Long time readers of this blog will know that I am not a huge fan of market "analysis" "reports" that try to predict the future of the book market. They have uniformly wrong, and good for only laugh.

So when Mike Cane sent me a link to a press release about a report that predicted the future of the ereader market, my first response was to laugh and point out that four of the companies mentioned in the press release stopped making ereaders years ago (Sony, Ectaco, Ematic, and Aluratek), and that another one (Icarus) was D-E-D dead.

But then I reread the lead prediction, and it got me thinking:

The worldwide market for eReader is expected to grow at a CAGR of roughly -12.7% over the next five years, will reach 200 million US$ in 2024, from 460 million US$ in 2019, according to a new study.

English is clearly not their first language. If it were then they would have said that the ereader market totaled an estimated $460 million in 2019, and is expected to shrink an average of 12.7% each year for the next five years.

As fond as I am of ereaders, it would not surprise me if this happened just as predicted. Smartphones and tablets really have replaced ereaders as the leading devices used for reading. They’re not just always available, but they also have more features and functionality.

What do you think of this prediction?

I was getting caught up on my RSS feeds and twitter link junkies this morning while working on tomorrow’s link post when I came across an editorial. Bradley Chambers wrote over at 9to5Mac that he thinks it’s time for someone to develop a Books Anywhere service similar to the (US-only) Movies Anywhere.

On the movies side of the business, there has been some movement to open up purchases. While the content still has DRM, multiple vendors have worked together to allow a service called Movies Anywhere. If you purchase a movie from Amazon Prime Video, you can stream it on iTunes/Apple TV as you bought it from them. If you find a deal on a film from Vudo (owned by Walmart), you can buy it, and then stream it on Google Play Movies.

A feature like this for books would be amazing. If Amazon puts a book on sale for Kindle, I could buy it and then know I could access it in the future on Apple Books. Digital books have been around for over a decade, so people are starting to build large libraries of purchases that are going to be locked to a particular platform forever.

If consumers knew that their purchased books would be accessible from any modern ebook platform, they’d likely feel more confident in their purchase. Consumers shouldn’t be locked into a single book platform forever. They should be able to access their purchases from any device and any ebook platform they choose. It’s time for Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others to form a Books Anywhere platform to give consumers options in the future.

This is never going to happen, for obvious reasons, but I expect that this editorial will get passed around a lot, so I thought it would be interesting to dig into it.

For starters, this type of service is not in the best interest of either Amazon or Apple. They have a solid position in the ebook market, and letting customers move their ebooks to other service providers could only weaken those positions, so neither one will go along with this idea willingly.

You’d have to force them to do so, which isn’t going to happen because no one in book publishing has that kind of power any more. It’s not like the movie industry, where the several major studios still dominate; while the major trade publishers did have that kind of power at one point, they pissed it away.

Book publishers could have forced all ebook retailers to adopt an interchange service back when the ebook market was still new (2010-ish), but instead the Big Five conspired with Apple to bring about agency ebook pricing. They wanted to kill off the market by raising ebook prices, but instead they killed their own ebook sales, allowed indies to step into the gap, and handed control of the market to Amazon.

Don’t get me wrong, I love how publishers gave authors the opportunity to learn they can do without the gatekeepers, but the Big Five publishers had the chance to define the landscape of the ebook market, and they threw it away.

What’s even worse is that there were several platforms that could have become the Books Anywhere service that Chambers proposed if book publishers had thrown their weight behind one back when they still had power.

Take Readmill, for example. This platform was literally designed to be a Books Anywhere service, and if publishers had demanded that all major ebook retailers supported Readmill, that might have actually happened. Instead, Readmill was acquired by Dropbox in 2014 for $8 million.

And then there’s Adobe Digital Editions. Launched in 2008, Adobe DE was/is a DRM platform that could be licensed by device makers and ebook retailers. They could have shared the same DRM, giving consumers the option of moving ebooks purchased at one retailer to a device purchased from another.

Sure, Adobe DE tech was marginally functional then and it’s still mostly unusable now, but that is mostly because the team that developed it at Adobe spent almost as much energy surviving Adobe’s internal politics  as they did developing the platform.

