed and resolved.

What fun times we live in, no?

When the iPad launched just under 3 years ago many hailed it as the future of journalism, the future of publishing, and the savoir of mankind. It was going to rescue publishers by giving them a new way to sell content to consumers.

Thank goodness that nonsense can now be put to bed.

The icon of the iPad publishing bubble, The Daily, is winding down operations. Newscorp put out a press release this morning with the news. They announced the closure as part of a general reorganization, and buried it as a footnote near the end:

News Corporation also announced that effective immediately, Jesse Angelo, the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Daily and long-time Executive Editor of The New York Post, will assume the role of Publisher of The New York Post. As part of a digital restructuring initiative, the company will cease standalone publication of The Daily iPad app on December 15, 2012, though the brand will live on in other channels. Technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post.

The Daily launched in early 2011 amidst a lot of fanfare, hype, and a massive advertising campaign. It expanded beyond the iPad in early 2012 with new Android apps, but clearly it was not growing fast enough nor was it currently covering its costs. It was reportedly losing 30 million dollars a year.

So it seems that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has finally learned that you cannot pin your hopes on selling content via a single channel. Apparently all those other potential customers who don’t have iPads really do matter. And even though The Daily did expand to Android in early 2012, changing the name of the single distribution channel from iPad to "tablet" doesn’t change the fact that it was a single narrow channel.

The funny thing is, this is a lesson which should have been learned the last time News Corp tried it.

Back in the 1995, News Corp decided to get into the online news business in a big way. They launched iGuide, a news magazine which was going to only publish content on the then-nascent WWW.

That sounds ambitious, or at least it would if not for the fact that there were only about 16 million people online in 1995 – worldwide.  (Even I wasn’t online in 1995; that’s how small the audience was).

As for The Daily, it should have been pretty obvious at the time it launched that the numbers didn’t really add up. At that point there were only about 15 million iPads in use (according to Apple).

Yes, The Daily had a smaller potential audience than iGuide, and for it to succeed The Daily would have needed to sign up somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of all the iPads owned when it launched.

Update: This post inspired a discussion on Twitter in which i had to explain why i was so down on The Daily. So let me amend this post.

This publication was launched as a result of the iPad app hype. There was a period in 2010 when selling content via iPad apps was supposed to save publishing. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

The Daily launched several months after it was clear that an iPad-only approach would not work, at a time when many publishers were turning instead to bundling digital content with print subscriptions. It was almost certainly doomed from the start.

EDIT: This post combines several articles about Wistron, a company that (for a while) almost made ereaders.

The Readius was one of those impossibly cool gadgets which, in spite of enthusiastic support from tech bloggers such as myself, was never quite able to make the leap from concept to production model. And now thanks to its parent company deciding to turn off the lights at the device developer Polymer Vision, it never will.

The Readius was one of those impossibly cool gadgets which, in spite of enthusiastic support from tech bloggers such as myself, was never quite able to make the leap from concept to production model. And now thanks to its parent company deciding to turn off the lights at the device developer Polymer Vision, it never will.+Plastic Electronics reported last week that Wistron, the Taiwanese manufacturer which bought a bankrupt Polymer Vision in 2009, is shutting it down. This story has been confirmed by the former CTO of Polymer Vision, Edzer Huitema, though he was not able to provide further details.

Polymer Vision was originally launched by Phillips Electronics in 2004, and in 2007 it was spun off from the Philips Technology Incubator. PV received a €21 million capital injection from Luxembourg based Technology Capital Group, and set out to make a smartphone with a 5″ foldable E-ink screen.

This was the pre-Kindle, pre-iPhone era, so you can imagine how novel the idea was. Few smartphones had a screen larger than 3″or so,  so a small device which unfolded to reveal a large screen had an instant appeal to many gadget nuts.

Anyone with a smartphone knows that there is a compromise between a device which is small enough to fit in a pocket while still being large enough to have a decent screen size.

At least, there used to be a compromise. Now that everyone seems comfortable with carrying around phablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note with its 5.5″ screen, there is little reason to develop a foldable E-ink screen.

And what with all the 6″ ereaders which now use a high-resolution flexible E-ink screen on cheap and pocketable devices, PV’s research is both antiquated likely too expensive to manufacture.

