Following several years of quiet debate, a division of the American Library Association has announced that it will be changing the name of its children book award.

From The Guardian:

The board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) made the unanimous decision to change the name on Saturday, at a meeting in New Orleans. The name of the prize was changed from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The association said Wilder “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values”.

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954. The ALSC said Wilder’s work continued to be published and read but her “legacy is complex” and “not universally embraced”.

Wilder was born in 1867 and died in 1957. She is best known for her eight Little House on the Prairie novels, about pioneer life in the American West, which were published between 1932 and 1943.

Wilder is not the first to be removed from an award due to the author’s racism; the World Fantasy Award used to feature a bust of H P Lovecraft before it was changed in 2015. It was widely known that Lovecraft was racist, but the prize was only changed four years after the award was won by Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, who only learned of Lovecraft’s racism as a result of her win, and the year after Somali-American Sofia Samatar won.

Scholars have been discussing the racism in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books for decades, but it was only in the last few years that the issue started getting widespread attention for the racist attitudes toward Native Americans as well as the racist cultural references toward African Americans.

It was only a matter of time before her name was removed from the award, and frankly, I am surprised those books are still being used in schools – they amount to cultural propaganda and should not be taught to impressionable minds. They present an idealized version of a period of American history that glosses over the many darker aspects of that period, so much so that the racism is only the first problem with the books.

Prime Reading is a part of Amazon Prime where readers can access thousands of ebooks for free.

The service initially launched in the US in late 2016, then expanded to the UK, Austria/Germany, China, and now France.

Amazon.fr added a Prime reading feature to Amazon Prime this week. Subscribers can now access thousands of ebooks, all for free. It’s hard to tell the exact figure (that is shown only to paying customers) but I am told that Harry Potter books are included, and so are Anna Gavalda.

The service is free to readers, but authors and publishers are paid a flat fee for putting their works in Prime Reading for a set period of time. The payment and period varies based on a book’s popularity, with Amazon paying anywhere from 100 euros to a couple thousand dollars for the rights to include a book in Prime Reading for a period of 180 days. (The book will of course remain in the regular Kindle Store during that time.)

IDBoox

Whip out the Advil, because a recent ruling by the US Supreme Court is going to cause a lot of headaches for authors and other small operators who sell online.

The Court issued a ruling today in South Dakota v. Wayfair which overturned decades of precedent and created a thorny tax problem for sellers.

From Ars:

State governments may require online retailers to collect sales taxes even in states where the retailers have no physical presence, the US Supreme Court ruled in a decision issued today.

The 5-4 ruling could clear the way for more states to require collection of sales taxes on products ordered online from out-of-state retailers.

The case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., Et Al., involved a South Dakota state law "requiring out-of-state sellers to collect and remit sales tax 'as if the seller had a physical presence in the State,'" the decision noted. Online retailers argued that the law was unconstitutional, and the State Supreme Court agreed, but the US Supreme Court overturned the state court ruling. South Dakota expects to collect another $48 million to $58 million in taxes a year because of this ruling.

The South Dakota Supreme Court based its ruling on a 1992 US Supreme Court case, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, which held that out-of-state companies don’t have to collect state sales taxes in states where they don’t have a physical presence.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling said the Quill decision was flawed:

Quill imposes the sort of arbitrary, formalistic distinction that the Court’s modern Commerce Clause precedents disavow in favor of "a sensitive, case-by-case analysis of purposes and effects." It treats economically identical actors differently for arbitrary reasons. For example, a business that maintains a few items of inventory in a small warehouse in a State is required to collect and remit a tax on all of its sales in the State, while a seller with a pervasive Internet presence cannot be subject to the same tax for the sales of the same items.

"Forty-one States, two Territories, and the District of Columbia have asked the Court to reject Quill’s test," today’s ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, also said. "Helping respondents' customers evade a lawful tax unfairly shifts an increased share of the taxes to those consumers who buy from competitors with a physical presence in the State. It is essential to public confidence in the tax system that the Court avoid creating inequitable exceptions."

The thing about this ruling is that it applies to all sellers, including authors who sell ebooks, print books, and other products on their websites.

If you sell direct (and reside in the USA) then you will need to find a way to collect sales tax for every state in the US. I expect that payment processors like Stripe and Paypal will have to step up and start collecting taxes on the seller’s behalf; it is frankly beyond the abilities of most small sellers.