Tech can be improved or replaced, if there’s demand for it. But instead the publishers let first Amazon and then Apple get away with using their own unique flavors of DRM. And then they lost the power they had.

The simple truth is the book publishing industry passed up any number of opportunities to create a Books Anywhere service, and did not. And I think we all know why that happened.

Let’s be honest: a Books Anywhere service would have actually helped the ebook market, and even today that is the last thing that Big Five publishers want.

image by Dai Lygad via Flickr

Remember Amazon Inspire, the site Amazon launched almost four years ago which teachers could use to share curricula?

Amazon just launched a complimentary service, Amazon Ignite, only instead of sharing content, teachers can use the new service to sell their content to other teachers.

Where Amazon Inspire is a standalone site, Amazon Ignite is a part of Amazon.com along the lines of KDP, only with fewer restrictions on content, and also with better payment terms. Teachers can upload and sell Word DOCs, Powerpoints, spreadsheets, PDFs, and even ZIP files. They’ll earn a 70% royalty on all sales, except for items priced under $2.99, where Amazon charges an additional 30 cent transaction on each sale.

While Ignite is focused on teachers, the content is sold on Amazon.com, and is available to all. The selection can be filtered by grade level, topic, resource type, and educational standard across areas such as math, social studies, technology, science, and language arts. Amazon offers previews of materials with its "look inside" feature (just like in the Kindle Store), along with recommendations and customer reviews.

Engadget

Macmillan CEO John Sargent is back in the news this week with yet another attempt at defending Macmillan’s new policy of windowing library ebooks. This time, he’s shown us just how bad Macmillan is at adapting to the digital age.

The new policy, which went into effect on 1 November, restricts libraries to only buying a single copy of a newly published Macmillan title during the first 8 weeks after it is published. Libraries are charged a ridiculous $30 per copy, rather than the ruinous $60 per copy Macmillan usually charges.

Sargent spoke with librarians last week the COSLA (Chief Officers of State Library Agencies) meeting in Hartford CT on 4 November. According to PW he justified the new windowing in part by saying:

Sargent reportedly told the group of about 10 state librarians that, based on “anecdotal” data, Macmillan believes that “if library users cannot gain access to a new ebook from their library, 8% of those waiting will likely buy the ebook.”

As with Sargent’s other claims, he has provided no evidence to back up his assertion, leaving us nothing to address.

COSLA issued a press release about the meeting, noting that Sargent “likened the ebook marketplace to that for major motion pictures in that new releases have the greatest value in their first few weeks and their initial release should allow for the greatest return on both creative and business investment. The availability of ebooks through libraries, which may be perceived as being free, is, in Macmillan’s opinion, the major driver in the consumer decline.”

This, on the other hand, I can address. While his belief is the accepted practice for Big Five publishers, what it actually represents is Big Five inability to monetize their backlist, and not whether the backlist has value. It’s a sign that Sargent is stuck in the pre-internet era, when the publishers still marketed to the buyers for the bookstore chains, and not the public.

Back in that era, publishers pushed to get their books on to store shelves because that is how consumers found them. That’s not how readers buy books any more, and in fact it’s not how libraries are buying Macmillan ebooks, either.

I was browsing a couple local public libraries today, seeing how many new ebooks they were buying. What I found was that my public library (Prince William) actually bought more Macmillan backlist in the past 6 months than frontlist.  Of the nine fantasy and SF ebooks acquired in the past 6 months, three were new and six were old – as much as eight years old.

The Fairfax County Public Library showed a similar split (and now that they’ve joined the Macmillan embargo, it will probably get worse).

BTW, another thing I noticed is that OverDrive has the weirdest definition of "fantasy"; they apparently think it includes SF genres such as dystopian (Ready Player One is cataloged by OD as fantasy, for example.)

In any case, Sargent’s analogy about movie releases points to the same failing mindset that came up with the new windowing policy, and in fact also gave us agency ebook pricing in the retail market.

Sargent (and the folks around him) can’t figure out how to adapt to the market and sell what customers want, so he has decided to arbitrarily impose restrictions to force his customers to buy what he wants to sell.