Polymer Vision had planned to release the Readius in 2008, and had even gotten to the point of signing up Telecom Italia as a customer and reportedly making an initial production run of 100,000 units. Tanother production run was planned for 2009, but it was canceled when PV was unable to raise another round of financing.

It seems that the 2009 financing failed due to one of the investor’s involvement money laundering or Ponzi scheme. In any case Wistron bought PV out of receivership for €13 million.

Wistron is a major Chinese OEMs (along with quanta and Foxconn), and while their brands aren’t on many products you have likely used a device they made for another company, Kobo, for example, paid Wistron to make the Kobo Touch and Kobo Vox (and probably all their other gadgets).

They had been continuing to fund research for the past 3 years and so far as I know they did intend to release a new Readius-like device.  But the last I heard about that was in May of 2011, when PV teased us with a product render showing the device they wanted to build.

One of my contacts used to have fairly good ties to PV, and I’m told they have not shown off any physical  prototypes, though they have made at least a couple prototypes for each of the concept images they have released.

The Readius eReader Lives!

A novel ereader, long thought dead, has risen from the grave.

Polymer Vision, a Philips spin-off, unveiled the Readius back in 2008 (at right). This was a truly unique  device with a 5″ folding E-ink screen. Unfortunately the company lost their funding in 2009 when one of the main investors got caught up in a Ponzi scheme.

The Readius showed up in a couple places in 2008, including MWC 2008, before the company died.

Polymer Vision was bought out of bankruptcy by Wistron, and they continued to develop the screen. Of course, by the time Wistron bought PV the original design was out of date. So the PV team started working on a new design with a better screen.

I’ve been getting "we’re not dead yet" updates for 18 months now, and I can finally show you the new design.

Below is the artist rendition of the new Polymer Vision Readius. There’s no word yet on when it will be released, but at least we know it’s still under development. Notice that it folds up into a cell phone and then expands into 2 different screen sizes.

Wistron to make e-readers for Hong Kong publisher

Digitimes is reporting:

Wistron is cooperating with a Hong Kong-based publisher to tap China’s e-book market, and plans to launch a 6-inch e-book reader in June 2010, according to industry sources.

The e-book reader will use grey-scale EPD from SiPix – a subsidiary of AU Optronics (AUO) – and run on Android, the sources noted, adding that the product will be sold at 2,980 yuan (US$436.27).

Wistron will provide both hardware and software solutions, while the publisher will provide content, the sources said.

Why is everyone watching Wistron? It’s because they bought Polymer Vision out of bankruptcy, and thus own the flexible screen tech that the Polymer Vision Readius was based on. We’re all hoping that they will release an ereader based on it.

The XO-3 tablet debuted at CES 2012 as the hottest gadget news story. Even though there was no guarantee that it would ever actually be produced, it was the device everyone wanted to see. And now it’s dead.

A couple days ago OLPC officially confirmed the story which had been circulating in some OLPC circles for the last few months. The tablet is not  going to be made. Instead OLPC will turn their attention to working on the next-gen XO-4 laptop.

That device is based on the original XO-1 laptop, and unlike the XO-3 tablet largely uses the same components. It was announced a few months ago, and the early prototypes are circulating through some parts of the OLPC community (I missed seeing one at the Books in Browsers conference). OLPC is working on improving the touchscreen component, which is still rather buggy.

Plans for a tablet were originally announced in 2009, and in 2010 Marvell signed on as a hardware partner. While that partnership may not have led to the wundertablet everyone wanted, it did also result in a couple major hardware updates to the XO-1 laptop which improved battery life and reduced manufacturing cost.

The XO-3 was rumored to have cost $75, or at least that is what OLPC reported. Now that it is dead, I would bet that the actual cost of a production unit was higher than initially hoped.

I must say that today’s news comes as no surprise. I had heard that this tablet was in trouble a couple weeks ago, and the only reason Network World beat me to the story is that I didn’t move fast enough. (Oops.)

Do you know why it died? According to what I was told, no one wanted to buy it. That kinda limits the possibility that it will be manufactured. What’s more, it sounded like no charitable foundation wanted to fund it, either. That kinda limits the possibility that even a minimal demo order could be made.

OLPC would have loved to have gotten this tablet into the hands of students, but without a major injection of capital there was no chance that would happen.

source

What with the last month’s launch of iBookstore in Brazil, and last week’s launch of the Livraria Cultura branch of the Kobo eBookstore, Amazon must be feeling the pressure to get the Brazilian Kindle Store up and running soonest.