I don’t have the answer right now how you would collect taxes, but I plan to look into it and devote a newsletter to it.

image by Oneras

B&N’s once mighty ebook division has fallen on hard times. What at one point was a billion dollar a year business has now shrunk to the point that there are digital publishing startups that have more revenue and larger work forces.

Barnes & Noble reported in its annual SEC filing that annual Nook revenues for the period ending 28 April totaled $111.5 million, down from $146.5 million the previous fiscal year. That is a decline of 24% in just a single year, and a decline of close to 90% from peak revenues in 2012.

The Nook division accounted for 3% of B&N’s revenues, with gifts and toys accounting for 28% and media (including books, DVDs, etc) accounting for 69%.

B&N also told the SEC that as of 28 April, the Nook division employed 57 people, including part-time workers. It’s not clear how many of those provide tech support, but we do know that many parts of the Nook division have been outsourced or shut down. eReader hardware development, for example, used to be handled in-house but has since been handed off to Netronix, a Taiwan-based OEM.

B&N had reduced staff and outsourced functions in a bid to reduce cost and turn the Nook division profitable; however, Nook continued to show an operating loss last fiscal year, costing B&N $36.3 million.

Edit: And yet somehow the Nook division also turned a profit, according to Forbes:

B&N CFO Allen W. Lindstrom noted in an earnings conference call that, ‘NOOK turned its first ever full-year profit, generating $3.5 million of EBITDA. Sales declines were offset by continued cost rationalization.'

Amazon is about to throw a wrench in authors' carefully made plans.

Reports are coming in that some time in the next month, Amazon will be sending Createspace users an email informing them that Createspace is merging into KDP Print. Yes, the inevitable is about to happen, but it’s not all bad; according to my source, legacy pricing for existing Createspace users will still be available (Createspace’s pricing was better in some markets).

Launched in July 2016, KDP Print is intended to give authors an easy to to manage both their print and digital books in a single location. In its early days access was quite limited, but the service opened for a public beta test early last year, and Amazon has been adding features ever since.

The newer platform doesn’t quite have the same features as Createspace, but according to experts there are good reasons to choose either one. It appears, however, that Amazon might soon no longer give authors a choice.

Or so early reports suggest; I am still working to confirm this rumor. The Createspace website is down at this time, thus making it impossible to see if they have posted a notice, and Amazon hasn’t responded yet to my query.

Have you been told anything by KDP or Createspace support? Can you go ask them and see what they say?

Update: I think we have confirmation from Amazon:

We don’t comment on rumors or speculation. However, as we’ve said previously in response to author inquiries, CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing are both part of the same team that helps authors publish and sell their books. They also use the same facilities and printers. Both services will be fully integrated in the future. This will allow us to innovate even faster for customers.

image by blogefl via Flickr

Earlier this week Amazon released a statement tangential to the ongoing problem of cheating in Kindle Unlimited, but as with many of Amazon’s statements the bigger story is what was left unsaid.

To recap, Amazon has a problem with people gaming the system in Kindle Unlimited. This issue has been around since the beginning, and as Amazon changed the rules to thwart the cheats, the cheaters changed their tactics in what is no more or less than a game of whack-a-mole.

In the early days people were uploading really short books, and were getting paid for a loan when the 10% threshold was reached (with a 10 to 20 page book, this didn’t take long). Amazon fixed that by switching to a system where they paid based on the number of pages read by subscribers, and in response the scammers invented the book-stuffing con and started uploading really long books.

The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book. This worked because at the time Amazon could only track a reader’s location but not which pages they had read.

Amazon announced this week that the jump to the end trick no longer worked:

In response to concerns we’ve heard from authors, we wanted to take a moment to clarify in more detail how we measure pages read to calculate the monthly allocation of the KDP Select Global Fund.

We have worked steadily over time to improve the fidelity of the KENPC system that measures the number of pages read. For the vast majority of cases, KENPC v3.0 records actual pages read with a high degree of precision. For the few remaining cases, such as very old devices, we employ several processes and technologies (both manual and automated) to accurately measure pages read. In addition, we regularly audit the pages read of top titles.

Our commitment to the fair allocation of the KDP Select Global Fund remains a top priority. That includes addressing attempts to manipulate our services. If you have direct evidence of these types of activities, we will review every single example provided to us at [email protected].

