In some ways Kindle Unlimited is a victim of its own success. It offers a great value to readers, so much so that there are many readers who have read hundreds if not thousands of ebooks in the four and a half years since Kindle Unlimited launched.

That high volume of activity can be a problem as time goes on, and readers start to lose track of which ebooks they’ve already read.  While you can easily find out whether you’ve purchased an ebook simply by visiting its listing in the Kindle Store, borrowed ebooks aren’t listed that way, and once you return an ebook it no longer shows up on your Kindle app or ereader.

Fortunately, there is a way  to find a list of all the ebooks that you’ve borrowed from Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited. In fact, there’s several ways to do this.

My Borrowed Items

Your first option is to visit the My Borrowed Items page on Amazon.com.This pages offers a list of your current and returned ebooks for Kindle Unlimited and Prime Reading. You can sort the list by date, author, or title, but it isn’t searchable, nor does it show borrowed audiobooks.

Manage My Content and Devices

Another way to see what you’ve borrowed is to go to your Manage My Content and Devices page. There’s a dropdown menu in the upper left corner that includes options for Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited.

On this page you can see the ebooks and audiobooks you are currently borrowing as well as the titles you have returned. And yes, it does list audiobooks that you’ve borrowed as well, not just ebooks.

Hard on the heels of news that the UK Society of Authors condemning the Internet Archive for piracy comes an announcement from The Writers’ Union of Canada expressing a similar opinion.

From the press release:

The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) joins with our partner organizations, the U.S. Authors Guild (AG), the U.K.’s Society of Authors (SoA), and the International Authors Forum (IAF) in strongly condemning the unauthorized lending of books scanned for the website Internet Archive.

…

Web users around the world are able to access and borrow scanned books from the Open Library site. All that is required is a free membership in the online Open Library.

“TWUC has found copies of Canadian works in the Internet Archive’s Open Library,” added TWUC Executive Director John Degen. “We believe these are unauthorized scans and loans. The harm this does to the e-book market, and to genuine library sales, is incalculable.”

This story has been going for a little over a year now, and it recently flared up again about two weeks back when The Authors Guild issued a statement criticizing the legal argument the Internet Archive made in defense of its piracy, and noting that the Internet Archive was no longer responding to DMCA notices.

I read that statement at the time but didn’t really say anything because I wanted to work out my position on this issue.

While I completely support the legal argument cited by the Internet Archive, I do not support how the IA is interpreting that argument.

The Internet Archive is trying to use an as yet unproven legal argument called "controlled digital lending" as legal cover for The Open Library. CDL uses existing rulings and US copyright law to make the case that there is a fair use argument for libraries scanning the print books in their collection, and lending the scanned copies in controlled circumstances.

This is a solution to the problem of mid-20th century books that are out of print and may never be re-released; CDL gives libraries the option of sharing a digital copy while preserving their print copy. In this limited niche case CDL is a boon to the public, and furthermore it is quite similar to what the HaithiTrust and other libraries are already doing.

Let me be clear: CDL is a good thing in specific situations, and it will benefit the public as a whole. It deserves your support.

The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is trying to use CDL to justify the general case of scanning print books and lending the copies through The Open Library.

That is not the same thing.

The Internet Archive is scanning and lending books that were published as recently as three and four years ago. These books are available both in print and digital, through both retail and library channels, so there was never any concern that the books might be unavailable or were in need of rescue – not in any way, shape, or form.

You cannot make a sound argument that CDL is intended to cover what the Internet Archive is doing. If nothing else, lending copies to anyone anywhere in the world is a violation of the very concept of "controlled" digital lending.

Both the Authors Guild and the Society of Authors have created online open letters to Internet Archive about the unlicensed lending of scanned books(here and here). You should join the letters.

image by vl04 via Flickr

The Authors Guild looked at the survey report on author income that they released a couple weeks ago, and they have come up with a solution that won’t actually fix anything.

They want the US gov’t to introduce a "public lending right" and force public libraries to pay author a fee each time their books are borrowed by patrons.

Edit: James Gleick pointed out in the comments that I was wrong to say that libraries would pay; The Authors Guild is proposing that taxpayers fund the PLR.

