The Library of Congress published a post this past week highlighting their growing collection of open access ebooks.

We are excited to share that anyone anywhere can now access a growing online collection of contemporary open access eBooks from the Library of Congress website. For example, you can now directly access books such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and Youjeong Oh’s Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place from the Library of Congress website. All of these books have been made broadly available online in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, which chose to publish these works under open access licenses.

A key objective of the Library of Congress digital collecting plan is the development and implementation of an acquisitions program for openly available content. We have previously discussed a number of open access book projects, including open access Latin American books, and open access children’s books. Significantly, the Library of Congress has long been receiving print copies of open access books through multiple routine acquisition streams. These openly licensed works can be made much more broadly accessible in their digital form.

In addition to the LOC’s collection, there are numerous free ebook sites such as Project Gutenberg, the major ebook retailers all have free ebook sections, and a lot of creators have released some of their works for free. This includes textbooks and other curricula that have been released for free as Open Educational Resources.

image by Pierre Blaché via Flickr

Authors have discovered that the Internet Archive has converted its lending library site into an out and out pirate site, and they are not happy,

For the past few years the Internet Archive has been operating a site called The Open Library. This site fills some of the role of a public library by lending scanned copies of print books.

The site existed in a quasi-legal state, protected by a legal opinion that kept it from being explicitly labeled a pirate site, but that legal fig leaf was stripped away this past week when The Open Library director Chris Freeland announced that the Internet Archive would now start "lending" ebooks without limits.

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.

During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist, ensuring that students will have access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar, and that people who cannot physically access their local libraries because of closure or self-quarantine can continue to read and thrive during this time of crisis, keeping themselves and others safe.

What they are calling the National Emergency Library is really just The Open Library with a new name, and new legal issues.

The problem with this is that The Open Library’s only protection was an untested legal opinion called Controlled Digital Lending. Go read it and you will see that it says said that a library could lend one scanned copy of a print book for each copy they had in their archive. This is great – in principle – because it means libraries can preserve their copies of old and rare print books and instead lend digital copies.

Update:  The university library consortium HathiTrust just adopted CDL on a limited basis as a response to the current emergency. (It sounds like they’re not sure it’s legal.)

CDL is a great idea, in my opinion, because it helps solve the orphan works problem. I do not however agree with how the Internet Archive has latched on to it as a justification for lending books that are widely available in stores and libraries.

But that does not matter today. In removing waitlists, the Internet Archive is discarding CDL as a defense, and is lending far more copies of each book than they have the rights for.

Update: While the IA has not put forth a fair use argument, they have lined up a lot of librarians as supporters. (The fair use arguments cited at that link are nonspecific, or not relevant.)

No matter your opinion of CDL, this is piracy plain and simple, and authors aren’t having any part of it:

https://twitter.com/ChuckWendig/status/1244011591395356672

This is piracy, plain and simple. And your local library can get you ebooks—ones they have paid for.

— Mark Wunderlich (@MarkCWunderlich) March 28, 2020

Joining the chorus of authors saying not to promote this. They have my books, scanned, without any kind of permission or license — it's just piracy.

Author's Guild: https://t.co/K0WcGzzEal

— Django Wexler (@DjangoWexler) March 28, 2020

https://twitter.com/KVJohansen/status/1244013661636775936

Ugh. This is one of those well-meaning but misguided efforts that ends up harming those who need help.

— Priscilla Gilman (@priscillagilman) March 28, 2020

https://twitter.com/Lori_Ella/status/1244006313371348992

Please stop promoting piracy. If you don't know why this site is wrong, please see the author's guild statement.

— Isabel Bandeira (@Emberchyld) March 28, 2020

Hey, NPR, authors never agreed to this–and actual lending libraries that PAID for e-books exist. Promote those instead!