There were reports last fall that this had been fixed, but I have also heard from authors who disagreed, so it is good to finally get a statement from Amazon.

But even so, while Amazon may claim to count pages read with exactitude, authors argue that the way Amazon measures a page size is less an exact science than a wild guess or perhaps a randomly generated number.

Authors are saying over on KBoards that it is possible to make minor changes to an ebook’s formatting and end up with significantly different KENPC. One said he could format his ebook fiver different times and get five different KEPNCs, and another wrote:

I contacted my rep about this just a few months ago when I was reuploading a few books and watching the KENPC change. I waited, made a small tweak, uploaded again, and got another different page count. Often by 20+ pages. Using Vellum for formatting, no hacks, and there’s significant variability among books with similar word count. This is one of the most frustrating things for me. It needs consistency or it will forever be gamed.

And a third wrote:

My two most recent books (1 and 2 in a series), formatted exactly the same with identical front and back matter. 66,006 words=369 KENP. 62,445 words=308 KENP. On one book, 202 words per page. On the other book, 178 words per page. My writing style and language doesn’t vary that much between the two books. One book has 6% fewer words, and 5% fewer characters including spaces, but it is allocated 17% fewer KENP.

The thing is, folks, if one page in Book A is equal to 1.2 pages in Book B and 0.8 pages in Book C then it really doesn’t matter how carefully Amazon counts the pages.

Any count reported by Amazon is fundamentally bullshit because there is no single standard page size.

Let me phrase it another way: Amazon’s accounting system in Kindle Unlimited is broken on a fundamental level.

Cheaters are and will continue to be a serious problem (they already know how to format their books to maximize page counts) but the much larger problem is that no two authors are being paid the same way.

The emperor truly has no clothes, folks.

image by bdesham

In spite of cheats like Chance Carter, the third largest ebook market in the world continued to expand in May 2018.

Amazon announced on Friday that the Kindle Unlimited funding pool total $22.5 million in May (plus bonuses – most of which went to the cheats) up from $21.2 million in April 2018. At the same time the per-page rate royalty hovered at $0.00454 in May, compared to $0.00456 in April and $0.004449 in March 2018.

• US: $0.0045 (USD)
• UK: £0.0035 (GBP)
• Germany: €0.0031 (EUR)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0045 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.0045 (CAD)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0110 (BRL)
• India: 0.0883729 (INR)
• Japan: 0.5631 (JPY )
• Mexico, Australia: 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

via Self Publisher Bibel

Instafreebie and other free ebook sites are a great way to give away ebooks, but not all readers are capable of loading an ebook on their Kindle.

That is why some authors give away copies bought in the Kindle Store, and now Amazon is making it easier.

Last week they announced a new bulk purchase option for Kindle ebooks.

Now, Amazon enables you to purchase multiple copies of your eBook in a single order.

As an author, a great way to build your brand is to run social media giveaways, gift your eBooks to readers at a conference, and/or send an eBook to your newsletter subscribers.

When you purchase multiple copies of a Kindle book on Amazon, we create a set of redemption links, one for each copy of the eBook. You can distribute these links to any reader on Amazon.com.

To get started, find an eBook, choose “Buy for Others”, and select the quantity of eBooks you’d like to purchase.

Visit our Help Page to learn more about our new Kindle feature “Buy for others”.

Paying retail for a volume order of ebooks is rather expensive, but there are some readers that can’t be reached any other way.

image by Tinh Te Photos

Launched in late 2016, KDP Print is Amazon’s solution for a single publishing portal that covers both print and digital books (audiobooks are probably on the roadmap as a future addition – KDP Audio, anyone?).

Many authors beleive Amazon intends for KDP Print to replace Createspace, and now it looks like Amazon may be using a subtle but annoying tactic to get authors to leave Createspace.

There’s a thread over at KBoards where authors have been sharing their recent experiences with  Createspace  demanding proof that the authors own the copyright on their books. For example:

I’ve used Createspace since 2013. I noticed a drastic decrease in quality control when KDP print launched. In four of the almost five years I’ve been using Createspace, I’ve never had any copyright verification requests. This year, I’ve received 18. Some of them, like the ones with a pen name, I rolled my eyes and responded to the email. Even more, were non-English editions published under the name on my Createspace account. Again, I rolled my eyes and replied to the email. Yesterday, I was updating my superhero novel cover with a new back cover blurb, and I get a verification email. The novel in question has been on my Createspace account since it’s publication in 2015, and uses the same author name that the Createspace account is registered with. There is absolutely no reason for Amazon to verify copyright other than they want to make continuing to use Createspace difficult to those of us who don’t want the hassle of using KDP Print.

