Over the past several months a number of sources have claimed that Apple was about to get serious about competing in the ebook market. I discounted the reports as baseless clickbait hype, but it would appear I was wrong.

A trusted source has sent me several photos of Apple’s first ebook reader, as well as a lot of information on what it can do.

Yes, you read that right; Apple is going to release an ebook reader. It will be called the Apple Reader, and it will have a next-gen Domino 7.9″ E-ink screen.

The Domino E-ink screen hasn’t been announced yet, but I am told it is nearly twice as fast as existing E-ink screens, and with a resolution of 450 ppi, it is also significantly sharper. Apple has reportedly been customizing this screen for over three years, and my source says it has an improved frontlight and a touchscreen so sensitive that you could write calligraphy on it.

The Apple Reader is currently running a modified version of iOS which includes the iBooks app and Apple’s office suite but will not include support for most apps. Apple is optimizing for the screen’s performance, rather than trying to make the Apple Reader as capable as possible.

The Apple Reader will not have a speaker, but it will have Wifi and Bluetooth, and  you will be able to stream Apple Music.

Apple Reader owners will also enjoy Apple’s new subscription ebook service, the Apple Library. Apple’s alternative to Kindle Unlimited will have a million titles in it at launch, including ebooks from three of the Big Five trade publishers.

The Apple Library will cost $9.99 a month.

So when can we expect this beautiful device to reach the market and throw Amazon off-kilter?

That I do not know for certain. I was told that the Apple Reader was supposed to be announced last week and scheduled to ship this fall, but the Apple Reader was pulled from the event at the last minute.

Your guess is as good as mine as to when the Apple Reader will be announced, but I do, however, have a small bonus for you; Apple is also testing a 6″ ereader, the Apple Reader mini.

It is a less amazing but also more pocketable alternative to the Apple Reader, and it might be launched at the same time.

P.S. April Fools.

P.P.S. The device shown in the first couple photos is the Boyue Likebook Plus, a Chinese ereader than has a 7.8″ screen. The second model is the T62, a 6″ ereader also from Boyue. Both devices run Android, and what you see on the screen are screenshots from my friend Juli Monroe’s iPad Mini.

It is amazing what you can do with screenshots, isn’t it?

Kobo’s next ereader has shown up on the FCC website, but unfortunately that is just all I can tell you about it right now.

According to the paperwork, the Clara HD is going to be made by Netronix, just like Kobo’s previous ereaders. Judging by that one screenshot in the paperwork, it will have an E-ink screen and Wifi, and it will run Kobo’s software.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the screen size or whether the  Clara HD will be waterproof. But it’s worth noting that Kobo’s last ereader was the 6.8″ Aura H2O2, and before that they released the 7.8″ Aura One, which suggests this is a 6″ model.

I can’t even tell you the launch date with any certainty (the embargo ends in September, leaving a long possible launch window).

But I can tell you this first of April that Kobo has a new ereader coming.

I can’t wait to see it, can you?

FCC

Radish is a Wattpad-like app which sells stories by the chapter. It has been around for several years now, and it has had some success – the startup even raised $3 million in financing early last year.

But it crossed my desk today for a different reason.

According to Andrew Shaffer and a number of other people on Twitter, Radish has sent an email to writers who sell stories in the app that is changing its content policy. In order to comply with Apple’s content policy for the iTunes app store, Radish is removing all erotica from its app.

You can read all three parts of  the email below:

Apple has always had a bizarre double standard for its content policy; apps are forbidden to show/sell adult content, and yet Apple sells shows like Shameless and Game of Thrones.

It has never been clear why such content is banned from third-party apps and yet allowed in the video sections of iTunes, but this is something we have had to cope with for as long as I can remember.

Radish is merely the latest victim.

The ebook market owes its existence to the romance genre.

eBooks gave authors a chance to sell the stories readers wanted to buy rather than the stories the gatekeepers wanted to publish, and without romance we would have an ebook market dominated by the Big Five and their pricing policies.

Guess how Amazon is repaying that debt?

By shadow-banning romance titles from the Kindle Store.

I have seen numerous reports on Facebook, KBoards, and elsewhere that Amazon has adopted a new policy where some romance titles, most notably those titles that Amazon has identified as erotica, have been removed from the Kindle Store best-seller list.

In other words, the ebooks are still being sold, they are just not showing up in rankings and have lost the algorithmic benefit of their previous sales rank.

