Have you been cheated by Author Solutions or one of their many subsidiaries? There’s a New York law firm that wants to talk to you.

Update: And now that firm has filed their lawsuit.

I’ve just been given a link to a new notice posted on the website of Giskan, Solotaroff, Anderson, & Stewart, a Manhattan-based law firm that specializes in class action and commercial litigation. The law firm:

is currently investigating the practices of Author Solutions and all of its brands (AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford, Xlibris, Inkubook, and Wordclay). Authors using Author Solutions have complained of deceptive practices, including enticing authors to purchase promotional services that are not provided or are worthless, failing to pay royalties, and spamming authors and publishing blogs/sites with promotional material.

They are seeking authors who have had negative encounters with Author Solutions. (Gee, I don’t think they’ll have much trouble finding them.) There’s no evidence yet that the law firm intends to file suit, but given Author Solution’s infamous reputation in the self-pub community I should think that a class-action lawsuit is inevitable.

This, folks, is what I had been waiting for ever since Pearson made it clear that they weren’t going to reform Author Solutions. That fly-by-night firm and their various brands have a history of questionable business practices that goes back for at least a decade, with some of the brands having been in operation since the late 1990s. Pearson acquired Author Solutions in mid-2012 for $115 million and have since used it to launch new self-pub services in partnership with Penguin India (Partridge) and S&S (Archway).

That firm has always been a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen but now that it is owned by Pearson there are some very deep pockets to go after. In fact, I would bet that this is just the first of many lawsuits currently in the works. This is just one firm that posted a public notice; I would bet that the rest are quietly reaching out to disgruntled ex-ASI customers via complaint boards and forums.

In the next few months we are probably going to hear about other firms which are also working towards filing class action lawsuits against Pearson/ASI. I have to say that I am looking forward to it; the lawsuits will be entertaining and stand as a warning to any of the other major publishers that are thinking about following in Pearson’s footsteps.

image by Ana Paula Hirama

Do you work in a paperless office? No? Then I have something for you.

Here’s an interesting Kinect hack that appears to have been developed last Fall but only came across my desk today. It seems a Japanese engineer has come up with a new use for the Microsoft Kinect.

As you probably know, the Kinect is a motion tracking accessory for XBox, Windows, and whatnot. It’s being used here to track the location of the trash as it is thrown in the air as well as the trashcan.

I’m not sure who created this smart trashcan, but I did find a "making of" video. The narration and subtitles are in Japanese, so my details are a little sketchy. But from what I can tell based on the video, that is no ordinary trashcan. It’s been hacked – turned into a robot, basically. In addition to motors, wheels, and a battery, there’s also a wireless connection so the trashcan can be controlled from a computer.

The operation of the smart trashcan is pretty simple. There’s an app running on the PC which takes the data from the Kinect, crunches it, and sends commands to the smart trashcan. The trashcan is maneuvered so it ends up below the piece of trash before the trash hits the ground.

Simple, yet practical.

But as cool as this is, what I would like to see is the next iteration of the idea. Rather than catch the projectile before it hits the ground, why not shoot it down?

I’d like to see this idea be adapted to include a foam dart gun like the one at right. It’s a USB powered dart cannon which incorporates a webcam. I can’t find a place to buy it online, but the thought that it might be used to shoot down trash has a lot of appeal.

found via eBookPorn

So 3 German booksellers, Deutsche Telekom, and Bertelsmann walk in a press conference … and announce they are going to be selling a new ereader called the Tolino Shine.

The Shine is going to bring generic ereaders to a whole new level. Its bland "me-too" design is based around the same HD E-ink screen found on the KPW and Kobo Glo. Like pretty much every other new 6″ ereader on the market, the Shine also has a frontlight, Wifi, and a touchscreen (IR).

This ereader has 4GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, and claims up 7 weeks battery life. It is going to retail for 99 euros when it ships next week.

Edit: This ereader also has access to 25GB of online storage (provided by the Tolino platform).

All 5 Tolino partners (Thalia, WeltBild, Hugendubel, Deutche Telekom, and Bertelsmann) will carry the Shine in their 1,500 retail stores across Germany or on their website. eBooks will be provided via one of the 5 ebookstores maintained by the 5 partners. I am told that all of the ebookstores have been updated to switch them from their current platforms to a new one developed by Deutche Telekom. Some of the 5 partners have released reading apps, and in the near future those apps will also be updated to use the new ebookstore.