The system we envision should be more generous, and of course the U.S. market is much larger. Authors would register—the system might be administered, for example, by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each year libraries nationwide would report aggregate lending statistics for each book (protecting the privacy of borrowers, of course). The systems for handling the data collection are mostly already in place, so the costs should be negligible, but in any case, they must not be borne by the libraries. The maximum payment to any one author would be capped: the idea is not to reward J. K. Rowling (no offense, Joanne) but to provide some much-needed help for midlist authors.

The idea of creating a new government entitlement program may seem insanely ambitious—and we all see the current dysfunction in Washington. But change has to start somewhere. We’re embarking on what will be a long-term effort, hoping that we may someday have a President and Congress willing to spend money investing in culture and the arts once again.

I believe that the time to restart the discussion is now, in the age of widespread e-lending. Libraries are eager to lend ebooks as widely and freely as possible, and they are resentful when publishers put obstacles in their way, while publishers worry that sales of ebooks in particular are being cannibalized by apps that make it easy to download library copies. We never want to tell a library not to lend our books—love of libraries is at the core of who we are. At the same time, librarians themselves are recognizing that they need the professional author to survive.

When it comes to ideas that aren’t actually going to help those intended, this one is a doozy.

The nice thing about PLR being in use for decades is that we have access to data that shows that, contrary to The Author Guild’s claims, PLR does not help help the bulk mid-list authors.

The Author Guild was somewhat correct when they said 22,000 authors in the UK were paid up to 6,600 pounds, but what they forgot to tell you was that almost as many authors were paid zilch.

According to UK data from 2017 (the most recent I can find), a total of 41,750 authors were listed in the PLR system when the payments went out in February. Of that number, 19,548 received nothing at all because their share was less than one pound. Another 16.654 received under 100 pounds, while 3,232 received under 500 pounds (PDF).

The numbers are almost as bad in Canada, where 59% of all registered authors were paid less than $253.80 CAD in June 2018 (this includes the authors who were paid nothing).

The Authors Guild wants to adopt a system which has been shown to have negligible benefit to 87% of authors involved in the UK, and paid negligible sums to most authors in Canada. The only authors who really benefit are the blockbuster authors who don’t need the money in the first place.

To be fair, part of the reason that authors earn so little from PLR is that the program receives minimal funding. The UK government gave it 6 million pounds in 2017, while the Canadian government paid out just under ten million CAD. (The funding rate in Canada is actually significantly higher on a per capita basis – almost twice as high as the UK’s.)

But while we could fix the funding issue without too much trouble (assuming we could get any federal funding at all), that’s still not going to change the fact that only a minority of authors will benefit.

I think The Authors Guild needs to go back and come up with a better plan.

image by comedy_nose via Flickr

Amazon sent ut an email to authors on Tuesday with the news that the Kindle Unlimited funding pool grew to $23.7 million  (plus bonuses) in December 2018 , up from $23.6 million November.

At the same time the per-page rate royalty fell to $0.0048737, compared to $0.005206 in November and and $0.0048413 in October 2018.  The page rate did not decrease uniformly in all markets; the UK rate actually increased.

• US: $0.0049 (USD)
• UK: £0.0039 (GBP)
• Canada: $0.0043 (CAD)
• Germany: €0.0030 (EUR)
• France: €0.0042 (EUR)
• Spain: €0.0045 (EUR)
• Italy: €0.0048 (EUR)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0096 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5851 (JPY )
• Australia: $0.0039 (AUD)
• Mexico: 008111 MXP
• India:  0.947985 INR
• Netherlands: unknown

Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million
• March 2017: $17.7 million
• April 2017: $17.8 million
• May 2017 :$17.9 million
• June 2017: $18 million
• July 2017: $19 million
• August 2017: $19.4 million
• September 2017: $19.5 million
• October 2017: $19.7 million
• November 2017: $19.8 million
• December 2017: $19.9 million
• January 2018: $20.9 million
• February 2018: $20 million
• March 2018: $21 million
• April 2018: $21.2 million
• May 2018: $22.5 million
• June 2018: $22.6 million
• July 2018: $23.1 million
• August 2018: $23.3 million
• September 2018: $23.4 million
• October 2018: $23.5 million
• November 2018: $23.6 million
• December 2018: $23.7 million

via Self Publisher Bibel

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited launched in July 2014. It costs anywhere from $3 to $11.50, depending on the market, and provides limited access to a catalog of over one million ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and digital comics.

Users are limited to only borrowing ten titles at a time, but it’s still a good deal if you can find ebooks you want to read. And if you run out of interesting content, Kindle Unlimited can be canceled at anytime.