It’s really hard to tell whether this is an over-zealous bot or an intentional policy, but there is a report that the uptick in verification requests came at the request of Amazon. "I asked one of the reps what was the deal of so many of these happening to independent authors and they confirmed there was an algorithm issue causing a much larger slew of items being triggered," an author reported. "They also said this was something initiated on the Amazon-side of the company outside of Createspace and they had to go through the 'procedures' as specified."

At this point the discussion I have been able to find is mostly limited to KBoards, so it is difficult to judge the scale of the problem.

Have you gotten one of these emails? Is this a hot topic in private backchannel conversations?

image by Eleaf

The Authors Guild has a well-deserved reputation for being a puppet of legacy publishers. This group has never missed an opportunity to bash Amazon and spread FUD (even though Amazon does more business with authors than publishers pay in royalties).

This is why I was surprised to read that The Authors Guild says they have set up a way that members can use to resolve disputes with Amazon.

After discussions with Amazon, we have agreed to an additional procedure that will directly flag issues where Authors Guild members feel they are being harmed as authors (not as customers), and online communications with Amazon have not borne fruit in a timely manner. Authors Guild members may now file complaints directly with the Guild. The Guild will review all of the author complaints to determine whether they raise problems that Amazon can or should address.

The Guild will not be able to successfully resolve every issue, of course; but in cases where the incident has been in violation of Amazon’s policies, they have worked with us to resolve them. In other cases, Amazon has heard us out and has been willing to review policies that work to the detriment of authors.

HOW TO LET US KNOW ABOUT YOUR ISSUES WITH AMAZONAuthors Guild members may contact us at [email protected] or here if 1) they have an issue with their books’ Amazon listings, such as where a third-party seller has won the “buy box” when there are publisher copies readily available, 2) infringing copies of their books are being sold, or 3) fake or abusive reviews of their books remain on their books’ pages. We ask that members attempt to resolve these problems directly with Amazon first through their normal complaint procedures

This option is only available to TAG members, and we don’t yet know if it will help, but god knows the industry needs this.

I have heard way to many horror stories about authors being punished by Amazon without ever being told exactly why. In many cases, the authors' only recourse is to ask for an explanation, and then after they get a form email response, appeal to Jeff Bezos.

Any alternative to the current situation is a huge improvement.

image by streetwrk.com

Amazon still hasn’t released a statement about the most notorious Kindle Unlimited abuser, but they have taken the smallest possible step to curb the abuse of Kindle Unlimited.

Amazon has removed the ebooks written by "Chance Carter" from the Kindle Store. The retailer has also removed the ebooks published by Carter under the "Abby Weeks" pseudonym. Both accounts look like the owner was booted from KDP, although there’s no way for third-parties to confirm this conclusion.

To recap, "Chance Carter" was the guest of honor in last week’s hot story about cheating in Kindle Unlimited. Along with Abby Weeks, Chance Carter was the pseudonym for someone who was publishing ghost-written books in Kindle Unlimited (a ghost writer on Fiverr has claimed credit for writing a couple titles published by Carter, yes).

This individual stuffed multiple novels inside a single ebook before uploading the ebook to Kindle Unlimited as one really long, really large file. The latter novels were described as bonus content, and were published on their own as well as stuffed in the back of other ebooks published by Carter.

KU users were then tricked into flipping to the end of an ebook by a freebie offer. Due to a bug in the Kindle platform, Amazon can track your location, but not what pages you have actually read. As a result, this paid Carter the same as if the reader had actually read an ebook all the way through.

Edit: I have seen nothing official from Amazon to suggest it, but a number of authors are convinced that the jump to the end trick no longer works. There is a good chance that I am wrong in the previous paragraph. (I have trouble believing it because if they are right then book stuffing would not be profitable to be worth the effort.

By using this trick, Carter was paid around $14 to $15 per user. All this money came from content created cheaply by ghost writers.