Readers will also be able to buy ebooks from the device itself as well as at Deutche Telekom’s 11,000 wifi hotspots across Germany. The new ebookstore boasts 300,000 German language titles.

So this is a Kindle killer? If you ask me, I think the Tolino partners forgot that in order to win you need to do something better than the dominant player or have some appealing feature that attracts users. I don’t see how the Shine meets those requirements.

Here’s a hands on video from lesen.net. Tell me if you think it looks like anything special:

And frankly, this is 2013. They’re not going to win the ebook market on hardware. And that goes double when you factor in the statistic that the global ereader market is shrinking, not growing.

Don’t believe me? Even what little stats I have on the German ebook market shows that I am probably correct. Last October BitKom reported that 11% of Germans read ebooks (9-ish million people). They predicted elsewhere that around a million ereaders would be sold in Germany last year (far fewer than the 12% of Germans who own a tablet). That leads to the obvious conclusion that most of those readers are not using a dedicated ebook reader. They read with an app running on a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

I would say it’s pretty clear that focusing on ereader hardware is a sub-optimal choice.

Let me know when Tolino has a plan to sell ebooks better than Amazon, because that is the point at which they might start winning. At this point all I can see is that they are making the same hardware mistake as everyone else.

Tolino

Apple has never been one to give specific details about how much content they are selling, so when I read today that an analyst with Asymco had released a new estimate of iBooks sales I was thrilled. Horace Dediu has a post over on the Asymco blog which claims that apple could be earning an nearly 2 billion dollars from iBooks.

If you take Mr. Dediu’s numbers at face value then iBooks could be quite profitable, generating $1.8 billion in sales and about $1.3 billion in payments to publishers, aggregators, and distributors.

That looks like a lot of money, but unfortunately the figure is bogus. It only took me a couple minutes to debunk it, and it turns out that absolutely none of the figures used by Mr. Dediu stand up under scrutiny.

First, Mr. Dediu arrives at the $1.8 billion figure by making guesses about the number of ebooks sold each month, and he also made a WAG about the average selling price. But let’s skip that and focus on the bigger error that Mr Dediu made at the very beginning of his analysis. Let’s see if you can spot it:

In June of 2011 Apple announced that 130 million ebooks were sold through iTunes. In October of 2012 it announced that 400 million sold.

If you’ve followed Apple news then you know they don’t announce the number of ebooks sold; Apple has announced the total number of downloads (example). That is not the same thing.

Downloads includes all the free ebooks that don’t generate revenue.  And if the statistic I found while writing about Amazon’s changes to their rules about free ebooks promotions was any sign, free ebooks outnumber paid titles by at least 15:1 and possibly as much as 100 to one (according to Smashwords).

So the short of it is the billion dollar figure that Asymco is reporting today is complete bunk. And that’s a shame because this was potentially a very hot story.

source

Amazon released a new update for their Kindle app for iPad and iPhone yesterday but they don’t want you to install it. In fact, no one thinks you should install the v3.6.1 update: not me, not Amazon customer service, and especially not the couple dozen early adopters who are having issues.

Update: Amazon has fixed the issue in the v3.6.2 update. I installed it and it works fine.

I think this is the only time I have can recall having seen a change notice which mentions solely:

Note: There is a known issue with this update. If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time.

Amazon is not being alarmist here; there are early reports that this update is screwing with device registration, causing users to lose downloaded samples, purchased ebooks, and app settings, all because the updated app forces them to re-register their iThing as a new device.

Andrys Basten was the first to notice the numerous complaints in the Kindle Support Forums. As of 9am there are 17 complaints on Amazon’s website as well as another 193 (mostly negative) reviews in iTunes. Nearly all of the reviews are reporting the same issue, with varying degrees of detail:

I updated via App store upgrades to 3.6.1 on an iPhone 5. This version of the application did not preserve the device registration, and I was forced to re-register the device. I had book samples, which I use for my queue of new books to purchase, on the device. These were lost.

and

Exact same issue with 3.6.1. The upgrade made me re-register the iPhone as a new device and I lost a number of SAMPLE books – which is how I evaluate prior to purchase. I also had to re-download numerous books from Cloud to Device. I can live with the latter, but the former has not only caused me to lose a potential shopping list, it has also cost Amazon (and authors) revenue as I have no way to recover the Samples and no written record of what they were.

iTunes

source

The Association of American Publishers has released a new monthly revenues report for October 2012, and if these statistics are any indication someone other than B&N has been selling a lot of ebooks.