That could explain a recent goof made behind the scenes at KDP, Amazon’s self-pub program. According to David Gaughran, the confirmation emails which Amazon sends out to newly registered authors and publishers now includes a mention of  amazon.com.br, Amazon’s still unopened Brazilian website.

Amazon was encouraging the new customers to set up author pages (this can hep boost sales), and just to be extra helpful they included links to all 5 websites where you can currently find a Kindle Store. I have not seen the email myself, but David did share a screenshot:

I don’t know about you, but I find it rather curious that there’s no mention of the Kindle Stores in Italy, Spain, or Japan. While the latter could have been left out because of language issues, the other 3 sites should be listed. And even the one for Japan should be listed; for all we know the person reading the email is fluent in Japanese.

Then again, this kind of mistake (including a nonfunctional site while leaving out existing sites) strikes me as quite plausible. For all we know a memo could be circulating behind the scenes at KDP with the news that the new Kindle Store was launching in the next few days. Someone could have gotten ahead of themselves and added the link for the new site before they were supposed to.

Amazon had been rumored to be launching the Brazilian Kindle Store this month, and by my clock they have not quite 20 hours left to make that rumor come true. But today is a Friday, so it seems more likely that the launch will be announced Monday morning.

Do you still have your heart set on that E-ink smartphone from Onyx, or perhaps the dual sided smartphone prototype?

Neither of those gadgets are going to hit the market any time soon, and they might not get made at all, so if you can’t stand the wait then you should check out this new case from PopSlate.

A reader tipped me to a crowdfunding project which launched today on IndieGogo. PopSlate is working to raise $150,000 to finish the design of this case and get it into production.

The case in question is going to be designed for the iPhone 5, and since it uses the Lightning connector it obviously won’t be backwards compatible. But anyone with an iPhone 5 will be able to enjoy having a 4″ E-ink screen as a secondary display.

Now, a screen without buttons is pretty useless, so you might expect the E-ink screen to have some kind of touchscreen. PopSlate came up with a better idea. Instead of a touchscreen, their case uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to detect your finger tapping on the E-ink screen.

As you can see in the video,  the prototype does a pretty good job of figuring out what the users are trying to do. I can only hope the finished product works as well. I don’t have an iPhone 5, but I am almost tempted to get one just to have this case.

Publishing your own book is relatively easy these days, but the process and costs involved are more than a little opaque. There are steps you won’t realize you missed unless someone tells you, and there are ways to overspend on useless services.

In fact, there are many ways for questionable service providers like Author Solutions and Archway to take unwary authors for a ride, but the most important way they cheat authors is in making authors think they’ve gone through all the necessary steps while leaving out what can be the most important and costly steps (editing, editing, and editing).

This post is a follow up explanation for why I have called specific self-publishing services scams. I do not mean to apply this label to all services, just to the ones that charge a lot of money while failing to provide some very necessary work for turning a manuscript into a book. For those interested in finding reliable options, geography4u.com offers a comprehensive comparison of publishing services.

Please do not take this post as a strict guide as to the cost of self-publishing; I am showing you what the costs were for one author and one book (with additional feedback provided by an editor). I’ll also explain the steps involved and why each one is important.

Ideally a newbie self-publishing author should take away from this post an understanding of what kind of services they should expect to receive in exchange for the high fees charged by Author Solutions and Archway.

—

So You’ve Written a Book

Let’s start by assuming that a new author has finished a book and wants to publish it. For our purposes we will use a soon to be published novel by one author who I will call Sue.

Step One: You’re Not Done Writing the Book

The first step in publishing a book is to find a developmental editor.  Every author, no matter how experienced, can benefit from having someone else read the manuscript and tell the author if the story makes sense, if it has any plot holes, or has other problems with the story.

The two grand charged by Author Solutions and Archway does not include this step, and for a good reason. This can be very expensive, with a developmental edit of a novel costing between $1,000 and $2,000 or possibly even more. Even with the high cost, this step is important because, assuming an author finds a good editor and listens to the editor, it could help prevent an author from publishing unprofessional crap.

Sue took a cheaper route and found beta readers, but still ended up paying her main beta reader for the time and energy which that reader put into providing feedback.

