The hot story in digital publishing this week was the Lendink Witch Hunt.

A little over a week ago a bunch of authors noticed that a site by the name of lendink was showing covers of their ebooks. Without confirming what was going or or what the site was doing, these authors flew into a rage and started issuing a shitstorm of demands that their ebooks be removed from the site and that Lendink stop pirating their ebooks.

I covered this story myself on Monday. I didn’t really know what was going on, so I reached out to a bunch of the authors who had issued the demands. I’ve just heard back from one of the authors.

I’m going to assume that everyone knows about Lendink by now and that you know the site wasn’t committing piracy. But if you’re finding this for the first time, you can read my post from Monday, Lendink’s response, or you can read this.

The author in question is O. G. Tomes (here’s her blog). I found her via Lendink’s Facebook page. That’s where Tomes had posted 2 bogus DMCA takedown notices in which she says that Lendink was hosting a copy of her ebook. You can find a copy of the notices here (search for the name "Tomes").

Not only is she not contrite, she still doesn’t understand what Lendink did nor the terms of her contract with Amazon. Her ignorance is so mind-boggling broad that it will stand as a milestone for future generations of authors.

Here is Tomes' explanation for her part in the lynch mob:

This situation is a sad one and warrants an explanation for all the parties involved. If at any time I had received a reply from Lendink or Amazon had taken a clearer stance maybe I could have avoided being compelled to demand removal of my works; ie their links and covers. I was never contacted by anyone requesting permission to display my works for sale or lend by Lendink. I did not authorize them to pursue their activity of listing any of my books. The site openly admitted to losing their affiliation with Amazon yet continued to work toward that moment when they could once again get paid for their referrals. My attempts to contact Lendink to answer my requests for information on their procedures were ignored. Attempts to join the site to find out the information were blocked. I followed "Lendink’s" directives for filing notices directly from their site. I have attached a copy to this email.

I think the matter warrants discussing but in a rational manner.

At this time, I must state that I do not grant permission for this conversation or any information contained or attached herein to be used in any public forum.

Sincerely, O. G. Tomes

First, let me say that I don’t need her permission (snicker) to post a copy of her email; I’m posting it for its news & commentary value so I have a clear fair use justification.

I’m at a loss to figure out where she is the most wrong. Is it the fact she admits she didn’t confirm exactly what lendink was doing before sending the fraudulent takedown notices? Or is it the way she blames Amazon and Lendink for her own ignorance of the contracts she signed?

Folks, I don’t even have to look at her contracts with Amazon to know that she agreed to everything and anything that lendink was actually doing. And from what I can tell, all Lendink did was show her covers; the site didn’t have a copy of her ebooks (that’s what she claimed in the takedown notice).  Everything Lendink did was allowed by Amazon’s contracts with their suppliers. These clauses are in the contracts so Amazon’s affiliates can do their marketing thing and boost Amazon’s sales.

And you can ignore everything she writes about Lendink losing their relationship to Amazon; the site might not have been able to earn a commission as an affiliate but it still had permission from Amazon to post the images. Trust me, that’s an unrelated technical matter having to do with how sites (such as the blog you’re reading right now) can pull info from Amazon (only with Amazon’s permission, basically).

Now, you might be thinking that Lendink should have limited the offered titles to only ones which were lendable. So far as I know that is not information which can be accessed from outside Amazon. All lendink could do was offer ebooks which its members had listed on the site.

Perhaps you think that Lendink should have only shown the titles listed by members? Maybe,  but listing titles which weren’t lendable is at worst annoying, not piracy. What’s more, titles shown to potential readers will sometimes result in a sale. Is that really such a bad thing?

I know that I have at least a few authors who follow this blog so I’d like to make a suggestion.

Folks, don’t be this person. Don’t join a lynch mob, but more importantly please for the love of Phil make sure you know what the hell is going on before you make an idiot of yourself.

If you don’t know what’s going on, ask someone.

One of the more infuriating parts of this lynch mob story is that there are a dozen or more places where the authors could have asked questions before joining the lynch mob. There’s Goodreads, Wattpad, Amazon’s own forums, MobileRead, Twitter, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Heck, if you don’t understand a situation you could always ask me. I might not answer your email, but I would love to find and crush a real pirate site.  What’s more, I just love finding information. And at the very least I can point you in the right direction.