The general book market was up 8.7% from $5.4 billion to $5.9 billion in the first 10 months of 2012, with only a few market segments reporting a decline (adult mass market paperbacks, adult & religious hardcovers and YA paperback). Children’s books in particular saw decent growth (18.7% overall), but ebooks continue to be the bright spot in the monthly report.

eBooks continue to exceed the grown of the rest of the market, with combined sales across all segments increasing by 46% ($896 million to $1.3 billion). Much of the growth can be attributed children’s ebooks (up 160%), which is still seeing the record breaking 3 digit growth rate that the overall ebook market experienced in 2009 and 2011, but the adult ebook and religious ebook segments are still seeing excellent growth (35.9% and 22.9%, respectively).

According to AAP’s publicly available stats, eBooks now account for  22% of the US book market. This change was accomplished in only 5 years.

image by Bill Ward’s Brickpile

When Amazon announced new restrictions yesterday on how their affiliate partners could promote ebooks, they said the new rules would only affect a fraction of a percent of affiliates.

Sadly, that is not true. The new rules are actually going to affect all Amazon affiliates, and  complying with the new rules is going to require the affiliates to do the impossible.

Amazon wants affiliates to control what customers do after they click a link and go to Amazon.

According to the new 80-20 rule (my name for it), Amazon affiliates will be penalized in any month that one, their affiliate ID shows up on more than 20 thousand free Kindle ebook purchases, and two, the total number of paid Kindle ebooks account for less than one in five purchases. If an Amazon affiliate can’t comply with the rule, they will lose their income for the month.

When that rule was revealed yesterday there was a lot of hand-wringing among the free ebook sites as well as among authors and everyone interested in promoting ebooks by giving them away for free.  There was a lot of discussion how this would kill most of the value in KDP Select (the optional free days is valued by indie authors as much as the KOLL payments). There was talk about how this would damage the ability of free ebook sites to promote ebooks while still covering the costs of running a website.

Update: Andrys Basten has pointed out that Amazon’s new rule might have 3 clauses, not 2. The first requirement for the 80-20 rule could be that the rule only affects sites that, in the opinion of Amazon, "are promoting primarily free Kindle eBooks". The rest of my post is now hinges on a drone at Amazon deciding on whether an affiliate fits under the first clause.  That does not exactly fill me with confidence. (Note: Other reports suggest that Amazon has said there are only 2 clauses.)

This is all true but we were thinking too small. You see, Amazon’s new rule counts all free ebook downloads, not just the ones linked to directly.

For example, let’s say you click on this link to Amazon and then get 5 free ebooks. Even though I didn’t promote one of those free ebooks, I am going to get dinged for all 5 downloads. They will count towards that 80-20 rule.

The problem here is two-fold. Not only could Amazon potentially penalize any affiliate, this rule also assumes that affiliates can control what Amazon customers do after they click the link.

The larger Amazon affiliates are but a single download frenzy away from going over the 20,000 limit. What’s more, this Sword of Damocles dangles over even the small and medium free ebook sites. Earlier today I heard from George Burke, the owner of eBookDaily, a 2-month-old free ebook site. According to George his site has now has 12 thousand active members. Under the new rule George is going to lose his Amazon affiliate fees in any month that the members average more than 2 downloads each.

I am only slightly kidding when I say that Amazon expects affiliates to practice mind control over everyone who clicks a link. Crazy, no? I’m still not sure how they expect that to work.

But the free ebook sites can always switch to promoting paid ebooks, right? That will get the average up and minimize the chance that they’ll violate the 80-20 rule, right?

I’m not so sure.

The problem with trying to encourage the average ebook buyer to pay for more ebooks is that the ratio of purchased ebooks to free ebooks is rather low. I have been told, and a second source confirms, that the average ebook buyer probably downloads 15 free ebooks for every one they buy.

Edit: My original source says that the ratio of free to paid acquisitions is even higher than 15:1 (that was old data).

Second Edit: Smashwords reported in April 2012 that they saw 100 free downloads for every paid ebook. Look at the slides here (slide #49).

That’s a 15:1 ratio, and in order to comply with the 80-20 rule the free ebook sites (and all other Amazon affiliates) will have to try to get Kindle customers to buy 4 ebooks for every free title purchase at least 1 paid title for every free one either by getting them to download fewer free ebooks or by getting the customers to buy 4 times as many ebooks as they buy now.