Update: About 36 hours from my first email, and nearly 12 hours after I published this post, Amazon finally decided how they are going to spin this:

A recent Kindle Store change inadvertently affected the display of sales rank for some titles. We have corrected this issue.

Second Update: I have confirmation from authors on KBoards that their ranks have been restored.

The change in policy was first noticed on 22 March, and it has affected both indie published ebooks as well as ebooks published by traditional publishers.

"While my self-pub BDSM books got hit, it’s also affected publishers like St. Martin’s Swerve imprint as well," one author wrote on KBoards. "I wrote two threesome books for them, Betting on Both and Game On, and both have had their rankings pulled. Dropped my editor at St. Martin’s Press a note – they may not be so happy about having the 'Zon do that to them."

Another author confirmed that even EL Grey got hit with the shadow ban. "I had noticed last night that E.L. James' Grey (pubbed via Random House) is overall-rank stripped too. It’s Book 1 from Christian’s POV. Book 2, Darker, is categorized as Romance, and is #676 overall. Grey is #7 in Erotica, but not on the BS list."

There are also a bunch of reports from authors who say that they checked their respective Author Central pages for their erotica titles, only be be informed that said titles were no longer ranked.

Amazon has confirmed the new policy, telling one author by email:

I’m following up concerning some of your books missing their best sellers ranking.

After hearing from our technical team we have confirmed that this is due to a recent update to the filter option for Erotica ebooks.

All adult themed titles will be filtered from the main category sales rank as part of this update. However, you will still continue to keep all of your category rankings. I know this wasn’t the answer you were looking for but appreciate your understanding on this policy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

I have attached a screenshot of the email at the end of this post.

Curiously enough, the change in policy only affects the main Amazon site, and not other sites like Amazon UK.

This detail has lead some authors to speculate that Amazon changed its policy in anticipation of the FOSTA bill becoming law. This bill is ostensibly intended to fight sex trafficking, but it has already had unexpected side effects such as Microst enacting a strict PG content policy in Office 365, Skype, and Xbox Live. Reddit has also removed several forums, and Craigslist has nuked its entire personals section.

I cannot confirm that Amazon’s new policy is also a result of the new law, however.

I reached out to Amazon for comment a day before publishing this post.  They were still struggling with how to spin this new policy when this post went live, which is why I do not have a statement from them.

B&N’s two month old book marketing app, Browsery, was officially released on Tuesday.

From the press release:

Browsery is available for Android and iOS users. It blends technology with the Barnes & Noble experience of community, conversation and peer-to-peer recommendations to deliver a new kind of digital browsing that’s a gateway for users to find new books and talk about the ones they love with fellow readers.  Customers can like, comment, or contribute answers to questions posed by the community, like or comment on the answers of others, or ask questions of their own. Seamless connectivity to the mobile web allows purchase or sampling of new discoveries.

“Books have always brought people together over shared interests to make recommendations to one another, and Browsery is rooted in that core experience of the reading life. We’re taking the way people talk about books with their friends and in our stores across the country and giving it a fun mobile presence,” said Fred Argir, Chief Digital Officer at Barnes & Noble. “Through this innovative new app, customers will be able to recommend great books to each other. We’re also encouraging our booksellers to get involved and share their knowledge and passion with a wider audience.”

I tried the app when it was in beta; I did not see a reason to keep it.  I find the book discussions on Reddit and Twitter – places where readers get to control the conversation, not a retailer – are more fulfilling than B&N’s app.

You can find the app in Google Play and iTunes. There does not appear to be an iPad or tablet version.

Earlier this month Pew Research Center released the results of its latest survey on American book reading habits. It turns out that one in four Americans hadn’t cracked a book in the past year, and now we know how that figure breaks down in terms of the population.

As you had probably guessed, the non-readers tended to have only an HS degree, earn less that $30,000, and live in either rural or urban areas. They also tended to be over 50 years of age.

Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about five times as likely as college graduates (37% vs. 7%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. Adults with lower levels of educational attainment are also among the least likely to own smartphones, even as e-book reading on these devices has increased substantially since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)

Adults with annual household incomes of $30,000 or less are about three times as likely as the most affluent adults to be non-book readers (36% vs. 13%). Hispanic adults are about twice as likely as whites (38% vs. 20%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months. But there are differences between Hispanics born inside and outside the U.S.: Roughly half (51%) of foreign-born Hispanics report not having read a book, compared with 22% of Hispanics born in the U.S.

Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book. Some 28% of adults ages 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 20% of adults under 50. There are modest differences when looking at gender and whether people live in urban, suburban or rural areas.

