A couple days ago I was caught flat footed. I predicted we’d see a new the Paperwhite Kindles as well as a new Kindle Fire. Instead we saw 3 new Kindle Fires (including a replacement for the original) as well as the paperwhite Kindles.

My face was red on Thursday because i disbelieved the 4G rumor and the multiple Kindle fire rumor, but in my defense I didn’t have any evidence to support the rumors. The thing is, 2 of those new Kindle Fire tablets had not yet cleared the FCC.

The paperwork only showed up Thursday afternoon, which means the story going around about the 4G model not having FCC approval is clearly not true.

Like the last several Amazon devices (here, here, here), these 2 filings only probably belong to Amazon. The paperwork has all the interesting details concealed (internal and external photos) and leads back to the same front company (CSC) as before (but 2 new addresses), so I’m guessing that they belong to Amazon.

At this point the FCC paperwork is really not much more than a footnote, but I’m making the note so I remember to go back and look at the guts once the concealed docs are released. Of course, that won’t happen until March and by then someone will have bought and stripped the tablets for all to see.

One of the filings is for a tablet with Wifi and Blueooth, while the other appears to belong to the 4g LTE model (it has a whole mess of frequencies it was tested for, including LTE) and that model also has an IC ID, meaning it has been passed by the Canadian version of the FCC. Hopefully that means we’ll see this device go north sometime soon.

And in other news, the new Kindle Fire tablets are once again eschewing Google.  They’re set up to use Bing as the default search engine, not Google Search, and that suggests an ongoing power struggle between Amazon and Google.

FCC ID (ZHS-1013)

FCC ID (CO2-2105)

At one point or another we’ve all seen a broken ereader screen but the following video showing the graphic aftereffects of the death of so many ereaders will likely be unsettling to some. Viewer discretion is advised.

A pair of artists, Sebastian Schmieg and Silvio Lorusso, have just published a new book which takes a look at damaged ereader screens. They’ve found and assembled a collection of 56 E-ink screens broken due to impact and torsion damage, and then released the set as a POD book (Lulu).

It’s a startling set of images, including several that, as a result of the damage, become a collage of what was on the screen before and after the damage. Some of the damaged screens apparently broke the data connection to a segment of the screen, thus preserving some part of the last useful info displayed. That is an effect I had not seen before.

You can watch the following video to see what the broken screens would look like on a Kindle Touch, but if you want to see what the book looks like I would check out one of the artists' websites (here).

The effect is quite different between this video and the book. The images are positioned so that the screenshot are positioned on each page so they look like they’re on a device, not pictures in an art book. That’s a clever touch.

I don’t know about you, but I’d never considered the broken screens as art before. Whenever I had been shown a broken screen on a device I had always noted the technical details of when and how it was broken. But it was just another dead device, not a piece of art. The fact that it was on a gadget kept me from valuing the image as art, which is itself a lesson in how the medium sometimes is as important as the message.

You can find images like the ones in this book on Flickr and other photo sharing sites. Or at least you can find photos of the broken devices. I’m sure you may have seen them from time to time, but if it never occurred to you to observe them as art and not failed engineering then the medium overwhelemd the message.

via Triangulation

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ballyhooed text to speech in the Kindle 2 in 2009.

But guess what’s now missing from the new Paperwhite Kindles even though it’s still present in the Kindle Keyboard 3G and Kindle DX models? TTS, aka “Read to Me.”

Tipped off by a Gizmodo review noting the absence of an audio jack, I called the Kindle support people Thursday and learned that the Paperwhite models would be mute. Bummer. For years, I’ve complained of E Ink’s contrast problems, and the new models are said to offer 25 percent more contrast, not just glow with less eyestrain than LCDs.

The news from Support jibes with a table comparing various models on the Amazon site (scroll down toward the bottom of this Amazon page). Notice? The table lists the Paperwhite models as lacking the speakers that high-end models offer.

So, Jeff, what’s the strategy here, given the diminishment of the usefulness of the Paperwhite models for the people with dyslexia or other learning or vision challenges? Especially, how about students? Don’t you hope to crack the education market? Dumb move, this muting. Speech chips cost a pittance, so that excuse just will not fly. If you don’t want a speaker or there isn’t room for one, at least include a headphone jack. Just how could you be so out of touch with customers in this instance? I actually was hoping Amazon would go in the other direction and do TTS right with “Amy” and other refined voices from the whizzes at Ivona (or would pick up the equivalents from a similar company).