— Shveta ?????? ? (@ShvetaThakrar) March 28, 2020

https://twitter.com/Bibliogato/status/1243975292391247873

Via @lilithsaintcrow
Doing a search on this site has led me to find books by Jack McDevitt, James S A Corey, Joe Haldeman, the late Jay Lake, Kameron Hurley and lots more.
This is piracy.

I am not happy about NPR giving Internet Archive a free pass here in glowing coverage. https://t.co/M3uwvwjjNT

— Paul "Princejvstin" Weimer (@PrinceJvstin) March 28, 2020

image by blmurch via Flickr

For the longest time now Amazon has provided authors and publishers who distributed their audiobooks though ACX with promo codes that could be given to reviewers, shared with friends, and otherwise used to promote an audiobook.

It had been SOP for Amazon to pay a royalty when a promo code was redeemed, but that policy ended today. Kirsten Oliphant Posted this in her FB group earlier today:

To summarize, Amazon will still give you the promo codes, but they will no longer be paying when the codes are redeemed. Which, TBH, is only fair; I can’t think of a good argument in favor of paying creators to promote their own works.

A friend just tipped me to the news that Amazon has retired its Author Rank feature. (Thanks, Morris!) I’m still getting a couple reports that people are still seeing Author Rank in the Kindle Store, but Amazon has an EOL notice in the Author Central admin pages, and has disabled the relevant page in Author Central.

Also, the Author Rank page on Amazon.com now redirects to the Amazon Charts page.

Originally launched in 2012, Author Rank has proven useful for little more than giving a few authors an ego boost, and many more authors crushing self-doubt. It will be missed by only the more obsessed authors  and their fans.

With news breaking that new color ereaders ( the first in nearly seven years) may be shipping later this week in China, now seemed like a good time to start thinking about when those screens might show up on other ereaders such as the Amazon Kindle.

The answer is most likely not going to be as simple as you would expect.

For starters, it is fairly safe to conclude that the screen on the iReader C6 shown above will not also grace the Kindle.

The thing is, Amazon has money, and if Amazon liked this screen tech then they would have paid for an exclusive so they could be first, and they would keep their exclusive very, very quiet until they were good and ready.

If the Kindle were going to get this screen then the first you would have heard about it would be when Amazon wanted you to know it was coming. They would either leak the info or announce it, and there’s no way they would let themselves be upstaged by Chinese companies.

No, it is much more likely that Amazon is either working on a competing screen tech that they think is better than the screen on the C6. There’s also a good chance that Amazon just doesn’t think any of the color epaper screen tech is viable. (Remember, E-ink’s older color screens, the Triton and Triton 2, were dreck.)

There’s no way to say with absolute certainty which is more likely, but I do know there are a couple possible screen techs Amazon might plan to use.

For starters, there’s ClearInk. This company has been about to release a screen to market Real Soon Now for the past 3 years. Their screens looked great 3 years ago, but we still don’t know if they can be produced on the assembly line. (Remember, one of the problems with Qualcomm’s Mirasol screen tech is that most of the screens failed QA  in the factory, and had to be trashed.)

For all we know, ClearInk could secretly have Amazon as a partner, and its screens could show up on the next Kindle model.

Another possibility is Liquavista, the screen tech company Amazon bought from Samsung in 2013.

Yes, I did tell you in late 2018 that Amazon shut down Liquavista, but as I noted at the time, Amazon was "unable to tell me whether Amazon still be pursuing this tech, if Liquavista’s R&D work been shifted to another unit, or the state of their screen production".

A lot of Liquavista people still worked for Amazon at that time, so it’s entirely possible they were still working on new screen tech that is based on Liquavista’s tech.

Liquavista’s screens did look pretty back in 2013, though they never did start mass production:

BTW, Amazon does employ a lot of screen tech people, so there’s a good chance that they are working on something new that Amazon is developing in secret, but there’s really no way for us to know for sure until Amazon decides it wants us to know.

In any case, this is going to be an interesting year for screen tech!