While it interesting to see this breakdown, Pew still asked the wrong questions. They asked about reading books, as if that were the only form that mattered, when they should ask more granular questions about all types and genres of reading material.

There is more to reading than just books, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that given our current blinkered focus on books.

Overdrive just announced on their blog that they have loaned a billion ebooks since they first started lending ebooks in 2003.

From OverDrive:

One billion. It’s a defining number that’s hard to fathom yet understood as a massive milestone. There are very few things that can use the number 1 billion to describe what they represent. Recently, digital library checkouts through OverDrive became one of them. On February 10, Team OverDrive watched as our all-time checkouts surpassed 1 billion, officially joining the three comma club.

We’re proud of this accomplishment, but it’s not something we ever could’ve reached on our own. The librarians and staff at the 40,000 library and school partners we work with around the world deserve all the credit for spreading the word and evangelizing the joys of digital reading. Because of their tireless work, this isn’t the end of a journey, but rather the first step toward billions more moments of reading happiness. At PLA this week, we’ll be celebrating our Billion Book Bash with hundreds of our closest librarian friends. If you’ll be in Philadelphia for the conference, we hope you’ll join us.

A billion is a lot, but I think it’s worth noting that OverDrive would have reached this milestone years ago if the major publishers had adopted reasonable policies on library ebooks.

All 5 of the major publishers either charge ridiculously high prices in the ebook market, or limit checkouts, or both.

If they had had their way we would never have reached this milestone.

The latest update for the Kindle iOS app is going to make David Rothman of Teleread very happy.

Amazon released a new version of the Kindle app today. New features include Arabic dictionaries, split view (but only on the larger iThings), and an option to scroll your way through an ebook rather than turn the page.

Yes, Amazon has finally taken the same scrolling feature found in all web browsers and added it to the Kindle app for iOS.

While this might not seem important, there have been times where I have had a diagram and its explanation show up on two different pages. If I had had the option to scroll the page, I could have had all the info on the screen at once.

This will prove to be a useful feature, although I do wonder how it will work on the iPad in landscape mode with the two columns. Alas, I don’t have an iPad to test this on, so I’m going to have to wait for you to test it and report back.

You can find the app in iTunes.

Changelog

• Split view on iPad is here! Resize the app to multi-task while reading without ever switching context.
• Try scrolling through your book – just like a web page. Turn continuous scrolling on via Settings, then easily turn it on and off from the Aa menu in your book. Tell us what you think.
• Pull down in the library to refresh your list of books.
• We’ve added Kindle dictionaries for Arabic.

9to5Mac

There is an unconfirmed report coming out of the Netherlands today that Amazon is shutting down its screen tech subsidiary. Citing unnamed sources, tech blog Bits &Chips claims that Amazon decided last year that it would close Liquavista.  Amazon is reportedly busy dismantling the startup, and plans to phase out the staff in the course of the coming year.

Amazon was asked to comment on this story about 3 hours before it was published, but has not responded.

For the past decade or so Liquavista has been developing a low-powered screen tech to replace LCD screens. Their designs were based on 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.

The tech was originally developed at Philips, before Liquavista was spun out in 2006. Over the following decade the startup showed off demo screens on several occasions, but it never put the screen into production, and it was never closer than a perpetual two years away from releasing a screen unit to market.

And now it looks like it never will be releasing that first screen.

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 it looks like I just may be the first to report Liquavista’s demise.

In a way, I’m not surprised. It was pretty clear when Samsung sold Liquavista in 2013 that there wasn’t much of a market for the screen tech by that point; the original intended use was as a solution to the mobile device battery life issue, and that problem had already mostly been fixed by 2013.

There was no need to use a new screen tech when battery capacity was already improving year by year, and screens were getting more and more energy efficient. Nevertheless, some of us had been hoping Amazon would push through and bring the new screen to market just so it could have a Kindle screen that no other ereader could match. (I even made it an April Fool’s day joke in 2016, and I was so convincing that someone actually stole the joke and claimed it was real.)

And now it looks like we won’t see it at all.

Thanks, Javi, for the tip!

Update: This post was originally published in November 2017, and was updated in March 2018 to reflect S&S’s ongoing exploitation of authors.

Of all the major publishers, Simon & Schuster is uniquely exploitative. They had previously revived the Star Trek Writing Contest to use it as a feeder pool for their vanity press, Archway Publishing, complete with cold calls where authors were pitched overpriced services, and now S&S has found a new way to gather in the lambs to be fleeced.

