This probably will not amount to much in terms of real impact.

From Motherboard:

The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office just proposed new rules that will give consumers and independent repair experts wide latitude to legally hack embedded software on their devices in order to repair or maintain them. This exemption to copyright law will apply to smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices.

The move is a landmark win for the “right to repair” movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of “lawfully acquired” devices for the “maintenance” and “repair” of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.

Specifically, it allows breaking digital rights management (DRM) and embedded software locks for “the maintenance of a device or system … in order to make it work in accordance with its original specifications” or for “the repair of a device or system … to a state of working in accordance with its original specifications.”

The thing about jailbreaking devices is that the federal government stopped trying to prosecute anyone for this all the way back in 2010. The act of jailbreaking was already effectively legal because everyone knew they would get away with it.

The new rules aren’t going to change the legal status quo, and they also aren’t going to stop companies from putting up all sorts of extra-legal roadblocks to keep you from fixing your device.

Remember, Apple has an established reputation for being an absolute dick to repair services who dare to use third-party parts in fixing iPhones (they also recently bricked iPhones that had been repaired with a third-party screen). And then there are companies like HP and Epson that attacked printer owners by releasing firmware updates that blocked you from using the third-party ink cartridges you had already installed.

So really, the new rules don’t actually mean anything. The federal government doesn’t care one way or the other, and the tech companies beleive they own you and will do whatever they want to establish and maintain their control.

image by FHKE via Flickr

For the past few years one of the most widely known "secrets" was the identity of Data Guy, the pseudonymous creator of the Author Earnings Reports (at right).

Many people in book publishing knew the name of the person who had upended the book publishing industry with his market analytics reports (including the companies which had hired him as a consultant), and thousands of people who listened to him speak at conferences knew him on sight.

But in spite of the fact that many people knew his name, and in spite of the fact that he  had built the Author Earnings Report into a market analytics startup called Bookstat.com, no one has ever publicly connected the Data Guy pseudonym with the person behind it.

Until today.

According to his LinkedIn profile, the CEO of Bookstat, the company founded by Data Guy, is a former gaming exec by the name of Paul Abbassi.

Edit: Just so you know, I didn’t actually know Paul’s name until this morning. I was not in on the secret, so I had nothing to betray.

Formerly the CTO at Digital Chocolate and the VP of Data Analytics at MaxPlay, Abbassi has two Master’s Degrees in electrical engineering, as well as a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Berkeley.

He has a decade of experience in running gaming companies, and then in 2012 he turned his attention toward book publishing. According to his profile his various projects include Booklead.com, a now defunct deals site, an unnamed company that aggregated book reviews, and then there’s this entry:

Pseudonymous cofounder and chief data scientist for the trade publishing industry’s preeminent independent data-reporting and author advocacy watchdog group. Coauthor of popular industry reports that track shifts in publishing market share by using a scalable cloud of custom-coded web spiders to scrape the public sales rankings of millions of individual titles at the largest online bookstores in real time.

While I do not have explicit confirmation that Paul Abbassi is Data Guy, that description is specific enough for me to safely say that I found the right guy. Furthermore, Abbassi 's profile photo bears a striking resemblance to the person I met as Data Guy at DBW 2015 (shown above).

I have queried several sources, including Data Guy, for confirmation, and no one responded at the time I published this post. If you can confirm his identity, please leave a comment below.

After 4 years and several moderately useful designs, Dasung is finally launching an E-ink monitor with the one feature that I have wanted since the first time I saw the Paperlike at CES 2015.

It has a touchscreen.

Now live on Indiegogo, the Paperlike Pro (Touch) is a 13.3″ E-ink monitor that connects to your PC or mobile device over HDMI. It has a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200 as well as a capacitive touchscreen. The pre-order price is $800.

The Paperlike gives you all the pleasing reading experience of a Kindle’s screen, only scaled up to the point that you can get real work done. As you can see in the video, it’s a pretty cool device. It’s going to finally give me something I wanted, which is to sit back and read with the screen in my lap. (Yes, I can do that with an Onyx Max, but after getting burned once when I paid retail for a disappointing and marginally functional Max unit, I am not going to buy Onyx again.)

I just wish that Dasung had passed on launching the earlier models and instead waited until they could launch this one.

The thing is, I have two very good Paperlike monitors on my desk. A lot of people bought those earlier monitors, and they work great. But those models were also so expensive that a lot of the people who bought one of the previous models will have trouble justifying the purchase of the new Paperlike Pro (Touch).

This could limit sales, possibly to the point that Dasung won’t have enough orders for a production run.

Indiegogo

When Walmart and Rakuten Kobo first announced their partnership in January, a few hopeful souls thought that Amazon finally have a real competitor in the ebook market.