There’s no need to contact Amazon to do so; you can cancel Kindle Unlimited in just a few seconds from your account page on Amazon’s website.

Here’s how you can cancel your Kindle Unlimited subscription.

How to Cancel Kindle Unlimited

The first thing you have to do is go to the Manage your Kindle Unlimited Membership page on Amazon.com or one of the other Amazon websites.

Look on the left side of the page for the Manage Membership widget, and click the Cancel Kindle Unlimited Membership button. This will take you to a confirmation page where you need to click the End Membership button.

Clicking that button will end your subscription the date mentioned on the confirmation page.

Fine Print

If you cancel Kindle Unlimited before the end of the billing period, Amazon won’t refund a partial month so you will still have access until the next billing date. Also, if you got the KU subscription as a gift or if it came prepaid, Amazon won’t refund the remaining months, which is why you are better off letting a prepaid subscription run out on its own.

Once your subscription does end, you will lose access to the titles you borrowed through Kindle Unlimited as well as any bookmarks, notes, and highlights you made while your subscription was active.  Amazon does save your annotations, though, just in case you purchase the titles at a later date or re-subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.

Barnes & Noble is avoiding talking about its finances, but the news from Europe is more positive. Lesen.net and other sites report that two German bookstore chains have announced plans to merge. Mayersche and Thalia,

Thalia has around 300 stores across Germany, while Mayersche has 55 bookstores in the German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate.

"The two companies will learn from each other and bring their respective strengths to the benefit of the customers," explains Hartmut Falter, owner and managing director of Mayersche, and in the future second managing partner at Thalia. "In this way, the expertise of Mayersche and Thalia will be brought together to a complementary and new quality."

The companies are still waiting for approval from German antitrust regulators. If this merger is accepted, the combined revenue for the new company will be just over 1 billion euros annually.

image by verchmarco via Flickr

eBook distributor PublishDrive just launched their own ebook conversion tool.  It takes in DOCX files and produces Epub and Mobi files.

BTW, I also added this new tool to my post on ebook-making tools.

From the press release:

To use the conversion tool, users simply upload a Microsoft Word DOCX file. The file is then instantly converted into EPUB and MOBI files that can be downloaded by the user. The tool can be used by anyone, and registration with the PublishDrive platform is not required.

This provides tremendous benefits for indie authors who lack the software or technical skills needed for conversion. With just a few clicks, authors can convert their manuscript to an industry-standard ebook format that is accepted by all major stores and e-reader platforms.

PublishDrive’s CEO, Kinga Jentetics, stated that the conversion tool is one of the most requested features at PublishDrive. “Most other converters,” she said, “leave ebooks with formatting issues or miss out on smart solutions like generating metadata into the EPUB file. As a result, many ebooks generated by other tools do not meet the requirements of commercial purposes or do not exploit embedding smart metadata to boost sales. I am so excited to see how authors will use this public feature. I believe PublishDrive’s public converter will raise the bar for quality EPUBS in stores – which is the number-one thing to provide a great reader experience!”

Rakuten Overdrive released its end of year report yesterday. The company now supports over 43,000 libraries and schools worldwide, including 65 public library systems that each loaned over 1 million digital books to readers in 2018.

Libraries working with Overdrive loaned over 274 million ebooks and audiobooks to card holders in the past year, a 22% increase over the previous year, which is the highest growth rate since 2015.

Highlights from the report include:

• Total digital checkouts from libraries & schools: 274 million (+22% over 2017, the highest growth rate since 2015)
• eBooks borrowed: 185 million (+19%)
• Audiobooks borrowed: 88 million (+29%, outpacing ebooks for the 5^th straight year)
• Ebook and audiobook holds/wait listed: 107 million (+28%)
• Children/YA checkouts/holds: 39 million (+27%)
• 65 public library systems around the world (+12%) with over 1 million digital book checkouts, including 11 over 2 million checkouts, four over 3 million, five over 4 million and two over five million
• New public library (digital) users: 4 million (+15%)

Most popular ebooks borrowed from libraries in 2018:

1. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)
2. The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press)
3. The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn (William Morrow)
4. Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate (Ballantine Books)
5. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (Anchor)

Most popular audiobooks borrowed from libraries in 2018

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (Pottermore)
2. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)
3. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson (HarperAudio)
4. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Random House Audio)
5. A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’engle (Listening Library)

Top digital books borrowed from libraries by genre:

• Adult nonfiction: Educated by Tara Westover (Random House)
• Adult fiction: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)
• Young adult fiction: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Balzer + Bray)

Over the past few months I have been hearing rumors of Amazon changing its ad program while at the same time I’ve been seeing indie titles show up in lock screen ads. All this activity signaled changes were coming, and today Amazon made it official.