One possible solution is that they could switch to listing more paid ebooks. Many sites already list a lot of paid deals, so I’m not sure that will have much of an effect in changing people’s behavior. Affiliates could also stop listing free ebooks entirely, but there is no guarantee that it would have any effect on the downloaders.

In any case, the real problem here is that Amazon expects affiliates to control what happens after someone clicks a link.  I know it sounds crazy but that’s what Amazon wants.

If anyone can think of a solution, please share. Also, please feel free to point out the flaws in my reasoning.

If you ask me, I think Amazon should simply disallow affiliate links on ebooks.  It would be easier on the affiliates, but it might also be more damaging on Amazon’s bottom line.

Barnes & Noble made a similar move last March when they stopped paying affiliate commissions on Nook ebooks. I’m sure you can recall how badly they’ve been doing this past year in terms of Nook hardware and content sales.

Amazon probably won’t suffer quite so much of a slowdown in growth, but they are still creating an opportunity for one of their competitors to step in and start trying to take customers away.  Given that more people read on smartphones and tablets than on ereaders, this is a real possibility.

image by dqqd

We’ve long known that it’s possible to cheat your way to a better ranking in ebookstores by buying faked reviews, but did you know that you can pull off the same trick with a print best-seller list (even a list as prestigious as that of The Wall Street Journal)?

It’s going to set you back $60,000 to $100,000, but it can be done. What’s more, it’s an accepted practice that even publishers like Wiley have used from time to time.

The WSJ reported this week that a marketing company by the name of ResultSource has expanded their services to include rigging the best seller lists. They’ve developed a way to buy their way on to lists:

It isn’t uncommon for a business book to land on best-seller lists only to quickly drop off. But even a brief appearance adds permanent luster to an author’s reputation, greasing the skids for speaking and consulting engagements.

…

But the short moment of glory doesn’t always occur by luck alone. In the cases mentioned above, the authors hired a marketing firm that purchased books ahead of publication date, creating a spike in sales that landed titles on the lists. The marketing firm, San Diego-based ResultSource, charges thousands of dollars for its services in addition to the cost of the books, according to authors interviewed.

It’s not exactly a new phenomenon. Five minutes with Google found 6 different stories on gaming the best-seller lists (one, two, three, four, five, six), and I’m sure there are more examples out there.

If anything the only real news this week is that ResultSource can offer as a paid service what used to be very difficult to pull off on your own. They’ve taken the one-off scam of yesteryear and developed it into a system where they basically sell a spot on the best seller lists.

So how does it work?

ResultSource arranges to pre-buy 2,000 to 5,000 copies of a title in the weeks before it is launched. All those sales are recorded in Nielsen Bookscan in the first week that the title is available, so if the title in question is in one of the smaller niche markets (business books, for example) those several thousand sales can be enough to vault a book on to the best-seller lists.

And when it comes to business books, being able to claim the status of  best-selling author can be worth enough that the initial investment can actually pay off:

It isn’t uncommon for a business book to land on best-seller lists only to quickly drop off. But even a brief appearance adds permanent luster to an author’s reputation, greasing the skids for speaking and consulting engagements.

Mr. Kaplan (one author interviewed for the piece) says the best-seller status of Leapfrogging has "become part of my position as a speaker and consultant."

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that this scam has become an accepted practice by at least some publishers. A rep for Wiley even admitted to recommending ResultSource to a small number of business authors. "We view it as a marketing tool that targets sales and the timing of those sales," she said.

This scam works best on the best seller lists that use Bookscan data as one of their sources. The best-seller list maintained by The WSJ, for example, has probably been compromised numerous times by ResultSource, but other lists like that of The New York Times are more likely to be immune. The NYTimes creates its best seller list via a secret process, and that should make it more robust. Current industry common knowledge suggests that it’s based at least in part on book sales at select bookstores across the country. But no one knows exactly which bookstores, so the NYTimes list is safe, right?

Well, no. That list has been quite publicly gamed on at least one occasion in 1995.

So are there any lists you can trust? I doubt it. Amazon has been shown to fiddle with their best seller list, rendering their list (and the one from Digital Book World) suspect. And even Bookscann cannot be relied upon to report sales; ask anyone and they’ll tell you it has also long since stopped being an accurate reflection of the book market.

Are there any lists you can trust?

source

 image by Martin Cathrae

Amazon has recently announced a change in the rules for their affiliate program. When those new rules take effect in March 2013 they’re going to make it harder for websites like eReaderIQ to cover their costs with affiliate commissions while still helping readers find free Kindle ebooks.