I am still waiting to hear from contacts in China whether this device have actually been released to market, but it would appear that E-ink’s next-gen color epaper screens have arrived on consumer ereaders.

CNTechPost reported earlier this week that the Chinese firm iReader has announced the C6, a 6″ ereader capable of displaying 4096 colors. They don’t mention the price or release date, but Chinese language sources say the device will be released on 25 March, at a retail of 1499 yuan (about $211 USD).

The iReader C6 is powered by a quad-core CPU with 1GB RAM and 15GB internal storage. It also has integrated speakers, a front-lit display, and a capacitive touchscreen.

The product listing says it weighs in at 170 grams and measures 6.9 millimeters thin. This makes it about the same size as most 6″ ereaders, but unlike its competition the C6 has a white shell rather than a black one. That was a wise choice because the white will probably make the color screen look better. (Similarly, most older E-ink ereaders have a black shell instead of a white one because a white shell would make the grayscale screen look grayer, while a black shell makes it look blacker.)

The C6 is not the first color ereader on the market, but it is the first that uses E-ink’s latest color epaper screens. There were several ereaders that used E-ink’s Triton and Triton 2 screens, but that tech was never widely adopted. Triton screens depended on a color filter placed on top of a graysclae E-ink screen and as a result its screen resolution was low and its base color was a dull gray. (It was also slow to refresh.)

We still don’t really know anything about the C6’s performance or screen quality, but I can assure you that I am doing my best to get one.

Edit: Color screen resolution is unknown. Some sources say this screen tech can display color at 212 PPI, while Pocketbook says the screens going into their device have a color resolution of 100 PPI. (I trust Pocketbook.)

Stay tuned.

P.S. If you are wondering what this new screen tech means for the Amazon Kindle, I have a few thoughts.

After a decade of lobbying bu authors and book publishers, the UK government announced this week that the Value Added Tax collected on the sale of ebooks would be reduced to zero starting on 1 December 2020.

The UK Publishers Association is overjoyed, but I see this as a glass half full.

“We are delighted that the Government has decided to zero-rate VAT on digital books and journals in the Budget," Stephen Lotinga, CEO of the Publishers Association, said in a statement. "It’s fantastic that the Chancellor has acknowledged the value of reading. The decision to axe the reading tax will bring an end to the illogical and unfair tax on those who need or prefer to read digitally and should contribute to an increase in literacy in the UK. We want to thank all the parliamentarians, organisations and individuals who have supported this campaign and helped make the case for change – we look forward to continuing the important work of making reading accessible for all.”

Under the old rules no VAT was collected on print books sold in the UK, while 20% of the price of an ebook was paid to the UK government. (Yes, the UK has the equivalent of what in the USA would be a 25% national sales tax.) Print books had a 0% VAT rate due to an elitist and archaic belief that books were unique cultural objects. At the same time, ebooks were classified as software.

While this change would appear to be good news, the RNIB reminds us that the glass is only half full. Only ebooks will be getting the zero VAT under the new rule, but audiobooks will not. Speaking in their role as advocates for the visually impaired, the RNIB has a problem with this development:

While we welcome the announcement of a VAT exemption on e-publications, we are disappointed that it appears this won’t be extended to audiobooks. Printed books, magazines and newspapers have been VAT exempt since the 1970s, because it was recognised that there shouldn’t be a tax on reading.

The change recognises the unfairness of taxing some alternative formats and will help widen access for blind and partially sighted people who use e-Readers. However, for many people living with sight loss, audiobooks are their preferred format and allow them to enjoy their favourite titles in the same way as everyone else. It’s not right that they will continue to be charged 20 per cent more for books, and we urge the Government to make sure that audiobooks are included in the exemption.

I don’t know what is more ridiculous, that the UK made this change twenty years after it was obviously a good idea, or that they still managed to screw it up.

Talk about being a day late and a dollar short.

image by Raymond Snijders via Flickr

It looks like the Big Five is about to become the Not-So-Big-Four.