They are using the cover of NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, to launch a writing contest, and they even roped in the S&S writing community XOXO After Dark to lend an air of legitimacy to the contest.

XOXO After Dark, a community site offering the best in romance, urban fantasy, and women’s fiction supported by Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster, is teaming up with Archway Publishing to launch the Hot Books, Cold Nights Romance Novel Writing Contest. Abby Zidle, Editor-in-Chief at XOXO After Dark and Associate Director of Marketing and Senior Editor at Pocket and Gallery Books announced the news today.

“XOXO is excited to find great new talent in romance writing,” said Zidle. “Some of the most popular writers today started their careers as readers and fans.”

Pocket Star, the digital-first imprint of Simon and Schuster, will publish the winning novel. Additionally, two runners-up will receive free self-publishing packages from Archway Publishing.

“We’ve all used a hot book to help us get through a cold night once or twice,” said Zidle. “And NaNoWriMo is the perfect time to encourage new writers to get that hot book onto the page.”

The problems with this contest are two-fold.

The first problem is that the "winner" gets a book contract with S&S digital imprint, Pocket Star, as well as a measly $500 advance (David Gaughran found this in the fine print).

That is a terrible advance and an exploitative contract, but the larger problem is that this contest is run by the Author Solutions front company, Archway.

Contestants are required to submit  their email and phone number to enter the contest, and Author Solutions is going to use that contact info to have telemarketers pitch over priced marketing and publishing packages.

That is exactly what happened last year with the Star Trek Writing Contest, and it is why Simon & Schuster chose Archway Author Solutions to run this contest.

For example:

I put my details in to test. First upselling call from Author Solutions came in… five hours. https://t.co/qMZA3oK8ys

— David Gaughran (@DavidGaughran) November 20, 2017

The thing about Author Solutions is that it uses high-pressure sales tactics to sell authors worthless marketing services. It gets most of its revenue from charging authors ridiculously expensive marketing fees and overcharging for publishing services (which are then filled by low bid contract recruited via Craigslist). It .

And that’s not just my opinion; this company (and its many imprints) has a terrible reputation at review sites like Ripoff Report. If you click the links in the above paragraph, you will see that Author Solutions is widely regarded as a scam.

No one should enter this contest; I would not wish Author Solutions on my worst enemy.

Update: It’s March 2018. The writing contest ended months and months ago, but Simon & Schuster continues to spam entrants with solicitations from its vanity press, Archway:

Since @SimonSchuster/@Pocket_Books launched its writing comp for newbies, & I signed up for more info, I've been called/emailed approximately 50 times by Archway – the vanity press run by Author Solutions for S&S – trying to sell me a "publishing package" @victoriastrauss pic.twitter.com/l8waoZvP5n

— David Gaughran (@DavidGaughran) March 7, 2018

This wasn’t just a one time thing; S&S clearly plans to try to con authors out of their money so long there is money to be had.

Amazon has just announced a third color option for the Kindle Oasis 2. In addition to graphite and gold, you now have the choice of champagne gold.

It is up for pre-order today for  $279.99, and it will start shipping on 22 March. It is only available with 32GB of storage and Wifi (but not 3G).

It seems rather odd to release a limited color option like this, given that the Oasis cases are going to cover the back and render your color choice irrelevant, but at least it is pretty.

Amazon is building bookstores that look like they were designed by an AI(*), but Beijing  is going one better. The Beijing International Book Mall is now home to a completely automated bookstore.

From The Beijinger:

Late night shoppers looking with a need to buy books will have their very specific conditions met in Beijing as 20 new staffless bookstores that will operate 24 hours a day are expected to open throughout the city this year.

Book-selling franchise Xinhua opened the first of the planned stores last month in east-end Tongzhou. Featuring an automated system with no regular human staff, the all-day bookstores are planned to be built at Beijing universities, government offices, and shopping malls.

Like other staffless stores, the "Xinhua Lifestyle Store" requires all customers to register their real names using their WeChat accounts and have their faces scanned before entering. And because the store has access to all their users' purchasing information, it can offer "precise and humanized" book suggestions to all of its customers.

…

Despite its convenience, the staffless store faces a number of drawbacks. For one thing, the 30-square-meter shop doesn’t offer a wide selection of books. The store’s book selection is limited to popular bestsellers that aren’t regularly updated. And, if customers are able to hold off their purchases until normal business hours, they would find a wider selection of books at the 80,000-square-meter Beijing International Book Mall, inside which the staffless bookstore is located.