Ever since Amazon opened the Kindle Store they have been using free ebooks as loss-leaders. The free ebooks were used to draw in as many customers as possible in the hopes that they would stick around and buy more ebooks. And thanks to Amazon’s passion for encouraging affiliate marketing, a whole host of sites have sprung up to find and introduce you to those free ebooks.

Unfortunately that is probably going to change soon.

Starting on 1 March, Amazon is going to start checking to see if an affiliate is encouraging people to download "too many"  free ebooks, and if anyone who crosses over the threshold will lose the affiliate fees for that month.

The new threshold has 2 components. According to Amazon, they will block a payment to an affiliate for any month where:

1. At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks
2. 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links

Amazon says that fewer than a tenth of a percent of affiliates, and they could well be correct. But no matter how many sites are affected, what’s really going on here is that Amazon is closing a lucrative loophole in the affiliate program.

Loophole? What loophole?

Let me explain. There are a number of websites that direct you to free Kindle ebooks not because they want you to download the free ebook but because they hope that you’ll buy something else while on an Amazon website.

All of these sites are not using Amazon’s affiliate system for its intended purpose (advertising a product sold on Amazon), but to instead promote a free product in the hopes that they can pick up an affiliate fee or sales commission on a product they didn’t promote.

Amazon naturally thinks that the sites I describe above are gaming the system, and they’re not going to let the bigger sites get away with it anymore. Starting in March a website that promotes Kindle ebooks is going to have promote more paid Kindle ebooks or it won’t make any money in a given month.

Luckily this will only affect the larger sites, and possibly not even all of them.

Amazon

Thanks, Jeremy!

When Bookish launched a couple weeks back I didn’t think much of the site. The press release claimed that Bookish would be a great community that would help readers find their next book, only there was no community and the discovery engine was less than amazing.

I suspected at the time that Bookish would turn out to be little more than a marketing tool for the 3 publishers who financed the site, and today I learned that my suspicions were correct.

Peter Winkler, writing for The Huffington Post, noticed that all of the books promoted on Bookish were published by either Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster:

The top stories at Bookish when I first visited it on Feb. 5 were Elizabeth Gilbert’s take on Philip Roth’s advice to a novelist to quit writing, an interview with novelists Michael Connelly and Michael Koryta, the editors of The Onion reviewing Fifty Shades of Grey and The Art of War, and an exclusive excerpt from Harlan Coben’s latest novel, Six Years. There were additional interviews with Po Bronson, Rhonda Byrne, author of The Magic, her second sequel to The Secret, and children’s book author Lucy Hawking.An ad on the right side of Bookish’s main page, for Jojo Moyes' novel, Me Before You, displaying Penguin Books' iconic logo, set my Spidey sense tingling.

"Hmm," I asked myself, "I wonder how many of these authors are published by the publishers behind Bookish?" A little sleuthing on my part quickly provided the answer: all of them.

I 'm not sure that comes as a surprise; I had assumed that the claims of editorial independence were bunk.  I mean, why else would 3 publishers fund a site through 2 years of development if they weren’t going to use it to promote themselves?

But wait, there’s more. Not only does the editorial content focus on book by these 3 publishers, so does a lot of the rest of the content on the site.

Peter reports that all of the exclusive author content is provided by authors signed to the 3 publishers. There is also adverts on most of the pages, all for books published by Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster.

And even the discovery engine left a lot to be desired. In spite of the fact that this site ws originally announced in 2010, Peter found the results to be anemic at best. It wasn’t able to find his book when he typed in the title, but then again he wasn’t published by Hachette, Penguin, or Simon & Schuster. And it turns out that Bookish’s much-vaunted discovery engine can only recommend from a rather limited selection of titles – around 250k at the moment. That’s not even as large as the combined back list of Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster.

Anyone want to take bets on how long before Bookish is shut down as a failure?

My money is on Bookish not lasting 6 months (barring a major reorganization), but I could be wrong. But at the very least I am sure that most will agree that Bookish will die in a shorter amount of time than the site took to develop.