A reader just sent me Amazon’s new ad guide for authors (Thanks, Tom!).

The guide details lock screen ads, which are just now (officially) being made available to authors, explains how to use the ad campaign manager, and walks you through the new ways that authors can target ads for specific products. There’s also a timeline explaining when the old product display ads are going to be retired.

Edit: Apparently I was misinformed; authors always had access to lock screen ads (my source was wrong).

I’m still reading the guide and getting feedback from experts, but it looks to me like Amazon just took about a third of what you learned in that course in Amazon ads last year and tossed it out the window.

It’s a whole new ball game.

Amazon Advertising (PDF)

Sorry to keep beating an old drum, but a new survey report on author incomes was released late last week, and it is just as useless as the previous ones.

On Saturday The Authors Guild reported that author income fell 42% since 2009:

The Authors Guild’s 2018 Author Income Survey, the largest survey of writing-related earnings by American authors ever conducted finds incomes falling to historic lows to a median of $6,080 in 2017, down 42 percent from 2009.

The Authors Guild surveyed its membership and the members of 14 other writers organizations in 2018, receiving detailed responses from 5,067 authors. This included traditionally, hybrid and self-published authors who have commercially published one or more books. When discussing median incomes, the survey looked at both full-time and part-time authors.

The respondents reported a median author income of $6,080, continuing a sharp decline over the last decade: $8,000 in 2014 and $10,500 in 2009 (per the Authors Guild’s 2015 Survey), down again from $12,850 in 2007, as reported in a joint Authors Guild/PEN survey.

You can download the report on The Authors Guild’s website. It does not contain all of the data or the survey questions, however. (For example, there’s no info on the age distribution of the 2009 survey respondents – was the average age lower than in 2018?).

This report shares many of the same issues as similar reports from the UK and Canada. They are about as useful as the reports claiming vaccines cause autism.

The Authors Guild report in particular is flawed because it is based on a self-selected survey group where self-published authors are under-represented and retirement age traditionally authors are over-represented.

As any polling expert can tell you, when you let individuals select themselves into a group, you create a biased sample that doesn’t reflect the larger population. The formal name is self-selection bias. It is a known problem in research in sociology, economics, psychology, and many other social sciences, where it even has a pithy acronym (S.L.O.P., for "self-selected listener opinion poll").

When it comes to The Authors Guild survey, the survey group is biased towards older traditionally-published authors. Senior citizens are twice as prevalent in the survey group as in the population as a whole, while younger authors are almost nonexistent among respondents.

TAG tries to brush the issue off with the argument that "very few authors publish before the age of 35". While that may have been true in earlier eras where publishers acted as gatekeepers, it is now 2019, and self-publishing has has made it easy for anyone to publish. (And frankly, there’s no current data to back up that claim about the typical age of first-time authors.)

Furthermore, self-published authors only accounted for a quarter of the survey group when common sense would tell you that, when it comes to the industry as a whole, indie authors outnumber traditionally published authors by a significant margin.

While it would be great to have useful data on author incomes, this report doesn’t actually tell us anything we can use. Its poor methodology invalidated its results, making it a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Next!

image by jamjar via Flickr

Editor’s Note: The following post was originally written on Twitter by @SuperWendy. I edited it and republished it here because I agree with the sentiment.

Over the past few years many blogs, both independent and run by Big Business, have shut down. This leaves many readers sad and wondering what they can do. Well, here’s an idea – how about the care and feeding of your favorite bloggers?

Here’s the thing – support comes in all shapes and sizes and doesn’t necessarily mean $$$$. Acknowledgment, a "well done you" every now and then – these are small things but deeply appreciated.

When was the last time you:

• Commented on a post?
• Signal-boosted a link on Twitter or Facebook?
• Bought something using the blog’s affiliate links?

You can’t be sad about bloggers disappearing and then do nothing about it; it would be like mourning the death of local retailers while shopping at Amazon.