And if you don’t have a network of people you can ask for advice, what the hell are you waiting for? Go start building one.

image by Kiwi NZ

FutureBook yesterday featured a piece on an experiment in the UK between Osprey publishing imprint Angry Robot and independent bookshop Mostly Books to bundle a free electronic edition of an Angry Robot novel with each print copy of it sold. (We’ve previously mentioned Angry Robot’s e-book store and e-book subscription plan.) After just two weeks, Osprey’s CEO revealed that the bundling initiative had tripled the publisher’s sales at that store, and plans are in the offing to expand it to other independent bookstores.

The article included opinion pieces written by Angry Robot’s sales manager Roland Briscoe and Mostly Books’s Mark Thornton about the lessons of the experiment. Briscoe talked about giving readers what they said they wanted—the permanence of a physical copy plus the convenience of an electronic edition. Thornton discussed being able to woo e-book fans back to the bookstore fold so they can enjoy the discoverability of seeing titles in person but still be able to read them on their favorite electronic platform.

The idea of print/e-book bundling has been around for some time—Baen even does it to a limited extent with some of its first-printing hardcovers that include bound-in CD-ROMs—but the way the market has worked so far in the US has prevented it from seeing much use. However, one of the stated goals of the settlement between the Department of Justice and the agency pricing publishers was to make possible this sort of experimentation in the US market—bundles of e-books sold together, or e-books sold together with their print version.

From a costs standpoint, bundling seems like an idea whose time has really come. It costs zero cents (or close enough to zero cents to be negligible. Maybe a few pennies in overhead costs?) in marginal costs to add an electronic copy to a printed copy—so if doing that sells more printed copies, isn’t it worth it?

Publishers have long had a problem getting over the mindset that every individual “copy” has to be paid for individually. (I remember, in the good old days when they were allowed to talk to people, the Pendergrasts of Fictionwise and eReader bemoaned the fact that publishers insisted that each different encrypted format of e-book sold in their store had to be sold separately.) And yet, given that Angry Robot’s experiment sold three times as many books as normal, that means they took in as much money as they would have if they’d gotten paid for the normal number of print books, that many e-books, plus the same amount extra.

Could bundling work for every book from every genre? Probably not. It will take more experimentation to know which ones will succeed. I hope that if the settlement paves the way, we might end up seeing more of that.

Thanks to some FCC paperwork we’ve known for about a months now that Sony had a new ereader in the works, but due to the confidentiality requests that was about all I knew.

Until today.

I’ve just come across a new product listing on the J&R website for the new Sony Reader. From what I can tell the PRS-T2 looks to be almost identical to the current Sony Reader with only a few minor cosmetic differences as well as some tweaks to the software.

Update: The listing page on J&R is down, but someone did grab a .

The T2 has the same Pearl E-ink screen, Wifi, touchscreen tech, and microSD card slot found on the current model, but the dimensions show it as being slightly smaller and (possibly) slightly thicker. As you can see from the image at right, the T2 swaps out the hard buttons found on the T1 with either smaller buttons or touch-sensitive pads (it’s not clear from the photos). I’d say it’s probably even running Android, just like the T1. And this ereader is also going to come with a pre-loaded copy of a Harry Potter ebook.

As for the software, I don’t see any changes to format support (no Epub3), but there is a mention of Evernote Clearly and Facebook support. I’m not sure how the Facebook integration works, but Evernote Clearly looks to be a way for you to save blog posts and news articles from your browser so you can read them later. This sounds similar to Pocket and Instapaper, so I guess this means you’ll be able to push web content to the PRS-T2.

And of course the new T2 will have support for direct download of library ebooks, just like the T1.

There’s no mention of a release date, but I expect this ereader to hit the market some time in the next couple months. The current retail is listed as $129,but that could change.