Ever since the news broke earlier in February that Amazon had a patent to sell used digital content there’s been a heated discussion on what this means for the ebook market and authors as well as whether it is right/wrong/ unethical/immoral to sell used digital content in this way.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the debate I have also been encountering a fair amount of misinformation. A number of people (including at least one blogger) don’t understand exactly what it means to sell a used ebook. One blogger writing over at TeleRead believes that it is illegal to resell an ebook:

Amazon has patented a means to sell used e-books within the Kindle system. A book will be branded within the system when it is bought, and when the buyer puts it up for resale at the Kindle store, it will be removed from his account and transferred to the buyer’s account. Amazon will receive a small fee for each sale. A limited number of sales of each book may or may not be included in the system.

According to copyright law, specifically the first sale doctrine, this is illegal because digital goods aren’t physical things so they can’t be resold. (See my article, “The First Sale Doctrine and eBooks,” for more details.)

She’s wrong (though her post on first sale doctrine isn’t completely off base). It’s a little complicated to explain why, so I’m going to have to take things all the way back to the beginning and work from there.

Let’s start with the author.

Someone writes a book and they decide to sell it in the Kindle Store. They upload it to KDP, negotiate and agree to Amazon’s contract, and the ebook is listed in the Kindle Store.

And then Amazon sells the ebook.

Well, no, they don’t.

I know that we are all used to saying that we buy ebooks but the legal relationship of exchanging your money for a Kindle ebook is not a purchase. What happens is that you agree to a contract. Amazon takes your money and grants you the right to use the ebook under certain conditions.

Those conditions are defined by amazon in the TOS. The terms of use for the Kindle Store are rather lengthy, and you can find them here. If you are not familiar with what’s in that contract then I suggest you go read it.

The transaction is a license, not a purchase. The exact difference between a license and a purchase is still a thorny legal issue, and it is not clear what rights you have outside of the terms of use, but there is a difference.

I suspect that people who say that the act of selling used ebooks is illegal due to copyright law don’t seem to have realized that Amazon does not sell ebooks. That means that copyright law does not necessarily forbid the reselling of Kindle ebooks.

—
Sidenote: The blogger mentioned above believes that you lease an ebook instead of buy it. You could phrase it that way if you like (a lease is indeed a type of contract) but she is still wrong in saying that selling a leased ebook is automatically illegal. She missed the fact that under certain conditions you can legally buy and sell a lease. It happens all the time.
—

Here’s the thing.  When or if Amazon resells ebooks, my guess is that what they will actually be doing is transferring a license from one customer to another while also cutting off access to the ebook for the seller and enabling access to the ebook for the buyer.

When it comes to reselling Kindle ebooks, the contract between the author/publisher and Amazon is probably going to matter just as much as copyright law,  and that is because Amazon arguably cannot resell a Kindle ebook if the author/publisher does not give them permission.

Earlier in the post I specifically call out the negotiation step because when an ebook is uploaded, the author/publisher is presented with a number of options like price, market availability, and whether the ebook should be added to KDP Select.  The author/publisher is able to decline or accept these conditions.

I also expect that when Amazon decides to start selling used ebooks, authors and publishers will be presented with the the decision of whether they wish to allow Amazon to resell their ebooks.

I am basing that assumption on the text of the patent (and Amazon’s past behavior). The patent includes a provision where the copyright holder can decide to prohibit the reselling of an ebook in much the same way that an author/publisher can decide not allow their ebooks to be loaned by one Kindle user to another.

In fact, this patent appears to cover both the reselling of ebooks and when users loan ebooks to each other. That detail leads me to conclude that Amazon will ask for permission to resell ebooks.

Or at least that is what I think. I could be wrong but I expect that I will end up being closer to the truth than the folks who say that reselling ebooks is illegal.

P.S. If a lawyer shows up and wants to present a counter argument, please do. I like learning why I might be wrong, and the legal issues surrounding this situation are far from settled.

image by J. Tegnerud, uitdragerij

The online bibliophile community Goodreads has just released some of the results of its most recent member survey and they’re raising a few eyebrows.

This survey was based on 1,500 Goodreads members. The results were presented last week at O’Reilly TOC, and based on the first half of the slides I think Otis Chandler was at TOC to meet with publishers and pitch Goodreads' user base as a survey group. (I’m not complaining; I just thought some publishers would be interested.)

Goodreads found that 37% of the members who owned smartphones read on them, with about 13% not reading ebooks on any other device. In comparison, 86% of tablet owners read on their device, with nearly a third reporting that the tablet was their only reading device.

There’s no obvious explanation for the sharp difference in usage, but the survey does show that smartphone owners are far more likely to use them on the go, with lunch breaks and commuting as the most common reading scenario. Tablet owners, on the other hand, are more likely to read at home than anywhere else.