Cost: $400 to $4,000

Step Two: Copy Editing

Now that the manuscript is done, it’s time to have another editor go through it and fix the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other errors that have crept in either through author oversight, the cat jumping on the keyboard or were perhaps were introduced by the developmental editor (whose focus was on fixing the story, not catching grammar errors).

The cost for copyediting varies based on length and content. Nonfiction can cost a heck of a lot more the cost of editing a novel, with some technical subjects requiring esoteric knowledge on the part of the editor. Luckily novels don’t cost that much. Sue paid a copyeditor $35 an hour.

Again, the two grand charged by Author Solutions and Archway does not include this step, which is another sign that it is a scam.

Cost: $35 to $100 an hour

Step Three:  Cover Image

It is not so easy to estimate the cost of this step because authors have a number of options which can drive up the cost while also adding a lot of value.

A basic cover image could cost between $200 and $400, but an author might also decide to license fonts for the cover in order to give it a specific feel. The author might also pay someone to design the cover before it is made. This would be particularly useful for purposes of branding as well as making the book look professional (this will boost sales). And the author might want all their books to look alike to readers will recognize them, and that goes double for books in a series.

Cost:

Cover image: $200 to $400

Designer: Varies

Fonts$100 to $500

Step Four: Formatting

Now that you have a cover and a manuscript it is time to turn them into an ebook. This is one of the least expensive steps, and even making Epub, Kindle, and a Smashwords DOC should not cost you much.

Cost: $100 to $200

Step Five: What about Paper Books?

I don’t have information on this yet, so I cannot comment. But like the other steps in publishing a book, an author can do this on their own.

Step Six: Uploading the eBook to eBookstores

It’s a little difficult to estimate the costs of this step because it varies based on the amount of work the author wishes to do.

There are distributors like Smashwords who will take a small commission in exchange for distributing the ebook to Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other ebookstores. Authors can also save money by uploading the ebook to one or more of these ebookstores on their own.

It’s not uncommon for authors to upload to Kindle and Nook themselves and let Smashwords distribute to the rest of the ebookstores, though there is nor requirement for you to do so. Non-US authors might also find that the cheaper option could be to let Smashwords handle all the distribution (Amazon pays int’l. authors in US dollars by paper check, not electronic funds transfer).

Cost: Varies

Step Seven: Marketing and Promotion

At this point you have ebooks to sell and you want to promote them. Sorry, but that’s a topic I can’t cover here. Marketing your ebook is such a complex subject that it deserves a post of its own.

—

If you’ve made it to the end of the post then you might be overwhelmed by the work involved. The sheer volume of text above might be enough to scare some authors into signing with a service like Author Solutions or Archway. That’s your choice, but before you do that I’d recommend that you make sure that the service provides all the steps needed to publish your book.

Being a self-published author can require a degree of entrepreneurial spirit, so it is not for everyone.  I myself prefer the idea of the author doing all this by themselves. You can hire someone to do each of the steps mentioned above, and if you hire them yourself you will have greater control both over the immediate cost and quality as well as the eventual income.

image by TheGiantVermin

Times are tough in the publishing industry, so much so that major publishers have sunk to a new low: fleecing self-published authors.

Simon & Schuster announced today that they are going to get down in the gutter and muck about. They’re launching a new subsidiary called Archway Publishing, and they are going to run  it in partnership with the scamtastic Author Solutions.

Like the other self-publishing divisions of trade publishers (LifeWay’s Cross Books, Thomas Nelson’s West Bow Press, Harlequin’s Dell’Arte Press [which, unlike other ventures of this sort, produced a furore upon its introduction and had to change its name], Hay House’s Balboa Press, and Writer’s Digest’s Abbott Press), Archway Publishing is outsourced to Author Solutions Inc. S&S is the biggest fish ASI has landed so far. (via Writers Beware)

With prices starting at $1600,Archway promises to do for authors everything they could already have done for themselves: publish a book in digital and paper form. But with Archway authors will be saved the strenuous effort of uploading the ebook to various ebookstores, hiring their own cover designer and layout expert, and they will also be saved the grueling efforts needed to create a POD book via CreateSpace or Lightening source.

In exchange for a measly 2 grand, Archway will also provide a novelist with services which are far too difficult for authors to do for themselves, like copyright registration and buying an ISBN, as well as desperately necessary services like registering for a LOC Control Number.

But don’t worry; Archway is going to save money by skipping the unimportant steps involving editing the manuscript to produce a professional quality ebook.