Variety reports that ViacomCBS (or whatever they are calling themselves today) is considering a sale of its book publishing unit.

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish told investors Wednesday that the company is taking a hard look at all operations. Simon & Schuster has generated inquiries from prospective buyers in the past, Bakish said during a Q&A held as part of Morgan Stanley’s annual investor conference in San Francisco.

Simon & Schuster “is not a core asset. It is not video-based. It does not have significant connection for our broader business,” Bakish said. “We have had multiple unsolicited inbound calls about that asset, and so as the market stabilizes, we are going to engage in a process” to examine strategic alternatives. ViacomCBS said publishing revenue in 2019 came to $814 million, down 1.3% from $825 million in the prior year.

PW reports that S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy confirmed the potential sale in a letter to staff. The letter did not include much in the way of addition detail, however.

This does not come as a surprise. Simon and Schuster is not technically the smallest of the "Big Five" US trade publishers, but it is the most vulnerable. The other four are either significantly larger in their own right or part of larger international publishing conglomerates (Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrink, Hachette is owned by Legardere Publishing, HarperCollins is twice the size of S&S, and PRH is PRH).

In fact, I would have described S&S as the most likely candidate to be bought by Amazon when it looked like the retailer wanted to take a bite out of the industry, and for years now the only thing stopping Legardere, PRH, or Holtzbrink from buying S&S was that CBS didn’t want to sell.

That has apparently changed, and soon so could the ownership of S&S.

Who do you think is going to buy them?

It’s hard to guess who will, but I would bet that I can name the one company that will not.

Amazon.

I know that most will assume that Amazon is the leading candidate, but as I see it Amazon already gets enough shit from the publishing industry, and it doesn’t need even more regulatory oversight. S&S doesn’t have enough revenue to make the headaches worth it, so Amazon is probably going to pass.

Do you think Bezos might buy it?

image by ActuaLitté via Flickr

Things are about to get interesting again for Kindle owners.

Amazon just rolled out a new firmware update for the Kindle. The official notice for the update doesn’t give much in the way of details, but a hacker combed through the code and found a few clues that hinted at new features.

Here’s what Amazon told us:

Here’s what’s new:

Aa Menu: Over the next couple of weeks, you will see an updated Aa menu that makes it easier to access all font, layout and reading options without leaving your book.

Performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general enhancements.

That’s not even close to being worth writing about, but the stuff Amazon left out, now that is another story.

JHowell posted over at MobileRead earlier today that he has already taken apart the firmware update, and found references to a couple new features:

• Options to control features like "Popular Highlights", "Word Wise", and "PinYin" moved to the Aa menu.
• Contrast setting with 5 choices: -2, -1, 0, 1, 2
• "Set the cover of the title you are reading to appear on your lock screen"

Using your book cover as a screensaver will be fun, but I think the contrast setting could be the most useful. If understand it correctly, Amazon is going to give users the option of adjusting the contrast between the white, black, and shades of gray displayed by the Kindle.

We’ll be able to make the whites "whiter" or "grayer", depending on the setting chosen. The lighter shades of gray will also be affected, but black will not be affected at all.

This won’t help much with text, but it should prove useful with images in an ebook.  Adjusting the contrast should bring out additional detail in images that would otherwise be indistinguishable.

Now that is going to be useful, IMO.

Barnes & Noble managed to find just the laziest but also the most tactless way to "celebrate" Black History Month. They have partnered with Penguin Random House in "a new initiative to champion diversity in literature", but rather than actually publishing the works of the works of diverse authors, B&N and PRH thought it would be a good idea to slap brown faces on novels by white authors.

They have selected twelve "classic" public domain works and gave each one "five culturally diverse custom covers designed to ensure the recognition, representation, and inclusion of various multi-ethnic backgrounds reflected across the country".

Update: B&N canceled the project Wednesday morning.