Good reads also mentioned that during this past holiday season tablets outnumbered ereaders under the Christmas tree. Three and a half times as many tablets were bought for each ereader purchased, confirming once again that the ebook market has moved beyond ereader hardware.

And when it comes to finding their next read, it seems that the vast majority of Goodreads members do what I do. When they finish a book, 83% seek out other books written by the author, while nearly as many look for similar books (75%). But when it comes to picking a book to read, nothing compares to word of mouth. A trusted friend was the single leading reason that members bought and read books, with reviews, samples, and buzz not even coming close.

Later in the survey the respondents revealed that price isn’t necessarily the dominant factor in where they buy ebooks, with only 44% reporting that they usually shopped around before buying. And less than half of that 44% always shop around.

And when readers do shop around, it will likely come as no surprise to learn who has the most loyal customers. It’s not Apple; 65% of the people who read in iBooks also use read Kindle ebooks (and over a quarter read Nook ebooks). And Barnes & Noble also has to share their customers with Amazon (37%).

But Amazon doesn’t have the same issue. Readers of Kindle ebooks are much more loyal than any other segment of the market, with only 18% also reading in iBooks and 15% reading Nook ebooks. This more than anything is an example of why Amazon has dominated the ebook market; they have a loyalty that cannot be matched.

BTW, Kobo placed a distant 4th in the "also read" category, coming in behind Google Play. No matter how impressive one might find their jump in revenue last year they’re still not making a lot of gains in the US market.

I have long argued that copyright law has grown far out of proportion and no longer serves the needs of the creators, so I was pleased to read this week about a recently filed lawsuit that could prune back some of the overgrowth.

The noted Sherlockian scholar, Baker Street Irregular and prominent attorney Leslie Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library and The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship, to name a few, has filed a civil lawsuit against the Conan Doyle Estate to determine that the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are in fact in the public domain.

Mr Klinger is suing (according to the press release) because of the pressure that the Conan Doyle estate applied against Mr Klinger’s latest anthology of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories.

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes was supposed to be published by Pegasus Books and included Holmes stories by numerous well-known mystery/sci-fi/fantasy authors.  The anthology is on hold because the Conan Doyle estate contacted the publisher, asked for a fee, and threatened to block distribution of the anthology if the fee was not paid.

The Conan Doyle estate’s justification for their legal shakedown is at best questionable and is based on a not-entirely settled point of copyright law. Allow me to explain.

As you probably know, the vast majority of the Holmes stories are old enough that they are no longer in copyright in the US. (The author died in 1930, so his entire body work is public domain everywhere but the US.) In the US you can legally download nearly any of the Holmes stories from sites like Project Gutenberg. If you wanted to, you could then format the stories as ebooks or bind them into a paper book and sell the stories. This is completely legal.

But according to the Conan Doyle estate, one thing you cannot do is write a new story that features Sherlock Holmes. There is exactly one remaining Conan Doyle book, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, that still contains copyrighted Sherlock Holmes stories – 10 stories, in fact. Because some of the original stories are still in copyright in the US, the estate believes that they can control who writes new stories. They are using that control to collect fees from publishers, studios, and anyone with deep pockets.

This is not the first time that I heard about the Conan Doyle estate collecting license fees. Star Trek: The Next Generation paid off the estate back in the 1990s. That tv series made 2 episodes that references Sherlock Holmes, and they paid an unnamed fee each time.

What’s more, even the editors currently suing the Conan Doyle estate have paid the fee before when publishing a collection of newly written Sherlock Holmes stories. They’re just not willing to submit to the extortion this time (I think it may have been the alleged threats that tipped the scale, or possibly the size of the fee demanded by the estate):

"The Conan Doyle Estate contacted our publisher," says Klinger, "and implied that if the Estate wasn’t paid a license fee, they’d convince the major distributors not to sell the book. Our publisher was, understandably, concerned, and told us that the book couldn’t come out unless this was resolved. "

Unfortunately for the estate, their interpretation of copyright law is arguably not supported by a plain text reading of current law. US copyright law protects a work as a whole, not the elements in a work.

Or at least that is one interpretation, and it is the legal argument that these editors are presenting in their lawsuit. I tend to agree with the editors because if you take the counter position to its logical conclusion then it is revealed as false.