In 2010 Sargent conspired with the other major publishers to give us agency ebook pricing because they wanted to sell print books. The market largely ignored this effort, which is why Macmillan has poor ebook sales even though there’s a huge ebook market.

Now Sargent is arbitrarily imposing restrictions on library ebooks because, again, he wants to force his customers to do things his way, rather than adapt to serve the market. He sees the early release window as being the most valuable, so he blocks libraries from buying ebooks then (even though they weren’t buying Macmillan ebooks then anyway).

Something tells me that isn’t going to work any better this time than before.

image  by jvoss via Flickr

Amazon shuttered five of its Amazon Books retail stores over the past couple weeks so the interiors could be renovated and updated. Both of the stores in my area closed, and over the weekend the Bethesda store reopened. (BTW, there is also a rumor of another store on 14th St in DC, but only a rumor.)

They hadn’t quite finished cleaning up when I visited today (there was a hydraulic lift and other equipment right outside the door) but aside from a couple empty Kindle Fire endcaps and two paper signs in the children’s section, it was fully operational.

I only found a couple articles about this location when it opened last June; it seems the novelty had worn off since the DC store opened a few months before.  There are few photos showing the interior of the Bethesda store, so it’s hard to tell exactly how it changed.

I did notice a few changes. though. For starters, the tables in the center of the store all lost their signs in the renovation; this really made it the store look less cluttered.

There’s also a much larger electronics section. Ring and Samsung each have their own table, and what used to be displays against the wall is now pegboard with basic accessories (such as USB cables, audio cables, etc), Kindle Fires, speakers, and web-connected spy equipment (aka smart home devices).

I also noticed when browsing the earlier coverage  that there were a few kid-sized seats in the children’s section; they were replaced by the table in the center:

When it comes to the books section of the store, a reader told me (thanks, Edward!) that it was smaller and that there were books set spine out. I can’t confirm the former but I can confirm the latter.

One of most noteworthy details when Amazon opened its first bookstore was that all the books were displayed with the covers facing out.  This went against standard practice and maximized each book’s exposure while at the same time limiting the number of titles Amazon could stock.

That policy has changed.

BTW, if you zoom in, you may notice another major change to the store; Amazon has replaced the cardboard shelf labels with E-ink shelf labels.

Despite my best efforts, I could not identify the manufacturer.

Everyone is probably going to get really excited about the shelf labels but to be honest I was a little surprised when Amazon opened its first bookstore without them; they are the perfect solution to Amazon’s policy of tying its brick-and-mortar prices to its website.

Amazon’s prices fluctuate daily, so if you wanted to check a price before; you had to scan a book with the Amazon app. Now you can just look at the shelf label, which Amazon can update whenever it wants.

While some libraries are telling patrons that Macmillan’s new restrictions are why its ebooks are not available, others are simply opting not to buy any Macmillan ebooks at all.

The AP and other sources report that  several major library systems are boycotting Macmillan ebooks:

Among libraries participating in the boycott are the Columbus Metropolitan Library, the Nashville Public Library, the Maryland Digital Library and Washington state’s King County Library System. The protest is in collaboration with partners in the Digital Downloads Collaboration.

Patrick Losinski, CEO of the Columbus library, called it a “stand against limiting equal access to our customers.”

“By limiting the number of copies our library can purchase, Macmillan is allowing only a certain segment of our society to access digital content in a timely manner — those who can pay for it themselves,” he said in a statement. “And that’s unacceptable in a democratic society.”

The embargo isn’t going to accomplish anything, obviously, but what’s interesting about the latest developments is that at least one library head is disputing one of Sargent’s claims, that the libraries had agreed to this change in policy.

Library executive director Lisa G. Rosenblum told Seattle’s KUOW radio station that she had never agreed to anything.  "They claim that they had spoken to library leaders, I being one of them, and had presented the plan months ago and we agreed to it,” Rosenblum said, “and in fact, that never happened. We never agreed to it."

The reason this matters is that if Sargent was lying about libraries agreeing to the change, if he is neglecting to mention the real reason Macmillan’s ebook sales are poor (a lie of omission is still a lie), then what are the chances he was telling the truth about anything else he said in either of his two public statements?