Edit: I am being faulted on Twitter for blaming B&N when this project was actually the brainchild of a famous ad agency. Okay, fine, it was B&N’s contractor, and B&N’s involvement was only the six or seven meetings at B&N corporate where this project was discussed and approved. (That’s not a huge difference in my mind.)

The books in question are:

• Alice in Wonderland
• Romeo and Juliet
• Three Musketeers
• Moby Dick
• The Secret Garden
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Emma
• The Wizard of Oz
• Peter Pan 
• Treasure Island
• Frankenstein

The astute reader will note that eight of the books are by British authors, and two are by Americans. And while the list includes two novels by a black author, I am sure this was an accident (they probably didn’t realize Dumas was a black Frenchman). You will also note that this list includes a work by Shakespeare, just not the one starring a black character.

There are also several titles on this list with problematic content, including Peter Pan and The Secret Garden, where the main character is explicitly racist. (This last issue could be dealt with  by bowdlerizing the book, but even so why would you bother to do so when you could just choose a work by a black author?) Edit: There’s also the hints of antisemitism in Jekyll & Hyde.

And then there are the covers. I don’t know which is worse, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cover where Hyde is depicted as Asian wearing a turban, or the cover of Frankenstein, where Frankenstein’s creation is portrayed as black (in the book, this creature is pursued by pitchfork-wielding and torch-bearing villagers).

I will let you decide which is worse, but I plan to hold back. There are sixty covers, so I am expecting that the worst is yet to come.

Barnes & Noble will be unveiling all 60 covers at an event Wednesday night in NYC (RSVP here). We are also supposed to be able to download the covers from B&N’s website, and I would go look for them, but I just can’t get past the banner on B&N’s home page touting B&N’s book club pick for February.

It is the racist, plagiarized Macmillan novel American Dirt.

Folks, what Barnes & Noble did here was no more and no less than literary blackface.  They republished  questionable works by white authors when it would have been so easy to find actually diverse authors to promote.

It took me less than 5 minutes of searching Wikipedia to find the lists of American authors (Mexican, African-American, Egyptian, etc), and about 5 seconds to figure out how to identify the ones with works in the public domain.

Barnes and Noble could not be bothered to do even that tiniest of work. Instead, they blindly grabbed whatever "classic" was handy, and slapped new covers on them without putting even the slightest thought into the message they were sending.

Update: According to the promotional materials, AI was used to select the titles.

We used artificial intelligence to analyze the text of 100 of the most famous titles, searching the text to see if it omitted ethnicity of primary characters. Using speech and linguistic patterns,or  natural language processors (NLP) accounted for the fact that when authors described a character, they rarely outright state their race, but often use more poetic and descriptive language.

I was originally going to simply mention this in an update, but I decided to pull it out and put it at the end after I realized what this said about the thinking behind this project. They blindly put their faith in tech to save them when they should have been aware of the principle of "garbage in, garbage out". AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and since this one wasn’t fed diverse books, there was no way that it could have picked up on problems like the racism in The Secret Garden, or the symbolism of the Frankenstein or Jekyll & Hyde covers.

And the worst part is that there were any number of people who could have pointed out the problems, had someone thought to ask.

* * *

B&N’s statement:

We acknowledge the voices who have expressed concerns about the Diverse Editions project at our Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue store and have decided to suspend the initiative.  Diverse Editions presented new covers of classic books through a series of limited-edition jackets, designed by artists hailing from different ethnicities and backgrounds.  The covers are not a substitute for black voices or writers of color, whose work and voices deserve to be heard.  The booksellers who championed this initiative did so convinced it would help drive engagement with these classic titles.  It was a project inspired by our work with schools and was created in part to raise awareness and discussion during Black History Month, in which Barnes & Noble stores nationally will continue to highlight a wide selection of books to celebrate black history and great literature from writers of color.

In 2019, authors and indie publishers earned more than $300 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select Global Fund, Amazon announced last week. In total, Amazon has paid out more than $1.1 billion since the launch of Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, in late 2012. (KOLL was the precursor and beta test for Kindle Unlimited, which launched in July 2014.)