That doesn’t sound appealing at all.

In an age where anyone in a hurry can download a book rather than get a paper copy, is there really a need for this kind of store?

P.S. I have visited an Amazon Books, and I am working on a post.

Misusing a book’s metadata is a well-known blackhat marketing technique. Amazon knows this, which is why for a decade now they have enforced a strict list of rules on what publishers and authors can’t put in metadata.

And now the UK’s Book Industry Communication is coming out against the practice. They have a released a statement to that effect:

Some publishers and other metadata providers are using the subtitle, and sometimes the title fields, in metadata feeds to carry marketing and promotional text. By this we mean using phrases such as ‘Sunday Times Best Seller’, ‘Gripping read from…’, ‘The Richard & Judy Book Club thriller 2017’, ‘” The best thriller writer alive” Another Author’, ‘Man Booker prize winner’ and so on. It is important for discoverability, good customer experience and an efficient data supply chain that these data fields reflect only the true title and subtitle text that appears on the title page. The valuable promotional text should be included in separate and dedicated promotional text fields, and all metadata recipients, including wholesalers and retailers, should be using these fields appropriately.

There has been a significant escalation of this practice over the last twelve months, despite consistent feedback from BIC members across the book trade that this is causing substantial time-consuming work to correct at various points throughout the supply chain. BIC has seen numerous examples that are confusing and misleading for consumers trying to make a buying decision. Feedback received to date also reveals this poor practice is having an adverse effect on supply chain efficiency both in terms of the timing of product to market and costs incurred by retailers and aggregators having to remove the unwanted text.

BIC understands the need to provide promotional and marketing text and the temptation to include it in the subtitle field, but advises publishers and other metadata providers that the title and subtitle fields should only ever be populated with the true title and subtitle, as would be used on the book’s title page.

It’s all well and good to condemn the practice, but a more effective approach would be to get retailers and distributors to adopt quality standards and then follow through and enforce those standard.

We know Amazon does this, and if everyone else in the industry followed suit then this would not be a story today because the cheaters would be stymied everywhere they went.

So rather than shaking its finger at the offending parties, BIC should really be asking the rest of the industry to step up and help fix the problem, don’t you think?

image by kaleidoscopist

After news broke last week Audible was paying an abysmally low royalty rate for its romance audiobook service, Audible Romance, the audiobook retailer promised to patch the problem with a bonus, but wouldn’t give specifics.

The bonus payments have started to arrive, and we still don’t know any more than we did before.

Authors are reporting over at KBoards that the bonus payments started arriving in their bank accounts yesterday without any new update to the situation. They haven’t heard anything from Audible, and neither have I (I just sent another email), so we are still trying to puzzle the method to Audible’s madness.

So far the reports from authors include:

• I received my bonus. It was $140. I only made $5 in the program.
• I got $25 and I had no minutes for the period.
• I made one cent from two books and got a $25 bonus.

Without more data to go on, all I can tell is that Audible paid each other at least $25 for having a book in the program, and is scaling the bonus somehow.

If you got a bonus, can you share your details below? It would help us all figure out what Audible is doing.

While it’s great that Audible is making up for last quarter’s disastrous royalty payment, they still haven’t said anything about how they will fix the fundamental problem of the Audible Romance subscription service.

The service simply isn’t workable under its current setup. Right now romance fans are allowed to listen to as many audiobooks as they want for a low monthly fee ($15, or $7 for existing Kindle Unlimited or Audible subscribers).

Romance fans are voracious readers,  and they are going to listen to a lot of audiobooks when they join an unlimited plan like Audible Romance. This means that Amazon is going to have to pay an unacceptably low royalty to authors if it wants to break even, or it will pay a decent royalty and lose a ton of money each period.

Whose bright idea was this, exactly?

image by ActuaLitté

After a two-year pause, the Pew Research Center  has at long last conducted a new poll on media use in the US.

A total of 2,002 adults were polled in the first week in January, and the report found:

About three-quarters (74%) of Americans have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January. Print books remain the most popular format for reading, with 67% of Americans having read a print book in the past year.

And while shares of print and e-book readers are similar to those from a survey conducted in 2016, there has been a modest but statistically significant increase in the share of Americans who read audiobooks, from 14% to 18%.

Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read four books in the past 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when the Center first began conducting the surveys of Americans’ book reading habits.

This is of course a survey on reading habits, not buying habits, a detail worth remembering when these stats are misused when someone proclaims (once again) that ebooks are dead.

Pew