All in all this ereader looks to be just a minor improvement on the current model. And that is deeply disappointing. For a couple years now I’ve been annoyed with Sony because in that time their ereaders have been consistently a step behind the competition. They released a cheap Wifi equipped ereader over a year after Amazon and B&N, they released a competitor to the Nook Touch and kobo Touch close to 4 months behind them, and now Sony has basically re-released their current ereader.

The Sony Reader PRS-T2 looks to be effectively the same damn device as the T1. For the past year, Sony stood still while B&N, Amazon, and even frigging Kobo advanced their designs.

So what could Sony have added to the T2? Color E-ink is out; the 6″ panel is not in production. But Sony could have used a higher resolution screen. I was half expecting that the new T2 would have the HD E-ink screen (1024×768) that LG Display announced earlier this year. When you combine the improved resolution with the Sony Reader’s annotation ability, the resulting device would have been droolworthy.

Hell, I’m dumbstruck to figure out why Sony isn’t at least using the high resolution screen that LG Display released last year; that would have been enough to make everyone want this ereader.

Eh. Sony used to be a good company once; clearly that time is past.

J&R website

I don’t know about you, but I can never get enough of infographics. Here’s one that compares the known details about the various English language ebook markets (UK, CAN, USA, AUS). It also covers the relative sizes of the ereader, tablet, and smartphone ownership in the 4 countries.

Interesting read.

More Infographics

More Infographics

via

A press release came across my desk today, and after I got over the fit of giggles I realized that the site mentioned did serve a purpose and was worth a post. The site is called PDF SB, and it’s a search engine that focuses on just a single type of ebooks: PDFs.

Like many I don’t usually regard PDFs as ebooks, and that’s half the reason I giggled. But once I looked at the site I understood its value. This site indexes ebooks that generalized search engines might have trouble finding and that specialized search engines would tend to ignore.

My favorite ebook search engine is Inkmesh.  This site helps me find free and paid ebooks in any of the major ebookstores, but when it comes to PDFs Inkmesh also has a couple defects. It only searches ebookstores and it doesn’t sort by format.

The thing about PDFs is that there’s a lot of noncommercial content released as a PDF which can’t be found in another format. Consider your average user manual, owner’s manual, or tech support docs. Inkmesh won’t see these files at all because they’re not for sale anywhere, and Google might not be able to find them in all the vast amounts of content cluttering the web. But PDF SB will find these ebooks, or at least it has a better shot at it.

Every so often I get requests for help in finding info on a device. This search engine should make it a lot easier to find the manuals, some of which are rather well hidden on the various support sites. It currently claims to list over 40 million files. It was originally launched just over 5 months ago, and recently went through a series of updates where the servers were updated and the algorithms were refined.

Positive hype aside, I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure this search engine does a better job than Google. I tested for several PDFs which I know can be found through Google; PDF SB couldn’t find them. Mike cane has also pointed out that this search engine ignores some basic tricks like quotation marks.

Still, I’m hoping the site will improve, and at the very least I plan to bookmark it.

PDF SB

Amazon has their fingers in a lot of pies, including selling new and used textbooks, selling and renting digital textbooks, and even buying back textbooks from students. This has put them into competition with quite a few companies, including everyone from B&N to half.com to Coursesmart.

In fact, Amazon does virtually everything with textbooks except rent them. Today that changes.

I’ve just gotten an unconfirmed report that Amazon is renting paper textbooks. There hasn’t been any official announcement from Amazon (and I’m still waiting for confirmation) but it does look like Amazon is ideed renting  paper textbooks. There’s already a support page with an FAQ and instructions, and at least one textbook has a rent button (or had a button at one point).

If you check your calendar, you can see that this is a full semester rental. Unlike the Kindle rentals, it doesn’t look like Amazon is offering shorter periods than a full semester, but they do have an optional 15 day extension. Shipping is free if you have an Amazon Prime or Amazon Student membership. The program is only available to US residents, of course, but if this textbook is any indication then it is a decent deal.

Amazon doesn’t have this title as a Kindle textbook, so it’s not possible to compare the sale or rental price directly. But for other titles it does look like Amazon’s rental prices for paper are significantly better than for comparable Kindle textbook rentals, which are set by the respective publishers. That just goes to show that a free market tends to set a lower price than a monopolist might like.