Millions of independent authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since the earliest iteration of the service launched in 2007 (it wasn’t called KDP until a couple years later, and in fact most indie ebooks in the Kindle Store on launch day were drawn from Mobipocket’s catalog).

Additionally, thousands of independent authors earned more than $50,000 in royalties last year, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties in 2019 through KDP.

Amazon did not share any other book sales states or publishing figures last week, when it reported total revenue of $280.5 billion for the 2019 fiscal year. This represented an increase of 20% over 2018. Net income also increased 15%, to $11.6 billion.

I wonder how much was paid through Audible? Amazon Publishing?

image by protohiro via Flickr

Who wants to help me chase down a rumor and see if there’s nay truth to it?

For the last 8 months or so everyone in publishing (except for me) has been saying that Amazon was going around and telling publishers that library loans are hurting their sales. I didn’t beleive that was true, and in fact I am still not convinced, but to be perfectly honest I do not have evidence one way or the other.

I had planned to wait and let the evidence present itself, but what with Jon Sargent telling librarians at ALA Midwinter last Saturday that Amazon told him library ebooks were hurting retail ebook sales, I can’t let this wait any more.

I have to find out if this is true, and for that I need your help.

I have two questions for you. I would really like to have you tell me the answers, but I can appreciate that you might be under an NDA and thus unable to say anything. So at the very least I would like you to ask these questions of yourself and of your colleagues.

1. Did Amazon tell you directly that library ebook loans hurts sales? (Did they show you data? What did they say, exactly?)
2. Do you know someone who says Amazon gave them this info directly?

Here’s why these questions matter:

• If you can answer yes to the first question, then you are a primary source. You know for a fact this happened, and everyone else who says it happened is taking your word for it.
• If you can answer yes to the second question but not the first, you are a secondary source.
• And if you cannot answer yes to either question, you are just repeating gossip.

The thing is, folks, all I have to go on right now is gossip. I don’t have any primary or secondary sources, so I don’t have any direct confirmation that this is going on. I want to change that, hence this post.

So why does this matter?

Just because everyone says something is true doesn’t mean it is. For example, at one point everyone was convinced that Amazon was killing indie bookstores, and that turned out to be not true. And for a while there the major publishers were saying that screen fatigue was the reason their ebook sales were down, but they stopped after I pointed out how it wasn’t affecting any other industry.

Will this Amazon rumor have the same fate as those other myths, or will it be proven true?

If you can answer yes to either of the questions, I want to hear from you. I don’t need a quote, and I do not need you to go on the record. I just want to know the answer.

So tell me, what have you heard?

image by alexanderdrachmann via Flickr

I am sure you know that Amazon tracks what you do on the Kindle and in the Kindle app – after all, Amazon can’t store your notes and highlights without first recording them.

But what you might not know is that Amazon logs your every keypress, and they keep that log literally forever (and, unless you live someplace with privacy laws to protect you, there’s no way to delete the log).

I learned that from Adrianne Jeffries, who tweeted a screenshot yesterday showing that Amazon still had Kindle reading data on her from 2018. Amazon is literally logging every time she turns the page:

https://twitter.com/adrjeffries/status/1222277544730337280

What’s not shown in the screenshot is that Amazon also tracks the titles of the books you’re reading.

While Amazon won’t delete this data in the absence of a privacy regulation like the GDPR, you can request the data they have logged about you by visiting the Request My Data page on Amazon.com.

I have asked for the Kindle logs from my account, as well as any logs from my Kindle Fire and Audible. Amazon said it could take up to a month for the request to be processed, which is when I will get to see .

In the meantime, I will be looking at refreshing my post on Amazon security settings you can change for more privacy. What I would like to do is add sections on the additional control you get under the GDPR. I can’t see any of that myself, so if you are familiar with these privacy controls I would like to hear from you.

image by simonov via Flickr