O O O

I have always wanted to say this but have never found a tactful way to do so. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I have tried to turn the post into a graphic for other bloggers to post on their site. (My efforts have not been successful.)

Alas, there aren’t that many bloggers left. Most of the really interesting people I follow are writing on either FB or Twitter. That is fine except if you don’t catch what they are writing  when they are writing it then you will probably never see it. And since both Twitter and FB now decide what you get to see, chances are you won’t see someone’s clever writing in the first place.

That shortcoming is a good reason to support writers who still keep up their own blog, wouldn’t you agree?

P.S. The above text was edited and shared with permission of the original author. Neither of would mind if you reshared the text so long as you give credit.

It has come to my attention that there is still some doubt as to whether a certain blog has a reputation for being less than reliable with its reporting of "exclusive" hardware rumors.

In the interest of settling the issue once and for all, this blog post will be used to document the many, many, many times that Good e-Reader reported a rumor that did not come true.

This post aspires to be comprehensive but it is a work in progress, and more examples will be added over time. I would appreciate any help you can provide.

O O O

In November 2015 that blog claimed Amazon would release the Kindle Voyage 2 that month. Fact check: No such device was launched.

In September 2015 that blog claimed Amazon would release the Kindle Voyage 2 that month. Fact check: No such device was launched.

In February 2018, that blog copied another blogger’s story lamenting the lack of a Kobo mini, and four hours later claimed that Kobo was seriously considering releasing a Kobo mini 2. Fact check: No such device was launched.

In August 2017 that blog claimed Amazon was teasing Alexa on the Kindle. Fact check: This claim is based on a statement that reads more like a "no comment" than a teasing yes, and no such device has been released.

In March 2014 that blog claimed the Paperwhite 3 would have a flexible screen. Fact check: Amazon didn’t mention it in the press release or on the product page.

In April 2018 that blog took a post where I asked readers whether they thought the Paperwhite 4 would have a color-changing "comfortlight" frontlight and spun it into a claim that the device would actually have one.  Fact check: The Paperwhite 4 did not have this frontlight when it launched in late 2018.

In September 2020 that blog claimed the Paperwhite 5 would have a color-changing "comfortlight" frontlight.  Fact check: Undetermined.

In 2016 that blog used my April Fools Day joke as the source for an exclusive story that Amazon was developing a Kindle with a Liquavista screen. Fact check: No such device was ever launched.

In April 2016 that blog claimed that Kobo would launch a new ereader by Mother’s Day. (This inspired a meme about that blog’s rumors over at MobileRead.) Fact check: It didn’t happen. Kobo’s new hardware didn’t even show up at the FCC that year until June, and they launched in August.

In April 2014 that blog claimed that Sony and Kobo were collaborating on a 6″ ereader with a flexible screen. Fact check: No such device was ever launched.

In May 2011 that blog claimed that Amazon would allow Epub on the Kindle. Fact check: This never happened.

Earlier today (24 December 2018) that blog copied another blogger’s speculation about whether Amazon will release another premium Kindle and reported that the Kindle Voyage 2 is going to be released in 2019. Fact check: No such device was launched.

In January 2019 that blog claimed Kobo would release an ereader with audiobook support on Mother’s Day. Fact check: It did not happen.

In October 2018 that blog declared that Sony was going to release a new 13.3″ Digital Paper in 2019. Fact check: No such device was launched.

On 19 February 2019 that blog claimed Amazon wold release a new basic Kindle and a new Kindle Voyage. Fact check: They guessed right 50% this time.

in November 2019 that claimed Sony would release a new 13.3″ Digital Paper in 2020. Fact check: This did not happen.

In August 2019 that blog claimed that Amazon would release a new Kindle Voyage in 2020. Fact check: This did not happen.

In February 2020 that blog claimed Kobo would launch a  device that is "half an e-reader and half something else". Fact check: No such device was launched.

In July 2020 that blog claimed that B&N had stopped selling Android tablets. Fact check: B&N has denied this report, saying that they are merely out of stock.

In November 2020 that blog claimed the Kindle Paperwhite 5 would ship in 2021. Fact check: Undetermined.

In December 2020 that blog claimed a new entry-level Kindle would ship soon. Fact check: Undetermined.

There may not be any honor among thieves, but there is certainly a collegial quid pro quo among tech companies.