You can find this title at Chegg , where it is renting for $58, and on half.com you can find it for around $60 (for a 125 day rental). Speaking of which, half.com has been running a textbook rental marketplace for at least 6 months (that I know of).  If you’re looking to rent, I’d go there first because like the textbook sellers the rental services have to compete.

Textbooks seem to be on Amazon’s mind this fall. I’ve been told that they’re making a stronger push to offer more Kindle titles, both for sale and rent, and that they’ve started pushing harder on textbooks in general. This is not good news for publishers, but the extra competition is a very good thing for students.

Amazon

I’m in the market right now to replace my (original) Samsung Galaxy Tab with a new Android tablet, so today I took a look at the Lenovo IdeaPad A1107. This 7″ tablet caught my eye when I was at BestBuy  yesterday. It’s priced at $200, making it a competitor to the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7, and its 3MP rear camera looked like it might  fill one of my core needs.

But as it turns out this is just a basic tablet. It’s a lot like the KF or N7 in that it doesn’t have all the best components that you’d find in a premium tablet. The A1107 is running Android 4.0 (great) – but on a single core 1GHz CPU. It has a high resolution (1024 x 600) 7″ capacitive touchscreen, but it also only has a VGA webcam in front.

That’s a rather odd mix of specs, isn’t it? I think this is old hardware. From what I can tell, the A1107 is an update of the IdeaPad  A1 tablet, which came out last year and ran Android 2.3. Aside from the newer version of Android OS there doesn’t appear to be any difference between the 2 tablets. The hardware specs look identical.

This post was going to be a roundup of reviews of the  A1107 tablet. Given that I was looking at this tablet for myself, I thought it might be useful to post my notes and opinions. Curiously enough it looks like no one has posted a review of the updated tablet (I think I might add this to my todo list). But a lot of sites reviews the original A1, and the hardware reviews were generally disappointing. They’re also from back in February, so by now (July) they are horribly out of date. I won’t quote them here because of how inaccurate they now are (several said that the A1 was a bad value at $250, but I did read them and will list them at the end of this post.

There were a couple details that were mentioned in most of the reviews which were enough for me to pass on this tablet. The rear camera isn’t as good as the specs make it sound, and several of the reviews described the screen quality as being less than that of the Kindle Fire (even though they have the same resolution). The screen complaint was rather funny to read; apparently 1024×600 is now a low resolution, and that surprises me. I didn’t know that so many reviewers were screen fetishists, but apparently it’s a growing trend.

My Opinion

This tablet has the screen, cameras, and now the OS to be a mid-rank competitor to other basic tablets like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire. At the $200 price point it is no great value; the features you gain in some areas cost you other features. Again like the KF, there are tradeoffs.

Reviews

• Android Authority
• Cnet
• Gadget Review
• GottaBeMobile
• Laptop Magazine
• Mobile Tech Review
• PC Magazine

Specs

• 1GHz CPU
• Android 4.0
• 7? (1024×600) LED screen
• Capacitive touchscreen
• 16GB Flash storage
• microSD card slot
•  Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS
• g-sensor

 Many, many Android tablets have hit the market in the past year or so, including ones from truly unknown companies. This is one such tablet.

The  Visual Land Connect tablet is one I happened across on Walmart, where it wa spriced right in the middle of the many $90 to $100 budget 7″ Android tablet. It has generally unremarkable specs, with the standard 7″ capacitive touchscreen, 8GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, Wifi, g-sensor, and it is running Android 4.0 on a 1.2GHz CPU.

Verdict

This is an unremarkable tablet with average performance and adequate build quality. There’s not much to set it apart from the competition, and I feel that if you happened to grab this tablet out of a bag full of similarly priced tablets, you’d be getting neither the best nor the worst of the bunch.

The one thing that set this tablet apart (and this is why i bought it) was the 1.3MP camera. That’s much better than you would expect on a tablet in this price range and I was hoping it would be the first one to offer a decent image.  Unfortunately, there seems to be a driver issue. I can’t get the installed camera app to work, and the several camera apps I downloaded from Google Play also do not work.