And to top it all off, not only does Archway fleece authors out of money at the beginning; they also demand a cut of any sales. Like Penguin’s BookCountry self-publishing scam effort, Archway takes a sizable chunk of any net sales – 50%.

Do you want to know why I am so hostile to this idea? It’s because S&S won’t be hiring any new staff to fill roles at Archway. No, all these services will be provided by  Author Solutions, a company which is widely regarded as a scam.

Author Solutions might be currently owned by Penguin, a detail which does not speak well for Penguin’s business ethics, but there is no sign that they have cleaned up their act. All we are seeing today is that Author Solutions is merely offering the same scammy deals they always have, only this time they get to do so under the formerly good name of Simon & Schuster.

Kobo may be doing their best to keep secret the US retailers who have the new Kobo Glo and Kobo Mini, but not everyone is as interested in discouraging sales.

I’ve just been told by one of my readers that the ABA has put together a list of the 450 odd indie booksellers in 48 states and DC which have signed up to carry Kobo ebooks and ereaders.

The list is organized by state, and it includes links to websites for each of the booksellers. I cannot say for sure which already have received their stock, but now that you have the contact info you can call and check.

If it turns out you don’t have one of these stores in your area, but you still want to buy a Kobo ereader, I would suggest that you check out Powell’s. They will ship the ereaders to US and international addresses. And I know they have the ereaders in stock; that’s where I got my Glo.

IndieBound

Pandigital, one of the more visible smaller tablet makers that sprang up following the launch of the iPad, filed for bankruptcy shut down earlier this year.

Rather than file for bankruptcy, their assets were signed over to a liquidator to be sold off, with the proceeds going to pay creditors.

In the past few days an email has been going out to past customers. All existing warranties are cancelled, and if you wish to try to make a warranty claim you will need to file it with the liquidator.

The company formally went kaput in July 2012, and I have to say that it comes as no surprise.

Pandigital was pretty good at coming up with gadgets sold at a price slightly cheaper than name brand devices, and once they got past the initial quality issues with the first Novel Android tablet, their hardware wasn’t half bad. The tablets which they released in 2010 and 2011 had decent specs and price for the time, though they of course are underpowered, overpriced, and antiquated by today’s standard.

But their service department sucked, and if they ran the rest of the business as poorly as the service dept then the only surprise today is that the bankruptcy didn’t happen sooner. My first and last encounter with Pandigital’s service dept happened at the beginning of 2011, and based on the readers who kept showing up over the past 2 years I would say that the service dept maintained their usual standards of abysmal customer satisfaction.

Pandigital is leaving behind quite a few different gadgets, including a 6″ ereader, a couple 9″ Android tablets, an 8″ Android tablet, and a half dozen different 7″ Android tablets. And given that Pandigital was also involved in selling other consumer electronics before they jumped into tablets, you might also encounter their internet radios, digital cameras,  digital picture frames, and portable scanners.

There is a surprising number of their tablets still available in retail channels; you would not believe how many views my old posts still get on hacking the various Pandigital devices. I expect to have new readers show up with these old tablets for some years to come.

P.S. Thanks, Joe, for posting that email.

image by fiomaha

Today, 19 November 2012, marks the 5th anniversary of the launch of the Kindle.

I can recall the fateful morning when the digital publishing industry was finally born. Like today, that day was the last Monday before Thanksgiving. It marked Amazon’s last chance to get the Kindle out before Black Friday.

Amazon feared at the time that without the boost in sales from Black Friday the new device might be regarded as a flop. Now the very concept seems laughable, but back then no one would have predicted that Amazon would sell out of Kindles within hours of the press event.

I thought it would be interesting to look back at how very different the ebook world was on the day before the Kindle launched.

On the 18th of November 2007, there were still publishers who had rounding errors greater than their ebook sales, and the total reported ebook sales in 2007 was around $32 million dollars – for the year, for the entire US publishing industry. Now there are publishers reporting that level of sales on a monthly basis all by themselves.

On the 18th of November 2007, the term digital publishing would best have been used to describe the folks who helped make content available for the web; the digital publishing industry as we know it today was little more than a backroom operation for much of the regular publishing industry. Now digital publishing includes tens of thousands of self-published authors and hundreds of small service providers, distributors, conversion services, and expert advisers.