Remember, folks, Macmillan hasn’t released any evidence to back up Sargent’s claims. The supposed proof has not been shared with libraries, the media, authors, or with OverDrive.

Surely it is not unreasonable to conclude said evidence does not exist?

P.S. I have contacted Macmillan twice in the past couple weeks concerning this developing story. They have yet to respond.

image by quinn.anya via Flickr

Macmillan’s new restrictions on library ebook sales went into effect on Friday, and OverDrive was ready.

Library patrons who reserve an ebook through the OverDrive Libby app are now being told that the Macmillan title they want to borrow is unavailable due to restrictions imposed by the publisher.

https://twitter.com/Aarya_Marsden/status/1190427383670738944

https://twitter.com/smreid09/status/1190426486148403203

https://twitter.com/MelindaEdits/status/1190436120003145731

Macmillan’s new rules allow for libraries to only buy a single copy of a Macmillan title during the first 8 weeks after it is published. (The reason the libraries mentioned above have several copies but can’t buy more is that the 8-week window has also been imposed on books published in the past couple months.) That single copy costs a ridiculous $30, and not the punitive $60 that Macmillan usually charges for library ebooks.

image by brewbooks via Flickr

Today is the 30th of October. In two days Macmillan will enact its new policy embargoing ebook sales to libraries, a policy which is so unpopular that John Sargent has sent out another letter defending the policy.

Today’s letter makes just as little sense as the one Sargent sent out back in July (PDF). Sargent is apparently convinced that library ebooks – but not the print books in a library’s collection – negatively impact retail ebook sales.

And now to address the windowing. We believe the very rapid increase in the reading of borrowed e-books decreases the perceived economic value of a book. I know that you pay us for these e-books, but to the reader, they are free. In the pre-digital world reading for free from libraries was part of the business model. To borrow a book in those days required transportation, returning the book, and paying those pesky fines when you forgot to get them back on time. In today’s digital world there is no such friction in the market. As the development of apps and extensions continues, and as libraries extend their reach statewide as well as nationally, it is becoming ever easier to borrow rather than buy. This is causing book-buying customers to change habits, and they are fueling the tremendous growth in e-book lending.

I have already previously shown that the idea that only library ebook usage can hurt retail ebook sales doesn’t really make sense given what we know about library patron behavior. To put it simply, when patrons browse libraries, we are looking for availability, not a specific format. Make the ebook more difficult to access, something the publishers have been doing for the past 8 years, and we’ll check out the print book instead.

And as for the supposed hassles of borrowing a print book, that is nonsense on several levels. For starters, Sargent is apparently ignorant of just how easy it is to borrow a book – easier than going to Amazon, in fact. I am now in the habit of requesting library books online, and then picking them up the same day.

But even if that were not the case, Sargent’s position boils down to "it’s too easy to get an ebook, so Macmillan  is adding roadblocks".

This arbitrariness, folks, is why librarians are furious.

And they should be. Macmillan is using a situation they deliberately created – poor ebook sales – as an excuse to impose restrictions on libraries.

The thing is, you know why Macmillan has poor ebook sales, and so do I.

Macmillan has poor ebook sales because in early 2010 they adopted a policy of discouraging ebook sales in favor of print sales.That is when Macmillan conspired  four other publishers as well as Apple to violate antitrust law by forcing Amazon to accept what is called agency pricing, a system where the publishers set the price and retailers are prohibited from deep discounts and sales.

Oh, Sargent dressed it up with excuses about fairly compensating creators, but everyone knows the real reason why Macmillan engaged in the conspiracy. That is established historical fact, and so is the antitrust suit brought by the DOJ, Macmillan settling the lawsuit,  its punishment, and Macmillan’s return to agency in 2014.

To pretend that Macmillan’s poor ebook sales are a result of anything other than Macmillan’s own policies shows a basic lack of awareness of consumer behavior, or a willingness to ignore the facts and lie.

Which do you suppose it is?

image by GoToVan via Flickr

Earlier this month Kobo partnered with the French retailer Fnac to offer a print-on-demand service through Bookelis. Authors who have their books in Kobo Writing Life can pay 49 euros to get their print book listed in 10,000 French-language libraries around the world.