Battery Life

The specs on the box claim 8 hours battery life, but I didn’t get that much. I tested this on a trip, and I usually got around 4 to 5 hours of steady use. That’s okay, but it’s a little short when compared to other tablets in this price range.

Touchscreen & Performance

The touchscreen worked about as well as I expected. I suppose that might be too vague for some, but touchscreens are a solved problem for Android tablets. I’m beginning to suspect that man budget tablets get their touchscreen from the same source and are built in the same factories.  That would tend to explain the general uniformity of these tablets.

Performance was also at par, and this tablet passed all my tests (Angry Birds, web browsing, Youtube) quite adequately.

What’s in the Box

The Connect tablet is specced to have USB host, but it only has just the one USB Mini-B port. Luckily the manufacturer included a converter cable so you can plug in USB accessories. The box also contains the power supply, asecond  USB cable (for connecting to your PC) and earbuds. But there is no HDMI cable to go with the HDMI port.

Apps & Android Market

This tablet ships with GetJar and a link to download the Amazon Appstore, but not Android Market. Luckily I was able to install it (instructions) as well as several apps. This tablet also ships with Aldiko, YOutube, Adobe Reader, and the usual basic suite of apps. There’s enough to get you started

Specs

• 1.2GHz CPU
• Android 4.0
• 7″ (800×480) screen
• Capacitive touchscreen
• 1.3MP camera
• USB Host
• 8GB Flash
• microSD card slot
• HDMI out
• g-sensor

Columnist David Pogue has just posted a brief but sure-to-be controversial entry to his New York Times blog. Wanting to give his son some good e-books to read at summer camp on his iPod Touch (you go, kid!), he recommended the late Robert Ludlum’s seminal spy novel The Bourne Identity. But when he went to buy it, it was nowhere to be found—it seems that the Ludlum estate and the publisher have not been able to agree on e-book royalty terms.

So, Pogue did what a good many frustrated e-book-desiring fans would do in a similar situation (and, indeed, what untold thousands of Harry Potter fans did do over the years pre-Pottermore)—he torrented it. But then he sent the publisher a check for $9.99. That makes everything kosher, right?

Well, no, it doesn’t. And I imagine, as soon as soon as his post makes the rounds of the blogosphere, angry authors and publishers will be lining up to tell him so. (The obligatory cries of “thief!” and “no no, copyist! copying isn’t ‘stealing’!” are already resounding like wild bird mating calls in the comment thread below the blog.)

It remains to be seen whether this will draw the same kind of reaction as the column by a New York Times ethicist I wrote about when I was at TeleRead, in which he advised his readers that, in his view, it was perfectly ethical to download an illicit copy of a book you had already purchased in print form. Pogue is going a step farther here: he thinks it’s justified to download a book you don’t own in print and pay the publisher afterward. (Though, to be fair, Pogue could own at least one copy of it in print already as well, if he likes it that much. He didn’t really say in the blog post.)

(One commenter suggested that he should have cut his check to the estate instead, given that they actually own the book and the publisher hasn’t e-published it yet. On the other hand, the publisher is the one who put the effort into polishing the book and readying it for final release, so you could sort of see it cutting both ways.)

What it really boils down to is frustration versus “entitlement.” It’s an interesting question when you think about it, irrespective of whether Pogue is right or wrong. Twenty or thirty years ago, the question could never even have arisen. The only comparisons would be of stealing a book from a bookstore and then paying the publisher (not really valid here since no bookseller is missing a chunk of its inventory from what Pogue did) or, more aptly, xeroxing a complete copy of the book and then paying the publisher (which is similar, but nobody would ever have done that because if they had the money to pay the publisher, they’d just buy the book and not futz around with a copy machine).

But then the world got all digital, and in the effort to entice people to buy more things, content owners made those things available in so many different ways as to make buying easy. We can buy almost every song we want from iTunes or Amazon, almost every or e-book we want from Amazon, B&N, or all the other stores, so many digital movies through Amazon, Netflix, CinemaNow, or other such services, that when we find one we can’t get, we get indignant about it. In the case of e-books, Amazon and its 3G Kindle made sure we can buy them almost literally anywhere, at any time.