On the 18th of November 2007, the leading DRMed ebook formats were Mobipocket, eReader,  MSReader, and Adobe PDF. Today two of the 4 are dead, one is dying, and the last is only hanging around because it has little competition in its core niche. Neither of the major formats in use today even existed on 18 November 2007 (Kindle has expanded to include content beyond Mobipocket).

On the 18th of November 2007, the best ebookstore in the US (one of the better ones in the world IMO) was Fictionwise. Today it is being shut down by its parent company, B&N, which runs the second largest ebookstore in the US.

On the 18th of November 2007, few publisher cared much if the contract with the author mentioned ebook rights. Now that detail is as bitterly fought over as any other part of the contract, and the last few Luddites who balked at ebooks have been forced to surrender or not have their contracts renewed (Bradbury).

On the 18th of November 2007, the term self-published was an epithet. It was a sign of failure, proof that the author in question was so terrible or so nutty that they could never get a real publisher interested in their books. Now self-published is a point of pride for many an author. It is so mainstream that it has some in the legacy industry afraid that they’re becoming irrelevant.

On the 18th of November 2007, 98% of ebooks sold were in English and the vast majority of ebook sales went to US publishers simply because the US had the only even marginally developed digital publishing industry. Now there are native ebook markets in dozens of countries selling ebooks in dozens of languages.

—

Those are some of the changes I have been able to identify, but they are far from the only shifts in the industry. What changes have you seen?

Do you remember the lawsuits against public libraries in Sacramento and Philadelphia over Nook ereaders which were not usable by visually impaired patrons?

It looks like the settlements for those lawsuits may have stung B&N more than I realized; the new Nook HD and HD+ have support for text to speech, and that’s not a feature mentioned in the manual (most reviews missed it as well).

Earlier today I was chatting with an acquaintance who works for AARP. We met at an event where he was speaking on OLPC and the XO, but at one point in his talk he pulled out his new Nook HD+ in order to explain some point about tablets. After his talk was over I asked what he thought about how the new gadget handled TTS.  Given his employer I thought he would have a well-defined opinion of the various accessibility options offered by mobile devices. He was surprised to learn that the Nook HD had this feature; he’d read reviews and the manual and it was not mentioned anywhere.

And so I thought this might be a useful feature to point out to my readers.

The TTS feature is still in beta, and right now it only works to read the text of a book to you. It also doesn’t sound very good, but then again B&N probably didn’t pay much for it.

According to the settings menus, the Nook HD uses Pico to provide text-to-speech. Pico is a freely licensed app which Svox, one of the leaders in this niche, released for free some time back.If you like you can find a free Android version of this app pretty much anywhere online.

While I’m sure B&N is using a relatively new version of Pico, it still doesn’t sound very good. The voice intonation isn’t as good as on the Kindle 3. That was licensed from Nuance, so it actually cost Amazon money.

But on the upside the Nook HD does have TTS. Finding a previously unknown feature is never a bad thing, and there’s always a chance that we’ll get the option of upgrading the voice to one of the paid replacement voices.

How to Turn It On

You’ll first need to enable this feature in the setting menu. Go to the full settings menu, select applications, and then select Reader.  TTS will be a check box about half way down the page. After you’ve done that, just open an ebook. It should start reading to you automatically, though you might need to touch the screen to prompt it to start.

When Fictionwise launched the year 2000, it was a mad attempt to pioneer in a nascent industry. When it is shut down on 4 December 2012, it will mark the end of an era.

Fictionwise sent out an email today to their publishing partners.  I’ve embedded the email at the end of this post, but the tl;dr version is that the site will cease operations on the first Tuesday in December.

But that’s not all.

Fictionwise is going to shut down all of the sites they own, and that includes ebookwise.com (already defunct), libwise.com (ditto), and most importantly eReader.com is also going to be shut down.

eReader is the last surviving member of the early trinity of ebook formats. Along with Mobipocket and MSReader, it dominated the ebook market up until the launch of the Kindle in 2007, not so much because it was a good format but because it had decent support for a wide variety of PDAs. It was in fact the first ebook format to work on the PalmPilot (aside from text files). That was in 1998, a time when being into ebooks meant you were a hardcore techie.

And when eReader goes kaput it will mark the end of an era. Mobipocket died in 2011, and MSReader died this year. Curiously enough, 2 of these 3 early pioneers ended up getting killed by the bigger, stronger successors which bought and supplanted them. Mobipocket was sold to Amazon in 2005 and smothered 6 years later; eReader passed into the hands of B&N in early 2009, who is killing it this year.