If the elements of a story can be copyrighted and not the work as a whole, then all the Sherlock Holmes stories that have entered the public domain include a copyrighted element. If the Holmes character is still under copyright then arguably you cannot do _anything_ to _any_ of the Holmes stories. They all mention a copyrighted element and thus cannot be used.

Does that make any sense? I don’t think so, and I am sharing that conclusion in order to offer a simple explanation for why the character is not under copyright.

In any case, it doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters here is what the judge decides.This case was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and if appealed will go to the Seventh Circuit Court.

Let’s see what happens.

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image by shining.darkness

Amazon updated the Kindle iOS app today and something tells me they’re no longer seeing the Kindle as the center point of their ebook plans.

In addition to a fix in the brightness control and a new end of book pop up menu with suggested actions, the iOS got a subtle byt meaningful addition to the highlight option. You can now highlight text in 4 colors, not just the single color offered before. As you can see in the screen shot at right, your color options now include pink, blue, yellow, and orange.

I know this doesn’t look like much, but the important detail isn’t what it looks like on the iPad (or the fact the Kindle Fire doesn’t have this option yet).

No, the important detail here is that you can’t see those 4 different highlights on the Kindle’s E-ink screen. Amazon has given the iOS app a feature that the Kindle will never have (unless there is a color Kindle coming).

I think this adds to a point I made last week. I wrote a post about hardware no longer being the determining factor for ebook sales, and one detail I used to support my argument was that Amazon was giving the Kindle apps all the same features as the Kindle hardware. Today Amazon proved my point by adding a feature that the Kindle can’t have.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a sign that Amazon has a color Kindle on their product roadmap. It would explain their rumored interest in Liquavista, and even if it’s not true one can always dream.

And in other news, Amazon also added a new end of book reminder similar to what is currently included on the Kindle Fire. When you get to the last page of a Kindle ebook, the iOS app will now suggest that you write a review, rate the ebook, or share with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. The app will also suggest other ebooks you might be interested in reading.

You can find the app in iTunes.

I have long held the position that LCD screens aren’t as evil as everyone claims, and that the belief that E-ink is better for you eyes is a myth. Now there is new evidence that reading on an LCD screen device like the iPad or Kindle Fire might actually take less mental effort.

A team of researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, have recently published a paper which shows that in spite of claims to the contrary, it was easier for a test group to read on an LCD screen. What’s more, the test group also showed approximately the same retention of the reading material, no amter whether they read on LCD, an ereader, or on paper.

Dr. Matthias Schlesewsky and his colleagues tested a group of 57 Gen X and senior citizens for this study. The comprehension and retention of the reading material was judged by asking the test subjects questions, but in order to measure how much effort the test subjects put into their reading this study had to go high tech.

The test subjects were strapped into a rig that tracked their eye movements and measured their brain waves using an EEG (electroencephalogram) machine. Past research has indicated that reading can be associated with certain patterns of brain activity, and in this study the researchers noted when they occurred and at what intensity.

The results were mixed, and I’m not sure I would place the same emphasis on them as the research team did.

First, the EEG measurements showed that the Gen X test subjects used about the same amount of mental energy while reading on all 3 materials, with the tablet requiring slightly less energy than the ereader and paper book. The eye tracking figures showed the younger group also spent about the same amount of time reading on each type of material, with the tablet taking slightly less time.

But with the senior citizens, the results clearly showed that the test subjects spent far less energy and time reading on a tablet than was spent reading on the ereader or paper book. Curiously enough, the ereader took more energy and time than reading the paper book or the tablet.

Interesting, no? The researchers have posited that the backlight on the tablet might contribute to it being easier to read. I think it merits further study, myself; I’d like to see the study repeated with a slightly different set of conditions.

One other interesting result from this study came from the comprehension questions asked after the reading sessions. Both test groups showed a slightly higher error rate when reading on the ereader or the tablet. It’s small enough that the researchers described it as insignificant, but I disagree.

As you can see in the graph at right, going from paper to digital introduced a slightly higher error rate. Given the general hype surrounding digital textbooks at the moment, this bears further study.

Right now the textbook publishers and their pr flacks are talking about the many wonders of digital textbooks (I still see federal govt interest in digital textbooks as a disguised jobs program) but there’s never really been much substance to prove that digital textbooks were better.

Here we have a study that suggests digital textbooks are not better for students. It’s a pity that this probably won’t slow down the mad dash towards the next hot trend, but as we all know the US government rarely lets evidence get in the way of politics.

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