The NYTimes published a story yesterday that explained just why Facebook was so good at knowing what you bought on Amazon and how Amazon knew all your FB friends. It turns out that Facebook has been illegally sharing your data with a whole bunch of companies.

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

…

The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

When countries do this, we call it spying, and there is at least some political oversight. But when tech companies do it, they try to keep it as secret as possible, claiming that it is completely legal and above board.

And yet for some reason they won’t tell users what is being shared, and it’s not even clear that regulators know exactly what data was passed or if Facebook’s conspirators (such as Hauwei, Yandex, and Amazon) used it legally.

Hell, there’s evidence that even Facebook doesn’t know how its partners used the data. Several say they were never audited by FB.

Furthermore, these partnerships were almost certainly illegal:

Data privacy experts disputed Facebook’s assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements, expressing skepticism that businesses as varied as device makers, retailers and search companies would be viewed alike by the agency. “The only common theme is that they are partnerships that would benefit the company in terms of development or growth into an area that they otherwise could not get access to,” said Ashkan Soltani, former chief technologist at the F.T.C.

Mr. Soltani and three former employees of the F.T.C.’s consumer protection division, which brought the case that led to the consent decree, said in interviews that its data-sharing deals had probably violated the agreement.

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

When I first read the headline I wondered what law Facebook had broken this time. By the time I got to the end of the piece I wondered if it might be easier to instead list the ones they hadn’t broken.

On the upside, this story did inspire me to invent a new party game. You play it by thinking up the worst possible thing for Facebook could have done and then try to guess how long we’ll have to wait before we find out that Facebook already did it last year.

My entry in this game is that some time in the next 6 months we’ll find out Facebook has a data-sharing agreement with the Saudi gov’t, and that the FB data was used to target Jamal Khashoggi for assassination.

I know I have a reputation for being inflammatory, but let’s not forget that data is Facebook’s stock in trade, and that FB has a record of sharing your data with just about everyone. Hell, Facebook even knew it was selling ads to the Russian government that influenced the 2016 election; what makes you think they didn’t pass data to the Saudis?

image by Book Catalog via Flickr

The internet has made many jobs redundant in much the same way that the word processor made the typing pool a thing of the past, and nowhere is that more true that in the book industry.

USA Today just published a list of industries that lost the most employees over the last decade, and the various parts of the book industry made the list no fewer than three times as positions go the way of the buggy whip.

24. Book and periodical merchant wholesalers

• Employment change 2008-17: -37.6%
• Employment total: 36,184
• Wage growth 2008-17: +7.9%
• Avg. annual wage: $44,372

Book and periodical merchant wholesalers is one of many industries that has been hit hard by the rise in the digital media industry. As people increasingly read their book, magazine, and newspaper content online, book and periodical wholesales are seeing reduced demand from retailers. With the industry in decline, employment has dropped 37.6% over the past decade.

…

13. Book stores and news dealers

• Employment change 2008-17: -43.3%
• Employment total: 81,003
• Wage growth 2008-17: +22.5%
• Avg. annual wage: $38,779

With the growing use of digital media, from newspapers to magazines to books, as well as growing competition from online retailers, the book retailing industry has taken a battering. Amazon has about 50% of the U.S. market book market share, while the largest brick-and-mortar book retailer, Barnes & Noble, has about 20%. One in eight Barnes & Noble locations have shuttered in the past seven years. Overall, employment in the book stores and news dealers industry has declined by 43.3% from 2008 to 2017

12. Support activities for printing

• Employment change 2008-17: -44.2%
• Employment total: 23,920
• Wage growth 2008-17: +126.6%
• Avg. annual wage: $52,346

Support activities for printing is yet another industry struggling due in part to increased digitization – employment decline in the industry over the past decade was one of the largest. Fewer than 24,000 Americans remain working in the support activities for printing industry, down from nearly 43,000 in 2008. The industry includes book binding, embossing, and engraving. But books, magazines, and stationary are quickly being replaced with online versions of the products.

Automation, outsourcing, and the changing technological landscape are expected to cost these industries even more jobs in the future. Martin Kohli, chief regional economist for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that in the next decade publishing jobs will likely continue to decline. “Our 10 year projections did show continued shrinkage in print publishing,” Kohli said.

That cold draft you just felt isn’t from the gaps around the door; it’s the Grim Reaper, coming for your job.

image by Sigfrid Lundberg via Flickr