If an author’s book sells well in this service, FNAC will give it a marketing boost.  If a book sells between 1 and 799 copies, the author will be highlighted as one of the top 100 authors Fnac.com. If a book sells between 800 and 1200 copies, it will be promoted on Fnac’s website, and of more than 1200 copies are sold, the author will be interviewed, and the title will be promoted in a newsletter.

image via Actualitte

Amazon’s POD service has expanded into the land of moose and snow. The retailer announced in the KDP support forums last week that KDP Print could now print and distribute books in Canada.

We’re excited to announce paperback manufacturing in Canada! This enables new features for KDP authors, including:

• Faster shipping to your readers in Canada. Manufacturing in Canada enables FREE Two-Day Shipping for Prime Members.
• Amazon.ca royalty reporting in your KDP reports. Previously, Amazon.ca sales were included in Amazon.com sales. As a result, you may see a shift of some units from Amazon.com to Amazon.ca reporting.
• Canadian Dollar (CAD) list prices. You can update list prices by going to your Bookshelf, click “…”, and “Edit Paperback Rights & Pricing”. If you don’t update your list prices, we will convert the United States Dollars (USD) list price to CAD for Amazon.ca. Learn more here.

If you have indicated in your KDP account that you hold distribution rights in Canada for your books, we invite you to set CAD pricing.

KDP Print is the service that Amazon launched as a replacement for Createspace. It launched as a beta in 2016, and officially subsumed Createspace last fall. It accounts for the vast majority of ISBNs registered by authors in the US (the ones that Bowker can track, anyway).

ISBN registrations by authors jumped 40% last year following the merger (just as I predicted when I reported on the KDP Print beta in 2016).

image by faungg’s photos via Flickr

Bowker, the private company responsible for issuing ISBNs in the US, released its annual report on the number ISBN’s sold last year.

The data doesn’t tell us as much as some would think, but it did show that Amazon’s Createspace (aka KDP Print)  bought the lion’s share of ISBNs in 2018. Out of  1,677,781 ISBNs registered in 2018, a total of  1,416,384 were sourced through Createspace. That is a jump of about half a million ISBN registrations from 2017, when Createspace accounted for 929,295 out of 1,192,345 ISBNs registered.

The increase is probably due to Createspace being bundled into KDP last year, and reflects authors taking the opportunity to create print editions for their existing ebooks.

Bowker concluded that the increase meant that "Self-Publishing Grew 40 Percent in 2018", but I would be willing to bet any amount of money you cared to name that they are wrong.  (I count print and ebook editions of a title as one, not several.)

You can find the report here.

The data is of course limited to mainly self-published authors in the USA, and is far from complete.  For example, there’s no mention of Ingram Spark, a POD service that competes with Createspace slash KDP Print. That is probably because Ingram Spark recommends that everyone buy their own ISBN, preferably directly from Bowker.

This report is also missing the many, many, many ebooks that were published without ISBNs (you don’t need an ISBN to sell an ebook in the Kindle Store) and it is missing  any data from ISBN-issuing agencies in other countries. The rules vary between countries; in Canada, authors can get ISBNs for free, while you basically have to rent them in Germany.

So really, aside from tracking the activities of a couple individual companies, this report is actually about as useful as a wet fart in a snowstorm.

Publishers Lunch may claim that "CreateSpace Continues to Devour Self-Published Print Market", but we don’t actually know whether that is true from the data in this report. (It probably is, though.)

image  by silverfox09 via Flickr

The hot publishing news story this week has everyone talking excitedly, but it’s left me scratching my head.

There’s a (paywalled) story over on The Bookseller reporting that the Commonwealth divisions of HarperCollins will soon have ebooks in Kindle Unlimited (but only in the UK and Australia).

I haven’t seen the original article, but from what I have heard there are very few details to be had. We don’t know the payment terms, exclusivity requirements, or the number of titles that will be affected.