In silencing the Paperwhites, was Amazon trying to extend the market life of the TTS-enabled Kindle Keyboard 3G and the DX? And nudge consumers toward the Fire models that can play digital audio books from Audible, part of the Bezos empire? Or cozy up to publishers or literary agents? A smarter move would be for Amazon to take a strong stand in favor of TTS while at the same time encouraging Audible to offer extras, such as author interviews, so that audiobooks still paid off. Anti-TTS strategies will actually reduce opportunities for writers. I want the print-impaired and joggers to be able to enjoy my books, and TTS make this more likely to happen.

No matter what the explanation for The Great Muting, Jeff, I’d be grateful for your personal pledge that text to speech will be a feature of all future Kindles, including the basic models (apparently audio of any kind was also missing from the the bottom-of-the-line Kindle introduce last year, and is still AWOL from the $69 successor).

At the very least, TTS needs to be in mainstream E Ink machines like the Paperwhite models.

I hope that librarians and advocates for people with disabilities will besiege Amazon with demands for TTS for all models. Same for joggers and walkers and others who would rather listen to their books when they need to pay special attention to their surroundings. (Yes, I do plead guilty to e-reading at times while walking—when conditions are safe enough.)

Of course, this is one more reason for librarians and others to support the Digital Public LIbrary of America, the ePub format, the battle against DRM and other efforts that would reduce our reliance on the proprietary technology.

Look, Jeff, it isn’t as if I’m anti-Amazon—I applaud your people’s innovative ways and stellar customer service, and I’ve sent thousands of dollars in Seattle’s direction over the years despite my less than full satisfaction with Amazon’s labor practices. I am not calling for a boycott and, in fact, have ordered a Paperwhite 3G. But I do believe that librarians and others should use whatever clout they can summon up to remind you of your social obligations, especially when Amazon may earn millions in tax money from some major Kindle-related federal contracts. Even if the Kindles in those cases have TTS, it would be extremely bad karma to reduce options in that area for ordinary users.

In so proudly demonstrating the Kindle 2?s TTS back in 2009, Jeff Bezos said: "Any book, blog, magazine, or personal document can be read aloud to you. If you’re in the kitchen cooking and want to be read to for a little while, or you’re on your commute to work and you want to be read to for a little while, Kindle can do that for you. Let’s listen…"

Yes, let’s listen. And, Jeff, you do the same. Unmute the Paperwhites! Ideally you could even give people with existing orders the choice of either accepting the silent Paperwhites or getting a slight discount on future models with the speech chips.

And speaking of good ergonomics—for everyone, not just people with print impairments: I notice that Kobo’s Glo model lets people vary the boldness of the characters. When will Amazon finally heed me and build this feature in? When I owned TeleRead, I begged vendors to oblige. Nice to see Kobo acting, whether or not I was the inspiration.

reposted from Library City under a CC license

Are you going to be in the vicinity of Urbana, IL this weekend? There’s a little paper book estate sale you might want to stop by. Now, normally we probably wouldn’t make such a big deal about paper book sales, but this happens to be the the estate sale of Michael Hart—the founder of Project Gutenberg, and one of the principal reasons we can read e-books on handheld devices today.

The sale site is posted in the form of an amusingly cheeky WordPress blog, with pictures of some of the books that will be offered for sale. The ground rules for the sale include the fact that books with cover prices will be sold at those prices—including old pre-inflation paperbacks. Also, the sale will start promptly at 9, with no early-birds permitted, and they express a hope that most books will go to individual readers, not dealers.

Ordinarily, I’d think it was kind of sad to see a man’s collection of books parceled out after he passed away—but Michael Hart dedicated his life to promoting reading. I’d like to think he would approve of seeing his books go to other people who would like to read them in turn.

Our Thursday infographic this week looks at some of the most loved children’s books. It also includes a mention of some not quite so children’s books, like the Twilight series.

It’s a fun read.

More Infographics

source: USC Rossier School of Education

More Infographics

via Visual.ly

There’s a hot story going around today about Bruce Willis and his plans to fight to pass his digital music collection to his daughters when he dies. According to the Daily Mail,

The Hollywood action hero is said to be considering legal action against technology giant Apple over his desire to leave his digital music collection to his daughters.