I am sorry to disappoint them, but Walmart doesn’t care as much about this market as they do.

I finally had a chance to visit my local Walmart today and look for the ebook display. It took up two panels in the book section, and was located in a great spot: the corner of two of the main aisles.

That was all it had going for it. According to the pricing stickers, the display had been there since August 22, but no one had bothered to fully set it up or maintain it. They hadn’t even bothered to put out the display units:

Do you see those Kobo Aura boxes? They’re supposed to be behind the counter in the electronics department.

And that shrink-wrapped packet of cards is supposed to be on one of the hooks, only no one had bothered to follow through.

Speaking of ebook cards, the hooks are still covered in the tape that was used during shipment to keep the cards from sliding around. You literally cannot buy an ebook, audiobook, etc without removing the tape:

How many people do you think would even bother?

I did, which is how I know that the cards offer zero incentive for me to complete a sale. The back of the cards don’t even have a blurb, much less any other detail that would appeal to readers.

Folks, this is not a serious attempt to sell ebooks – not in any way, shape, or form. This display tells us that the only thing Walmart cares about is being about to boast that they sell ebooks in store.

So long as Walmart can say that in their quarterly statements, they are satisfied. Actually selling ebooks – well, I doubt that is even mentioned on the same slide deck.

Next!

Amazon PR gave me the runaround on this launch so I have nothing official to tell you, but luckily for me the new Kindle has already leaked on Wired.it. The new Paperwhite is an incremental improvement on the last model. It is waterproof, but not really that much improved over what we have know.

The official announcement will be made in about 40 minutes.

Here’s the product listing on Amazon.com. The price is $249 (that is a placeholder, obviously).

* * *

reposted under a CC license from Wired.it

With tablets being cheaper and offering better color and decent battery life, color-E-ink is a dead duck.

But don’t tell Onyx that; they just showed off a new educational ereader at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Johannes Haupt got up close and personal with the Onyx Youngy Boox, an ereader equipped with a 10.7″ color Carta E-ink screen.

Sporting a resolution of around 150 ppi, this device has a camera of unknown resolution, a stylus, and what looks like an electromagnetic touchscreen (I don’t think we see them using their fingers). It runs academic software and is only available in China.

That is a shame, because this would be a great device to see.

FYI: The reason this device has a screen resolution of 150ppi has to do with how it gets its color. This is actually a 300 ppi grayscale Carta E-ink screen with an RGBC filter applied on top. The filter  adds red, green, or blue on top of a pixel on the E-ink screen (the C is for "clear"). The filter requires 4 pixels on the grayscale screen underneath to give you a single pixel on top This reduces the resolution to 150 ppi.

Here’s a fascinating footnote to tomorrow’s Amazon news.

I have official confirmation today of a rumor that circulated in March: Amazon has shut down its screen tech sub, Liquavista.

An Amazon rep told me this morning that they "can confirm that Liquivista is no longer operating". However, they were 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.

If Amazon stays true to form, this information will probably be released to Techcrunch or another major news site after I break this story.

It is also entirely possible that Liquavista will play into tomorrow’s announcement, but that is really just a wild guess. (I am not playing coy; due to Amazon PR giving me the runaround I really don’t know anything about tomorrow.) That is unlikely, however; I was first tipped to this story by a reader who noticed the Liquavista website went down 3 weeks ago. (Thanks, Javi!) If Amazon were still doing something with Liquavista, the site would have been restored when I pointed it out to Liquavista weeks ago.

Launched in 2006 as a spin off from Philips, Liquavista had been developing a unique type of screen tech that was based on running an electric current through a liquid. This is called electrowetting technology, which is a fancy way of saying that each pixel in a Liquavista screen contained 3 liquids (red, green, blue), and that the color shown by a pixel depended on the amount of power fed into each liquid.

Here’s a demo of a Liquavista screen from 2013. Recorded shortly before the Amazon acquisition, this was the last time Liquavista showed off their screen tech.

The screens were originally being developed as a solution to the battery life issue. Mobile battery life was terrible back in the pre-iPad, pre-iPhone, and pre-netbook era, and people were willing to pay a premium for a screen which used less power than typical LCD screens.

That was why the company was launched, and why Samsung bought it in 2011, but by the time Amazon bought Liquavista in 2013, it was pretty clear that there was no broader market for this tech. The problem of mobile battery life had been solved and battery capacity was already improving year by year, and screens were getting more and more energy efficient.

Coincidentally, I was the first to report that Samsung bought Liquavista in 2011, and the first to report that it had been sold to Amazon in 2013, and now I am the first to officially report Liquavista’s demise.