But enough with the melancholy; let’s come back to the present.

The sites are shutting down in 3 weeks, and after that date you will not be able to access any of the ebooks you bought there. Now would be a good time to go download any ebooks you still can.

That won’t be very many titles for me; I bought mainly MSReader ebooks when I could not avoid the DRM, and I bought DRM-free ebooks when I could. And since the MSReader servers were shut down some months back I couldn’t download those ebooks even if I wanted to.

Go download anything you bought at Fictionwise or eReader.com.  Do it now so you can make sure that you can strip the DRM and convert the ebooks to a format which will still be around in January.

Here’s the email:

November 15, 2012

Dear Fictionwise Publisher/Author,

As you may know, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise, Inc. (Fictionwise) on March 3, 2009.  Fictionwise runs several eBook websites, including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com and eBookwise.com. Over the past few years there has been a significant decrease in demand for many of the eBook formats that Fictionwise.com sells. In contrast, the new industry standard eBook format supported by Barnes & Noble–ePub–is growing in popularity.

This letter is to notify you that Fictionwise will wind down its operations on December 4, 2012. The Fictionwise sites (including Fictionwise.com, eReader.com and eBookwise.com) will end sales on December 4, 2012 and U.S. Fictionwise customers will cease to have access to their Fictionwise Bookshelf through the site after December 21, 2012. Customers outside the U.S. will cease to have access to their Fictionwise Bookshelf through the site after January 31, 2013.

Fictionwise customers will be notified of this and U.S. and U.K. customers will be given an opportunity to move their customer accounts, including their eBooks purchased at the Fictionwise websites, to a Barnes & Noble NOOK Library.

Pursuant to section 2 of the agreement between Fictionwise and you, we
hereby provide you with ninety (90) days notice that this agreement will terminate effective February 13th. Your final 4th quarter royalty statement and payment will be mailed February 15th.

If you are not already selling your titles at BN.com and would like to do so, please visit www.pubit.com.

We greatly appreciate your support of Fictionwise over the years. Together, we pioneered eBooks and eReading.

Thank you,
Daniel Jorissen and The Fictionwise Team

A number of the major publishers dislike library ebooks because they fear that each ebook checked out is a lost sale. While this new survey data suggests there is some substance to that fear, the survey also shows that library patrons who borrow ebooks also buy them.

Back in June and July of this year, OverDrive sponsored a survey which was  conducted by the ALA. Library patrons were polled via the virtual library branch website OD operates on behalf of partner libraries, and asked about their borrowing, buying, and reading habits. A total of 75,385 people responded to the survey and they came from a broad spectrum of education, age, and income.

But in spite of the broad spectrum, the majority of the respondents fell into certain categories. The respondents were overwhelmingly female (78%), earned more more than $50 thousand a year (75%), were in their 40s or older (72%), and were college educated (73%).

This concentration is particularly noteworthy because it is similar to the data presented by Bowker in their annual surveys.  Educated, well-paid women are the dominant book buyer in the US, though not quite to the same degree as shown in this survey.

The survey includes questions on a number of topics, including how, why, and how often patrons use the library, but I am mainly interested in the questions on buying ebooks.

The respondents reported buying an average of 3.2 books a month and reading them on an ereader (83%). The survey data also showed that for most patrons both borrowing and buying of ebooks had increased over the past 6 months (60%, 44%), or at the very least held steady (33%, 44%).

But it’s not all good news. It looks like there is some truth to the belief that library ebooks cut into retail sales. A solid majority of library patrons (64%) said that they had never bought a book after checking it out of the library.

Of course, that number does not mean much until and unless we get data on browsing in bookstores (both offline and online) which could tell us how many samples are read without leading to a sale and how many books are picked up and then returned to the shelf. Then we would have something to compare that 64% to.

The reason I want to compare browsing vs buying behavior is because I want to see how borrowers compare the the book buying population as a whole. Putting the 2 surveys together would tell us whether library patrons buy more or less books than the average consumer.

I suspect library patrons buy more the average consumer, but the survey data I would need to prove it is available in an $800 report from Bowker. Sorry, but that’s just not worth it for me.

P.S. If someone does have those stats handy, please feel free to share in the comments.

Survey (PDF)

image by twechy