…

Since Willis – who occasionally sings with a blues band and has appeared in a video for Damon Albarn’s band Gorillaz – has apparently spent thousands of dollars downloading music on to ‘many, many iPods’, he is keen to be able to hand it on legitimately to daughters Rumer, Scout and Tallaluh.

I’m really not sure how much weight we should put in this story. It just doesn’t add up in a number of different categories.

Update: And now the story has been denied by Mrs. Bruce Willis. Told you so.

I was planning to write about this story and how it relates to ebooks, but since that is something of a stretch I sat back and contemplated the story while planning my route of attack.  I kept reading the original article, looking for the best points to raise, and I noticed that there were a number of details missing.

If you’ve only read one of the reposted copied stories, I suggest that you go read the original. One thing you won’t find there is any statement from Bruce Willis or his spokesman about the topic. That’s not such a big deal, but I’d like to know where the info came from in order to evaluate the credibility of that source.

You might also notice the absence of references to any past stories about Mr. Willis' efforts in this area. Normally that wouldn’t be a big deal (my Google-fu is high), but in this case I can’t find anything in Google either.

And I’m not done. Have you considered where the story was published? It was in the Daily Mail, a right wing UK tabloid that is not widely regarded for its accuracy. While that by itself is not enough to condemn this article, it does start to add up.

And finally, has anyone considered how much Bruce Willis would really care about having "spent thousands of dollars downloading music"? The guy is reportedly worth $150 million. The music collection would have to hit 5 digits to get beyond being a rounding error for his  personal net worth. Heck, I bet his annual lawyer costs are higher than the amount spent on that music collection.

Do you really think he’s going to spend more than a couple minutes of time making sure his daughters could keep the music?  At best this might be a footnote in the legal docs somewhere (right after the cars), but I seriously doubt that it’s the focal point.

Now, I’m not saying that he doesn’t believe in this issue, but I don’t know that the original article is describing his motivations accurately. He might even really be funding the legislation in 5 states, but if he is I would bet his interest is more philanthropic than personal.

All I know today is that the Daily Mail article is not trustworthy. It does not stand up to scrutiny.

image by andyarthur

IFA-Berlin is going on right now and Charbax is in the thick of it. A couple days ago he got a few minutes with Sri Peruvemba, the head of marketing at E-ink, and as usual Charbax got a look at gadgets that no one else has posted.

Do you remember the dual sided dual screen smartphone? It turns out that the second screen was just a dummy. The device everyone has been looking at is more of an idea piece than a functional design. Charbax gets that detail out of Sri at about 15:40 into the video. Surprisingly, the dummy screen is the LCD screen, not E-ink. But on the upside Sri does say that real phones using 2 real screens are only a couple months away. E-ink is working with partners to finalize designs and get them into production.

Charbax also got the first look at E-ink’s newest prototype, the one with a color lighted E-ink screen. No one is producing it yet, but as you can see in the video (at 10:36) it looks rather cool. It’s almost cool enough that the glare from the frontlight layer doesn’t bother me.

Elsewhere in the video you’ll find E-ink’s flexible screens, including the Wexler FlexOne, E-ink signage (26:10), a sample piece E-ink screen for that dual sided smartphone (20:30), and more.

The Nook Touch might be over a year old now, but thanks to the combination of Android OS, a decent hardware design, and an enthusiastic development community it is still the best 6″ E-ink Android tablet on the market (in spite of the lack of sound).

Actually I’d call it the only 6″ E-ink Android tablet, because while the Kindle Touch can be turned into a decent tablet  type device it runs a proprietary version of Linux, making it a little hard to develop apps. And the Sony Reader T1, while it looks very pretty, is limited by the amount of space to install Android apps.

Today’s video shows a hacked Nook Touch running a PS1 emulator app. It’s likely also running the fast refresh hack as well as other hacks.

BTW, if you’re not impressed yet by the Nook Touch, watch this video. It shows the NT playing video at 20fps or higher. While the resolution isn’t all that great and there’s no sound, this is still an impressive accomplishment considering the Nook Touch was never intended to play video. This and most of the other great new abilities were added via software hacking, and that just goes to show the original hardware design was brilliant.

via Hackaday

News is breaking today that apparently European regulators take as dim a view of anti-trust conspiracies as in the US.