Liquavista never did get their screens into production; I see from my archives that mass production was supposed to begin in 2013; however, nothing reached the market, and it’s not clear that they even started production.

Liquavista were one of many startups that competed to provide a low-power screen solution, and most of them are dead now.  The lucky few like Pixtronix and Mirasol lived long enough to be acquired, while the majority declared bankruptcy or simply shut down.

The one survivor from that era is E-ink. First commercially produced for the Sony Librie and later the original Kindle, E-ink screens still dominate the ereader market, although with the way that market is shrinking due to people holding on to last year’s model (it still works great), it is hard to predict the company’s financial future.

Liquavista’s future is equally uncertain.

There are two frequently repeated misconceptions about the ebook market that continue to be repeated no matter how often they are debunked.

The first is that AAP publisher ebook revenue is the sum of global ebook sales, and the second is that ISBN registrations equals the number of titles published by indie authors each year.

The first misconception still hasn’t died out despite numerous repetitions – including in every AAP press release – explaining that the AAP stats reflect publisher revenues, not what consumers paid to retailers, and that the stats reflect less than half the market (indies and non-AAP publishers account for the rest).

The misconception about ISBNs, on the other hand, looked like it had died out a couple years ago after countless repetitions pointing out that an ISBN is not required to bring an ebook to market, so a lot of authors don’t bother getting one and thus the reported stats about ISBNs registered every year don’t mean what you think they mean.

Alas, Bowker, the company that administers ISBNs in the US, seems determined to revive this misconception. For reasons known only to them, earlier this week they misrepresented their annual report on ISBN registrations:

According to the latest report from ProQuest affiliate Bowker, self-publishing grew at a rate of more than 28 percent in 2017, up from an 8 percent increase during the prior year. The total number of self-published titles grew from 786,935 to 1,009,188, surpassing the million mark for the first time.

Self-publishing of print books increased by 38 percent in 2017 for a total of 879,587. This is the fifth consecutive year of print growth – driven by a 50 percent increase at CreateSpace, a self-publishing platform. Self-published ebooks decreased by 13 percent, continuing a downward trend for the third successive year. Two service providers, Smashwords and Lulu, accounted for 105,037 ebook titles, 81 percent of the ebook total of 129,601.

As the numbers confirm, self-publishing continues to grow each year. According to Beat Barblan, Director of Identifier Services at Bowker, "Self-publishing shows no signs of slowing down and continues to grow at a steady rate. CreateSpace was very popular in 2017 – and now that its customers are moving to the new Kindle Direct Publishing platform, we don’t expect any decline in self-publishing."

While the statistics are factually correct, Bowker’s description is utter hokum.

Here’s some background for those just hearing about this issue for the first time.

• An ISBN is more or less a serial number for  a book. You must get one for a print book or it can’t be distributed, but the same is not true for an ebook (although there are benefits to getting an ISBN for an ebook).
• ISBN registrations are handled by a different agency in each country. In the US, that is Bowker.
• Since Bowker charges for ISBNs, a lot of authors save money by not getting an ISBN for their ebook.
• Bowker only license ISBNs in the US, and nowhere else, sothey can’t tell you the number of ISBNs registered by self-published authors in, say, Canada.

This means that Bowker’s claim of a million indie titles published is a miscount that ignores the entire rest of the world as well as the majority of ebooks published in any given year.

To put it simply, folks, we have no clue how many ISBNs were registered by indie authors, much less the number of titles published by said authors.

Next!

Whatever subcontractor is now running B&N Press on behalf of Barnes & Noble sure is doing a bang up job. They just announced a bevy of new features, including:

• Print Pre-Order: Now available for all print books on sale. Set your publication date up to 180 days in the future without needing final cover or interior files. Don’t forget, eBook pre-order is already available up to 12 months in advance of publication!
• Order advance copies of print books ahead of publication: Don’t forget, you can order personal copies of your print books, even if the book is available for pre-order, before your on-sale date.
• Customize your print book spine: You now have the ability to customize your print book’s spine if you’re uploading separate front and back cover files. Match the color of your book’s spine to any color in your existing cover files, and choose your font size and style.

Does anyone know who is running B&N Press now?

I have looked and I can’t find any info.

It looks like Amazon may have begun its irregularly scheduled leaks in anticipation of a new Kindle launch.

Earlier today an announcement was made on the Weibo social network that Amazon would be holding an event in next week on the 17th in Beijing. The event will be held at the Beijing·Zhuzhong Art Museum at 1:30 pm local time (1:30 am US eastern time).

The graphic doesn’t say anything specific about the new Kindle, although to be honest I’m not sure exactly what it says (Google Translate doesn’t work well with Chinese).