So perhaps power corrupts. Because we can have almost anything we want at any time, it feels like a personal affront that we can’t get that one particular thing we want right now dammit. So some folks feel entitled to reach out and take it. Even Pogue is doing this, though he’s trying to salve his conscience by sending the publisher a check afterward.

Is there a solution? Well, time, for one thing. Sooner or later all the books people want will be available as e-books, because when people want to trade money for something, the smart content holders will figure out ways to oblige them (as J.K. Rowling eventually did with Pottermore). The only ones left out will be the ones no one wants anyway, because without demand the publishers won’t be moved to make them available. Eventually, the days of people pirating out of frustration with unavailability will be a thing of the past, just like outhouses, or hitching posts and watering troughs in front of businesses. That’s not too helpful for today, of course.

That being said, Pogue’s post could spark some interesting discussion on the ethics of downloading with or without payment, and the frustration of being unable to buy the things you want when you want them.

If people can stop their cries of “thief!” and “no, copyist!” long enough to focus on the issue, anyway.

image by spaceninja

Right now everyone is quietly anticipating Amazon releasing a frontlight-equipped Kindle, but it seems like they might be beaten to the punch by a small Chinese ereader maker. Onyx has just posted a video showing their latest prototype, and from what little I can make out in the darkened room it looks impressive.

They’re calling it the Onyx Touch at the moment. They’ve taken their touchscreen equipped ereader, the Boox i62HD, and modified it so it has a frontlight.  It’s difficult to make out details in the video,  but I did see enough in the first few seconds to confirm that the hardware matches the existing ereader. The i62 first showed up as a prototype last year, and Onyx has been selling it since early this spring.

But the device in the video is actually the i62HD, which has the new flexible higher resolution screen which was developed by LG Display.

This ereader looks to be heavily influenced by the Nook. The i62HD has a Pearl E-ink screen (1024×768), NeoNode zForce touchscreen, Wifi, and card slot. But instead of Android it’s running Onyx’s own custom Linux firmware which is based on the work they’ve done for their other ereaders. It actually has far more format support and much better annotation options, some of which you will see in the video.

I’ve heard from one of Onyx’s dealers that his sample should arrive in late August and the device should be on the market in late September.

We might even see this device hit the market before a similarly equipped Kindle, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Amazon can afford to throw a lot more resources at the problem.

via

As you sit here reading this post you probably have any number of companies spying on you. At a guess, I’d bet that right now Facebook, Google, and the maker of your web browser are all watching what you’re doing online. (And if you found this post via Twitter, you can add them and Bitly to the list.)

With that in mind it should probably come as no surprise that a new start up is planning to start watching you while you read.

Hiptype is coming out of the shadows today, and they’re pitching themselves as the "Google Analytics for ebooks". This start up has developed a new platform which will let publishers know virtually everything about your reading habits as well as personal details like your location, age, and income. Basically it’s going to let publishers know all the juicy details that Amazon, B&N, and Kobo have but don’t share.

Publishers can get the data by first signing up with Hiptype and adding a script to their ebooks before they’re released to distributors and ebookstores. Hiptype is offering a free script for publisher’s first ebook, and they’re charging a monthly fee of $20 to $100 for the various packages, with the higher prices offering greater detail on a larger number of readers.

The data gathered by the scripts is sent to Hiptype’s servers, and I’ve confirmed that it’s only going to be transmitted over Wifi, so it won’t be chewing up your data plan. Publishers can log in and see a dashboard with data organized by title. Hiptype has a demo online,and I’ve clipped parts of it for this post. As you can see, the data is quite thorough. But I’ve also been told it is has also been anonymized  while it was processed, and there’s no indication that publishers can get the specifics about a single reader.

The Hiptype platform doesn’t work everywhere, and in fact it has only been stated to work in iBooks. It won’t work on the Kindle or the Nook platforms because the script involved is written in JavaScript. Neither the Kindle format nor Epub support JavaScript, and if that little bit of code won’t run then there’s no way for the info to get to Hiptypes servers (good).

But the platform is expected to expand beyond iBooks as more apps and devices add support for Epub3. Right now Epub3 support is limited to Readium and iBooks, though I do expect more apps to be released later this year.