Reuters is reporting this morning that Apple and several publishers are in talks with the European Commission. The conspirators are reportedly trying to stave off a criminal prosecution (and the attending fines).There’s no public info on the parties involved but according to sources the publishers are Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Livre and Holtzbrinck.

There aren’t any specific details on the settlement, but it would reportedly involve releasing Amazon and other ebookstores from ebooks price controls for two years. As much as that might dismay some in publishing, I’m sure the conspirators would prefer this option to the fines, which could reach as high as 10% of their global revenue.

Is it just me or does it appear that Apple and a number of publishers broke the law? I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but it would seem that we wouldn’t have all these settlements without some serious rule breaking involved.

Several publishers have settled a US antitrust lawsuit while Apple and 2 others are going to trial, and that makes me wonder if this Reuters report is true. I tend to think it is; when it comes to corporate governance Europe has harsher laws than the US and the rumored penalties would best be described as painful.

On the other hand, given the current state of European book pricing laws I’m not sure how much of an effect this settlement will have. Quite a few countries in the EU have fixed price book laws (Germany, France, Spain and more) so even if Amazon is allowed to discount ebooks under a new contract with publishers they would be blocked from doing so in most of the national markets.

This very issue of discounts came up a couple weeks back when Apple tried to sell discounted iTunes gift cards and ended up having to block those cards from being used in the iBookstore.

In fact, given the current laws in Europe I really don’t see the point of an anti-trust conspiracy. Publishers already had laws on the books which gave them what they wanted: a way to stop Amazon from discounting ebooks.

Then again, I thought that the publishers and Apple would never be able to get away with the US conspiracy, and yet they tried it anyway. Perhaps they’re not as smart as I thought.

via

Yesterday Amazon was awarded a patent for a dual screen LCD/E-ink tablet which had a screen on both the front and the back of the device. It was a cool concept, but at the time all i had to show you was a diagram. Today I can show you this.

That is a dual sided smartphone prototype. E-ink is showing it off this week at IFA Berlin. I don’t have any details yet on whether the second screen has a touchscreen as well, but it looks to me like this gadget is running Windows Phone, not Android.

There’s no word yet on which device maker has committed to the idea, but E-ink is saying that someone has a similar design in the works. And I’m sure more will release their own version. You can just look at it and know that someone will want to buy it.  But will it be cheap enough? That’s another question.

via

If you’re a US resident who bought any agency-priced e-books from one of the major e-book sellers and don’t live in Minnesota, rejoice! A $69 million settlement between 49 states (plus five territories) and three of the five agency publishers means you stand to receive at least 25 cents per e-book you bought. Woo-hoo, you’re in the money! (Minnesota opted out of the settlement.) Assuming the court approves, the publishers will pay out the money into a fund and e-book stores will start notifying their customers within 30 days.

The payout per agency-priced e-book bought will be valued at $1.32 if the book was a New York Times Bestseller at the time they bought it, 32 cents if had been a NYT Bestseller during the first year of its publication, and 25 cents for non-NYT Bestseller backlist titles. If you bought the books from Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Apple, you’ll get an account credit unless you state you’d prefer a check; if you bought them from Google or Sony you’ll just get a check. And about $10 million of the settlement will be set aside for administrative costs. Any money remaining after everyone’s been compensated will go to literacy charities.

Of course, anyone who did buy an agency-priced book probably spent a lot more than 25 cents or even $1.32 more than they would have on it if it weren’t agency priced. And while there are still two non-settling publishers plus Apple to shake down for pennies, it’s doubtful that even if they doubled the payout it would still bring those prices down to pre-agency levels.

The bright side is that it will be a lot easier to find and compensate the people who qualify for the payouts, given that all the stores have computerized records of who bought what e-book. But in the end, all this really means is that you’ll get some store credit that might entice you to buy another book, and give the publishers more money. Really, class-action suits are generally worthless for anything except enriching lawyers. (For example, I got a 55-cent check a few weeks ago for something to do with Google AdWords ten years ago. 55 cents! Was it even worth the cost of sending that check out?)

So what do you plan to do with your 25 cents per e-book?

While Apple, Asus, Lenovo, et al, are looking at designing the best single screen tablet, Amazon has been thinking outside the box. Today they filed for received a new patent for a dual screen tablet.