I have queried Amazon on this topic, but I have not received a response. It’s hard to tell you what that means, but I can assure you I will be keeping an eye out for additional leaked details.

Stay tuned.

Kindle Frere

So six years after EU members were punished for lowering the tax they collect on the sale of an ebook in violation of EU rules, the European Union decided that this wasn’t such a terrible idea after all.

From Reuters:

European Union finance ministers decided on Tuesday to allow lower sales taxes on e-books and other digital publications and to align them to reduced levies applied to paper versions of books and magazines. The deal will allow EU states to apply reduced or even zero VAT rates to electronic publications, which are currently taxed at a minimum of 15 percent because they are treated as electronic services.

“This proposal is part of our efforts to modernize VAT for the digital economy, and enables us to keep pace with technological progress,” said Austrian Finance Minister Hartwig Loeger, who chaired the meeting.

The agreement comes after more than two years of talks after a European Commission proposal. The European Parliament supported the plan a year ago.

While it is good that the EU is finally catching up with the market, let’s not forget that it only took them 18 years to reach the conclusion that ebooks should be taxed the same as print books.

Remember, Amazon may have jump started the ebook market in 2007, but the ebook market really got its start in 2000. Many of us had been buying ebooks for years before the Kindle came along, and some had been paying an unreasonably high tax for the privilege.

Okay, things weren’t so bad in the early years before regulators was paying attention, and Europeans could duck paying VAT by buying from US ebook retailers. That doesn’t change the fact that the EU’s tax rules made no sense, and that it took 18 years to change those rules.

It’s almost as if the EU is being run by Vogons.

Over the past several years I have written about several E-ink laptop concepts that might one day make good writing tools. None have gotten past the concept stage (not even the Onyx Writer) but that is about to change.

I just got an email from Astrohaus, makers of the Freewrite hipster typewriter, announcing their new, smaller, distraction-free writing device.

Folks, meet the spiritual successor to the venerable Alphasmart Neo:

The Freewrite Traveler is a netbook-sized device that fixes many of the shortcomings of the 3-year-old Freewrite. The Traveler weighs less than half of the Freewrite, is promised to cost half as much, and folds into a compact clamshell.

Where the Freewrite only counted as portable if  your goal is to be seen lugging its heavy aluminum mass around, the Traveler is small enough that you could conceivably slip it into your backpack next to your laptop.

It functions essentially the same as the Freewrite, though; both devices are strictly writing devices. They don’t have any apps, and the Freewrite doesn’t even have an editing feature or a way to transfer files via USB. Instead, your work is synced over Wifi to your cloud accounts (Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive supported).

Astrohaus has been showing off the Traveler since about March, but I don’t think it’s gotten much media coverage yet. I can’t find any videos or blog posts, or much in the way of photos.

It is officially launching on Tuesday, so the dearth of coverage will probably be resolved by tomorrow.

BTW, the Freewrite costs $500, so the Traveler should cost $250.

What do you think of the design?

In form it reminds me of the  netbook that Palm tried to launch a decade ago. That device never reached the market because Palm realized they had already been beaten by netbooks running Windows.

In function, this reminds me of the Alphasmart Neo. Released in 2004, that was one of the last in a line of classroom writing devices from Alphasmart. The Neo was little more than a keyboard with a small LCD screen – just enough hardware that you could bang out a paper, but not enough that you could play games on it.

A lot of us have fond memories of Alphasmart or one of the several devices that stepped into its niche; how do you think the Traveler will compare to them?

Astrohaus

It seems Kobo wasn’t too happy at the absolute secrecy surrounding its new ereader, so it decided to fix that situation by leaking a product render of its next ereader.

A short while ago Kobo Spain tweeted a graphic that showed a new ereader named the Kobo Forma. They quickly deleted their tweet, but not before several people snagged copies:

Who? It’s true? Today at Kobo Spain: @kobo @Kobo_ES pic.twitter.com/35EF2q1B1A

— Ernest Prats Garcia (@eprats) September 27, 2018

The Kobo Forma would appear to be the unnamed Kobo device that cleared the FCC in August.

We know almost nothing about that ereader beside the fact it had Wifi but not Bluetooth, and that the FCC unit had a 1.2Ah battery, but now it looks like it will have a one-handed design similar to that of the Kindle Oasis.

We’ll know more in a couple weeks.

I for one can’t wait to see it; I love the idea when Amazon tried it, but never found the original Oasis appealing (and Amazon wouldn’t send me an Oasis 2 review unit, so I can’t say much about it). But now Kobo is going to give it a try, and it’s like Christmas is coming early this year.

Stay tuned.