And as far as legal concerns go, Hiptype emphasizes that the first time someone opens an ebook that uses a Hiptype script they’ll be shown a short privacy notice. Readers will also have the option to opt out at any time.

Hiptype launches into a private beta this week. I’m told they’re working with several publishers and self-published authors, though none were named when I spoke to James Levy, the CEO and founder of Hiptype. Nor would I expect them to be; this is not exactly the kind of thing that publishers would like to be caught doing.  Sure, you know you’re being tracked by everyone, but there’s still a social stigma attached to the idea.

Publishers and self published authors can request to join the beta on Hiptype’s website; new customers are being accepted in clumps as Hiptype expands their servers to support the load.

As interesting as the tech details are, one detail I’ve picked up over the years is that readers who use one app don’t always behave like readers who use a different app. If publishers start tweaking ebooks based on data from Hiptype, there’s no guarantee that the tweaks will have the same effect across all ebookstores.

Speaking of other ebookstores, I’m going to make a prediction. I bet that someone at Apple, Amazon, Kobo, or B&N will notice Hiptype and decide to respond by either sharing similar data with publishers (or selling it).  And it’s a tossup which it will be; Amazon tends to jump on new ideas first but Kobo is already known to have this kind of info going through their servers and they’re still building out Writing Life.  It wouldn’t take them long to  build a new dashboard so publishers can see the data.

Earlier this week I broke the news that the Kobo Touch launch was not going well in Japan, and after getting a lot of negative reviews Rakuten decided to hide the problem rather than deal with it.

I happen to still be waiting for a response from Kobo, and to be honest I don’t expect to ever hear from them (their marketing dept doesn’t like me for some reason). But Rakuten has chosen to respond to the issue and I have a quote from them here:

Following the launch of Kobo Touch in Japan we saw a tremendous consumer response. Unfortunately, some users were able to gain access to the system before our official launch timing of 15:00 on July 19th. Users began writing reviews and comments about the service that was not yet ready for public release. We then launched on schedule, but considering the review board had been populated by feedback not relevant to the actual service we decided to temporarily suspend the review board feature, which we felt was not fully reflective of the service at launch time and was misinforming consumers.

However, we understand that we did not meet the high expectations of our loyal customers. We have been listening to their feedback through our customer support center and having been working around the clock to resolve all outstanding issues.

So according to Rakuten they let the site go live before the service was up and running. This let people get in and post reviews before Rakuten was ready.

I don’t believe that is the core of the issue, but even if it were it would only explain some of the problems reported. They’re glossing over a number of other issues.

For example, Rakuten promised 30 thousand Japanese language titles; they launched with only 18,894. What’s more, the statement above ignores the fact that (according to one of my readers) Rakuten/Kobo pushed out a buggy firmware update.There are also reports of activation issues for the Kobo Touch as well as problems with the Kobo Desktop software.

And Rakuten is also failing to mention how their customer service fell down on the job. This was clear in a number of reviews posted (though Google translate isn’t the best at Jap-Eng), and there were even complaints about Rakuten 's CS dating from the 20th through the 22nd – which means that the early access wasn’t relevant at all.

Folks, Rakuten & Kobo are pitching themselves as the only real answer to Amazon on the global ebook market. If this launch in Japan is any indication of their combined abilities I think we might want to save some effort and go buy Kindles right now.

Rakuten can’t even come clean on their mistakes – not even after they’re know to the world. Is this really going to be someone you’d trust to sell you anything?

Unlike the past couple infographics I posted (which ranged from bad to hilariously terrible), the following infographic is based on a recent survey of consumers and includes info not posted elsewhere.

Computers continue to dominate as the most popular reading device, and nonfiction edged out fiction as the most book category.

More Infographics

via spectros.com

There’s buzz going around Twitter this morning about a recent WSJ article (the top link). The article covers the various ways that Amazon and Apple are going head to head, including tablets, smartphones, app stores. and app development.

It’s a nice summary article, and aside from mistaking Amazon’s budget Android smartphone for a direct iPhone competitor (and getting the sizes of the app stores wrong), the article does show how the 2 companies are competing for your pocketbook. But I’m only interested in one little bit towards the end.