Carter insists that everything they did was entirely within the rules at the time. That may be true (I have a different interpretation of the rules),  but that doesn’t make it ethical nor does it indemnify Carter from public criticism.

At best, Carter is the equivalent of the content mills that stuff Google’s search results with poor-quality content. Those content mills used to rank high in the search results due to good SEO practices, but that only lasted until Google changed its algorithm to punish purveyors of bad content. Content mills are still around, but they don’t enjoy quite the success they used to.

Like Google, Amazon has changed the rules in Kindle Unlimited  several times, all in an effort to fight cheaters. Most recently Amazon restricted bonus content to 10% of an ebook’s length (this rule was announced Saturday), but past rule changes have included switching to a system that paid based on pages read rather than per copy,  limiting the length of ebooks in KU, and banning practices like putting a TOC at the end of a book.

While Carter would claim that they haven’t done anything wrong because they have stayed entirely within the rules, the fact that Amazon kept changing the rules to ban specific practices should have been  a clue that said practices were not ethical or fair.

image by Rusty Clark 

Amazon released a new update for its ereaders this week, and it’s going to make picky readers very happy. The update adds support for Arabic-language ebooks which have been available through the Kindle Store since last fall, and it also gives readers the option to install their own font.

I haven’t had a chance to test it myself (my Kindle has a dead battery), but according to Amazon’s help pages this update adds a "fonts" folder where you can install your choice of fonts. The fonts have to be either OpenType (OTF) or TrueType (TTF), and all you have to do is copy them to that folder via USB.

I have a ZIP file of fonts over on this post, if you need them.

This is great news for anyone who needs a non-English-language font, and it’s a shame Amazon did not add this option years ago.

Amazon will be pushing the update out to Kindles over the next few weeks. If you don’t want to wait then you can download the update from Amazon and install it yourself.

Changelog

• Read Arabic language books: Your Kindle e-reader now supports Arabic language books. Choose one from a selection of thousands on the Kindle store and enjoy reading Arabic content.
• Read with your own fonts: You can now install your favorite fonts on your Kindle and choose one of them from the Display Settings (Aa) menu to read your eBooks. Connect your Kindle to a computer and refer to the “Read Me” file in the “fonts” folder for more information.

You’re not going to believe the email Barnes & Noble is sending out today.

I’ve just learned that B&N is withdrawing support for the Nook 1st edition, the dual-screen ereader than B&N launched in late 2009. (I didn’t realize I still had one on my account until I got this email.)

You can find the email at the end of the post. It says that owners will not be able to sign in, register, etc on their Nook 1st Editions after 29 June. (If  the device is kept offline, it will continue to work, obviously.)

Anyone who got the email can get a replacement Nook ereader or Android tablet at a discount.

The Nook 1st edition was released on October 2009. It had a 6″ E-ink screen, a 3.5″ control screen, and ran Android 1.5. It shipped with both Wifi and 3G connectivity, and was cheap at $259.

A Wifi-only model was released in June 2010.

This ereader received a few minor updates in 2010, and was supplanted by two Android devices: the Nook Color, which came out in late 2010 with a 7″ LCD screen, and the Nook Touch, which was released in June 2011 with a 6″ E-ink screen.

The Nook 1st edition never really had a lot of support from B&N, although it did have its own hacking community for a while. The hackers added several features, including a new menu design for the control screen and the option to install apps. That feature never came to much due to the limitations of the OS.

This ereader also had a clone, the Spring Design Alex, which was announced a few weeks before and released a few months later. The Alex had a very similar design, only it was thinner and much more capable (I have one).

Spring Design sued B&N in 2010, alleging the retailer had stolen the design. The lawsuit was settled in March 2010 without decisively proving the point one way or the other.

O O O

Dear Valued Customer,

Over eight years ago, we launched our first Nook eReader, and we were thrilled to have you as one of our first customers for what has become a tradition of offering great books on demand to readers. We want to thank you for your loyalty and continued support of the Nook 1st Edition and Nook products.

Because of advancements in our eReader technology, we wanted to let you know that, unfortunately, we are unable to continue to support the Nook 1st Edition.

The good news is we would like to offer you a special coupon for one of our more advanced readers so that you can continue to read digitally and maintain your library. You may choose from the following:

Nook Tablet 7 for $25.00 (50% off the List Price) plus Free Shipping*

OR

Nook GlowLight 3 for $59.99 (50% off the List Price) plus Free Shipping*

Either of these Nook eReaders will provide you with up-to-date, enhanced reading experiences that we think you’ll use and love for a long time to come.