I do however have the statement from HarperCollins UK (this is why I waited to post):

We are testing participation with Kindle Unlimited in the UK with a limited number of our ebooks to understand how readers use the service and to ensure we are exploring all possible avenues for our authors. We believe there is opportunity to drive sales through Kindle Unlimited and a la carte sales by allowing readers as much choice as possible in how they access content.

If that is really all that is known about the deal then I really do not understand why everyone is so excited.

The major publishers have been in the subscription ebook market for years and years. They’ve had ebooks in Scribd and Bookmate and (the late) Oyster since forever, and there are even publishers with books in Kindle Unlimited under the same exclusivity and payment terms that authors get. What’s more,  I checked with Remi Harad of Scribd and was told "we have thousands of titles from HarperCollins on our platform, and we add hundreds of thousands of new titles in the platform every year".

A couple of HarperCollins' competitors even launched a subscription ebook service Germany; it’s called Skoobe, and it belonged to Holtzbrink (parent of Macmillan) and Bertelsman (parent of Random House) before the German book retailer Thalia bought a 50% stake.

So this week’s news is a huge deal – compared to what, exactly? Can anyone tell me?

Is it the fact Amazon is involved?

image by Jamais Cascio via Flickr

It’s only been a few short days since Amazon announced that Amazon Giveaways was ending, and now they’ve decided to shut down another promotion service. I have heard from multiple sources (thanks, Lindsay, Adam, and Nicole!) that the retailer sent out an email today informing authors that the Kindle Matchbook program is going to be shut down on 31 October.

Here’s the email:

Starting October 31, we’re retiring the Kindle MatchBook program. If you have books enrolled in Kindle MatchBook, they’ll be unenrolled at that time.

Here are a couple things to know:

• Readers will still be able to buy books in their preferred format (eBook or paperback).
• We’ll issue payments from any remaining Kindle MatchBook sales on your regular payment schedule.

Best regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing Team

Launched in 2013, Kindle Matchbook was a program where authors and publishers had the option of creating ebook+print bundles that combine a Kindle ebook with a print book sold by Amazon. The ebook could be given away for free, or sold for $1.99 or $0.99.

If you’ve never heard of this program, you’re not alone. Aside from the stories about the publishing industry losing its shit when Amazon launched Kindle Matchbook, it has gotten almost no media attention.

Most authors have never heard of it, and the ones that do have books in the program report that there was little interest from readers. "I can see why they are retiring it. I’ve had all my books enrolled in Matchbook since the beginning, allowing people to get a free ebook copy of any paperback they buy," Shawn Inmon wrote on FB. "I think I’ve given away maybe 20 copies in all those years. It just doesn’t seem to be something people are interested in."

Shawn’s conclusion is born out by the fate of the ebook startup Shelfie. That company launched a competing bundling service around the same time as Kindle Matchbook launch, and it shut down in early 2017. Shelfie’s tech was acquired by Kobo in April 2017, and then – nothing.

Clearly this is one of those ideas that is cooler in the abstract than in practice.

image by caligula1995 via Flickr

Amazon is shutting down its nearly five-year-old giveaway service in two weeks.

The retailer sent out an email today, informing authors and others who have run contests that the service is being wound down over the next couple months. The option to start a new giveaway contest will end on 10 October, and Amazon will end all current contests on 17 October.  All outstanding prizes will need to be collected by the end of next month.

Hello,

After careful consideration, Amazon Giveaway is retiring. Thank you for participating in the program. Our records show that you have credits from previous eBook giveaways. These credits can be used to create new giveaways until October 10, 2019 and customers can enter giveaways until October 17, 2019. You can also download any remaining eBook credits as Kindle claim codes from the Amazon Giveaway dashboard. Claim codes do not expire, and can be gifted through social media channels, or directly to fans, followers, friends, or family members.

Any unused credits that are not downloaded as claim codes will be refunded by November 30, 2019.

I heard about the EOL via KBoards and FB, and Amazon confirmed the news on its own site.

So tell me, have you used the service?

I never have, neither as a seller or a contestant. I’ve never found the offers appealing, although I do see that Amazon added Kindle ebooks as a prize option in early 2016.

What did you think of the service?

image by trendingtopics via Flickr