As you can see from the diagram above, the concept device has a screen on both the front and the back. Now that’s relatively novel; past dual screen tablets like the Entourage Edge, original Nook, or the SpringDesign Alex had the screens side by side so the user can see both of them.  While that offered more screen real estate it also led to a bulkier device which sometimes took up more space than desired, particularly when you’re only using one of the screens.

Amazon’s concept also has a pair of cameras, a mike, and g-sensor. It’s not clear from the filings exactly how you would use the device (other than the obvious details) but I bet Amazon has put some thought into it.

What I find most interesting about this patent is how closely it fits a rumor I heard last year. According to an unnamed source, Amazon was working on a dual screen tablet, a device with an E-ink and an LCD screen. I didn’t think the rumor was real at the time, but it does agree with this patent to a surprising degree.

So it looks like Amazon really did have a prototype dual sided dual screen device in their labs last July. Who knows, that could be the Kindle Fire which will be unveiled next week.

That’s actually not such a wild supposition. The FCC paper has suggested that the new KF2 is a slab style device without a hinge. The demo diagram above shows a device with a screen on the front and the back.  They could be the same device – if not for the placement of the FCC label in the middle of the back of the device.  That kinda kills the possibility that there’s an extra screen.

Still, this is an interesting patent. It’s also Amazon’s second patent for a dual screen device; the first covered the original Kindle, and we all know how that turned out. But unlike that earlier patent I don’t expect to see this device hit the market.

The thing about patents is that companies usually only receive them after the related device is on the market. Filing for a patent usually takes years (the average is 7+ years), and working the bugs out of a device can almost always be done faster.  Of course, that rule might not apply in this case; Amazon only applied for this patent last February and they got it today. That is exceptional turnaround.

Then again, if Amazon really were planning to release this device they would likely have stalled on the paperwork so as not to leak details.

Update: According to a reader I misread the paperwork. It looks like Amazon doesn’t have the patent yet; the reason we saw the filing yesterday was that Amazon chose to have it revealed to the public, not because the patent was awarded. So I guess I was right; Amazon probably isn’t going to make this device.

via

Here’s a story I didn’t expect to have to write.

Lendink, on of the many sites set up to arrange for Nook and Kindle owners to lend ebooks to each other, got another DMCA notice yesterday. It’s the first such notice since the site restarted last week, and it’s a doozy.

I’m sure you know that Lendink is a legitimate website which a few weeks was taken down by a lynch mob of uninformed authors. The authors never really understood what the site was doing and they all sent threatening emails (ranging from mild to scary) to Lendink demanding the impossible: that their ebooks be removed.

I had been hoping that the enormous public spectacle of the authors being wrong would be enough to educate everyone about sites like Lendink as well as Lendink in particular. Nope. As we can see from this latest DMCA notice, my hopes were in vain.

Tim Cushing of Techdirt tipped me to the notice, which was posted yesterday on Lendink’s Facebook page. Dale Porter, Lendink’s owner, is planning to post all such notices in order to shame the senders. This particular notice was sent not by an author but by an unlicensed attorney, and that’s where this story gets deliciously entertaining.

Hank St James describes himself as an attorney (even though he has not passed the PA bar exam) and for the past few years he has been running an anti-piracy service for self-published authors. I’ve never heard of him before, but I found a reference to him in a 2010 blog post on the e-reads blog. He was then calling himself the "pirate sinker", a monicker which he still uses today.

Update: Someone on Slashdot has turned up the detail that  this lawyer might be operating under a pseudonym. There’s a lawyer by the name of Hank James Clarke who lives a few miles (52 miles) away from Wilkes-Barre, PA. If that is the same guy then he is likely also committing an ethics violation. But given the distance it seems unlikely.

He seems to be running this operation out of his house Wilkes-Barre, PA, which should tell you a lot about his lack of success. He doesn’t even have a website that I could find, but he does appear to have conned a number of authors into signing up for his service.

And I do feel that he is conning authors because this guy doesn’t seem terribly competent. He sent a DMCA notice for some 80 to a hundred titles (I lost count) to a site which patently was not hosting or pirating the ebooks. Furthermore, this fool didn’t bother to read the FAQ for Lendink before perjuring himself with this bogus notice.

But the most damning detail in this story is that the guy clearly missed all the coverage of Lendink in the past few weeks.  If his anti-piracy work is his job then you would expect him to keep up on the news, right? I have difficulty figuring out how he could have missed Lendink. I’ll grant you that an author could miss the stories (and I would not blame them), but a businessman has an obligation to his customers.