Please note that as of June 29, 2018, you will not be able to purchase new content, register with a BN.com account, or sign in using a Nook account on your Nook 1st Edition. However, you will still be able to access your existing library, or download new content, by using our Nook Reading Apps for iOS, Android, or Windows, on mobile and tablet devices.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause but we think you’ll be delighted with your new Nook device. If you have any questions regarding this offer, feel free to contact us at 877-831-2393 Monday-Friday 8AM-11PM ET and Saturday-Sunday 9AM-11PM ET. Please be prepared to provide your Nook 1st Edition serial number. If you need assistance locating your serial number, click here for instructions.

We truly appreciate your business and look forward to continuing to provide you with the great Nook experience and to welcome you at Barnes & Noble stores.

Sincerely,
Barnes & Noble

image  by lib-girl

Apple is making its big announcements today at WWDC, and they shared a few details about Apple’s ebook app.

iBooks is getting a huge update as well as a new name when iOS 12 is released. It is now called  Apple Books, and it’s going to feature an updated library view that puts a better emphasis on your content as well as a new Apple Books bookstore that includes a section for audiobooks.

Best of all, it will have a “Reading Now” section when you first open the app, showing you a live preview of the book you most recently were reading and where you left off.

iOS 12 is in beta right now. So far as I can tell, the official release date has not been announced.

The Verge 

If you have been following tech news then you’ve probably heard the term blockchain mentioned more than once. This word is rarely explained in non-technical terms, but it is thrown around a lot by tech companies trying to get in on the hype.

We’ve even seen a few companies like Binded or LBRY claim to offer services to authors, and a lot of people in publishing saying that blockchain is the greatest thing since sliced bread. So far, none of the new ideas from either the tech companies or publishing pundits are actually useful to authors, but one day that is going to change.

With that in mind, I think now is a good time to go over some basic guidelines on how to evaluate new tech and whether we should use a new tool or service based on that tech.

I was inspired to take up this topic by the recent announcement about a new startup called Authored.

From BEG:

The Authored Platform is an application, which is active on both the iOS and Android platforms. This platform will function like Google Books, Amazon Books, Apress, Wiley, and many other online publishing systems. However, Authored is also a social networking site, which will allow users to publish high-end content from writers and authors of products.

Authored is scheduled to open to the public in in the second quarter of 2019. Right now Authored is raising funds via an initial coin offering (ICO) which may or may not be a scam (I would not invest my money, even if I had any to spare).

The thing to remember about blockchain (this will help you avoid falling for the hype) is that it is a technology, not a service or product.

To put that in perspective, you are reading this blog post in an app or web browser that integrates hundreds of different technologies on a computing device that integrates thousands.

The app, browser, and computing devices are the products that use tech, most of which you have never heard of.

The only reason blockchain is mentioned more than all the other tech we use everyday is that it is the tech buzzword du jour.

Rather than listen to the buzzwords, what you should do is ask whether a tool or service based on blockchain is useful – just like you would with any other new service you encounter.

I usually ask myself these questions:

1. Does the service do something I need?
2. Does it fill that need better than a service I am already using?

We still don’t really know anything about Authored other than it is supposed to be a social network and sales platform, so there’s no reason to think it will be better and more useful than Gumroad or a dozen other third-party sales services.

I do know a few details about Binded and LBRY, the two services mentioned at the beginning of the post, so let’s analyze those companies and see whether we should use them.

I have written about Binded before; it offers a blockchain-based alternative to "poor man’s copyright" that does absolutely nothing useful while at the same time misleading creators about how it protects their copyright.

LBRY, on the other hand, is a sales and distribution platform where the content is locked inside the LBRY apps. This is arguably less useful the many existing sales platforms, and at the very least it offers no obvious improvement over what we have now.

If we let ourselves be swayed by the hype then we might sign up for one or both of these services just because they use blockchain, but when we step back and ask the hard questions it is clear that there’s nothing to recommend either service.

The next time you encounter a service that pitches itself on its use of blockchain, you should ask yourself the two questions I used in this post. These are actually the questions you should ask about every new service you encounter, but they will be especially useful in keeping you from falling for the blockchain hype.

image by wuestenigel