There was a footnote near the end of the article about a new app Amazon might be testing. No name was given, but reportedly this is a competitor to iBooks Author:

At the same time, Apple is trying to chip away at Amazon’s e-book business with new technology to build interactive e-books, called iBooks Author. Amazon has tested its own similar technology with publishers in response, said another person briefed on the project.

While I have no evidence to prove it exists, I’m betting that it does exist and that the new app is called the Kindle Scribe (or at least it was at one point).

Do I have any inside info? Not currently, no. Did I find a trademark? No, but then again Amazon does tend to file trademarks after they announce the product so that’s no big deal.

My one piece of information is a website address that Amazon registered last August. It’s kindlescribe.com, and while the address goes no where at the moment this is something which could be changed.

You might recall the name from the buzz around that time; many blogs were erroneously calling it Amazon’s next ereader or tablet. I didn’t. While many bloggers didn’t look beyond the obvious, I declined to speculate on how Amazon might use the site. Once again I am amazed at my foresight.

Even though I have no real evidence, you’ll have to agree that the name alone is compelling. The name Kindle Scribe is a good choice for an app to make Kindle ebooks, isn’t it?  What’s more, Amazon already has ebook creation software to build on. Mobipocket had already developed MobiCreator by the time Amazon bought them, and while development dies out in 2009 Amazon still has the source code to build off of in much the same way that the Kindle iPhone app used parts of Mobipocket’s never released iPhone app or the way that the original Kindle shared code with Mobipocket’s Java based reading app.

To be honest, I’m not sure we’ll ever see the Kindle Scribe app, but I do think Amazon registered the website address just in case they ever needed it. And I do think that the app exists.

P.S. If anyone at Amazon wants to leak details or a copy of the app, you know where to find me.

It’s been just under a week since the Kobo Touch started shipping in Japan, and things are going so well that Rakuten has removed from their website all the reviews of the Kobo Touch.

No, seriously, all of the reviews are down – both good and bad.  I suppose there were too many people writing things like "I’m going to buy a Kindle" and that upset someone at Rakuten.

Luckily one of Rakuten’s potential customers tipped me to the story, including giving me a link to a blog that had collected responses and a screenshot of the review page before Raskuten removed it. That’s why I can show you things like this:

If you can’t see the image above, it says that the Kobo Touch has a 3 star rating largely due to the vast number of 1 star reviews. I unfortunately cannot show you the reviews themselves; no one thought to save them before it was too late. But I have been told that the many low ratings shared a number of complaints:

Generally people were complaining in their reviews about problem with crashing setup of kobo desktop application, very limited offer of Japanese books, unresponsive touch screens, poor customer service, etc

And you have to admit that graphic speaks for itself.

Update: My source found a Google Cache page of reviews. Thanks, Bibo!

Second Update: I’ve been reading some of the reviews. Here’s one that jumped out at me.

Reading revolution seems to have ended in failure, unfortunately. Ringleader of the revolution or imprisoned or beheaded will?

Rakuten launched the Kobo Touch in Japan with the expectation that they would dominate their home market. They are native to the country, and Rakuten does have a sizable retail presence there. Given their technical and CS resources, you’d think they would have been able to pull this off.

Unfortunately, it now looks like Rakuten has paved the way for Amazon to dominate yet another ebook market.This launch is rapidly turning into a debacle and  it’s going to damage Rakuten’s reputation. And according to some of the tweets I’ve seen (in Japanese) it already is.

Folks, they took the reviews down from the website so new customers wouldn’t be warned about the many problems. I want you to look past the fact they did it and think about how customers will feel once they discover the deception. That is what will make this a major debacle and not merely an embarrassment for Rakuten.

A bad launch could be recovered from. This is closer to being a systematic effort to lie to their customers. Okay, eventually people will forgive Rakuten, but in the short run this debacle could drive readers to Amazon.

And we know Amazon is planning to launch in Japan as soon as they can. If they get the Kindle Store live in Japan in the next month or so they’ll be able to capitalize on this story without lifting a finger.

I’ve reached out to Kobo, but they not yet responded at the time I posted this. I will update this post with their response.