Speaking of his customers, I’m not going to call out the authors who hired this bozo; they probably thought he was competent when they hired him and at least some will be appalled at the bogus notice. Please do not hold this against them or drag their names through the mud.

But you can say whatever you want about Hank St James. The service he offers is clearly defective and deficient. His work is about as sturdy as a deck of cards, and we really should share that detail with his potential customers.

Unfortunately, that’s about all we can do. PA can’t exactly take his license away from him if he doesn’t have one, and there’s not much we can do about the perjury. No one has ever been prosecuted for a bogus DMCA notice.

Update: It turns out I was wrong. There’s at least one case of a bogus DMCA notice costing the sender money. Jane Litte of Dear Author reminded me of Lenz vs Universal, the bouncing toddler case. In that situation the parent of said toddler had recorded a short clip of the kid dancing to background music and then posted it to Youtube. Universal had the clip taken down under a DMCA notice. Lenz responded by hiring a lawyer and suing Universal. She won.

Second Update: A reader pointed be at OPG vs Diebold, another example where a bogus DMCA notice ended up costing Diebold money. This one is much more complicated, though.

Would someone please do us all a favor and sue this attorney. He needs to be shut down.

P.S. If you ever meet me at a conference, ask me what I know about Attributor’s anti-piracy service. I can’t post it here, but I do have some interesting details.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9280842894530460095

If you’re a self-published author who is still struggling to get noticed, now might be the time to swallow the rest of your pride, jettison your code of ethics, and start buying reviews. (Hey, everyone is doing it.) The NYTimes interviewed the owner of a paid book review service yesterday, and business was good.

Todd Rutherford is the owner of a now defunct web site called GettingBookReviews.com. For a low price of $99 Todd promised to review your book. If you needed a chorus of reviews, Todd could arrange 20 reviews for $499 or 50 reviews for $999. The reviews would be posted on Amazon, B&N, or other ebookstores by the reviewers and would look for all intents and purposes like a real review.

And business really was good. The NYTimes article says that he earned $28,000 a month. Customers included authors who have since made it into the best seller lists, the most notable of which was John Locke. You probably know him as the first self-published author to sell a million Kindle ebooks. He got his start by buying reviews.

Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford.  “I’m ready to roll.”

and

He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility.

Locke ended up buying 300 reviews from that service, and god only knows how many he bought elsewhere. And from what I can tell, the reviews he bought probably weren’t written by someone who even read the ebook. Heck, they not have even been all that well researched. Here’s how one of Rutherford’s reviewers described her work process:

For a 50-word review, she said she could find “enough information on the Internet so that I didn’t need to read anything, really.” For a 300-word review, she said, “I spent about 15 minutes reading the book.” She wrote three of each every week as well as press releases. In a few months, she earned $12,500.

“There were books I wished I could have gone back and actually read,” she said. “But I had to produce 70 pieces of content a week to pay my bills.”

But at least the service promised a 5 star review and the option of editing that review before acceptance, even though they were only paying "reviewers" $10 per review. That really moves it beyond the pale, doesn’t it?

This service was dishonest and deceptive but still effective, so I have to say that I’m glad when I read the reason Rutherford shut it down. One author (or several authors) didn’t like his service and responded by posting negative reviews on various consumer protection sites (here, here).

Once Rutherford’s service was exposed to the light of day, it was dead. The writing blogs took up the torch of shaming him into shutting down (here), and then Amazon took down some of his reviews and Google cancelled his Adwords account (so he couldn’t buy advertising).

If there’s anything I’ve learned from this it’s that I have always been right to trust negative reviews. Paid reviewers are far more likely to give a book 4 or 5 stars and only say nice things.  I would not expect to see as many negative reviews from a paid service (otherwise they might piss off a customer).

Rich Adin posted a few weeks back that perhaps uneducated  reviewers were a serious problem because we did not know whether they had read and understand the book. Perhaps Rutherford could add that to his next review service?

As for me, I’m sticking with Rebecca Allen. Negative reviews are currently more reliable than positive reviews due to the simple fact that the reviewer feels strongly about the book. When that emotion is cogently conveyed in the review it can give you valuable insight into whether you want to read a book.

via NYTimes & elsewhere

image by mikeymckay