Here’s an infographic that needs the attention of the well-read.

GE Editing has assembled a list what it says are the mot iconic book set in each country of the world.

We include epic poetry like Pan Tadeusz from Poland, international best sellers like The Three Musketeers set in France, and books recently translated into English for the very first time like the Iraqi classic The Long Way Back. You will find books from favorite authors like Margaret Atwood and Anthony Burgess and discover vibrant new voices like Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz.

Not having visited these countries or read all of the books, I can’t comment on whether the books are well-matched to each country.

What do you think?

Amazon announced on Saturday that the June 2017 funding pool for Kindle Unlimited was $18 million. This was an increase of  $100,000 from May 2017, continuing the gradual growth trend we’ve been seeing since the beginning of the year.

At the same time, data collected by Self-Publisher Bibel shows that the per-page rate dipped several hundredths of a cent in most markets.

• US: $0.0042 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0029 (EUR)
• UK: £0.0032 (GBP)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0042 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.42 (CAD)
• India: 0.8214 (INR)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0102 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5377 (JPY)
• Mexico: $0.0702 (MXN)
• Australia: $0.3627 (AUD)

P.S. 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

image by jeffbr13

Last November Bookbaby conducted a survey which polled authors on everything from what genres they are publishing to how they’re promoting their books.

I just got an email today with the news that Bookbaby had released the results of the survey. I have not had a chance to read the survey, but i see from the forward that 7,677 people, including 4,600 published authors, answered the 56 question survey.

The survey report covers:

• The wide range of tactics used by authors across all popular genres.
• The professional services used by the most-successful authors.
• Who successful authors reach out to for book reviews.
• How a body of work leads to stronger sales and an increased fan base.
• Where the most successful authors focused their time and money.

You can get a copy of the survey results from Bookbaby in exchange for your contact details (they want to come harvest your organs later, if that is okay).

In related news, Bookbaby also has a author conference coming up in November.

Bookbaby

In a recent critique, editor Rich Adin voiced frustration regarding the prevalence of negative book reviews written by seemingly uninformed readers. He specifically questioned the validity of one-star ratings from individuals who may not have even finished the book. However, an alternative perspective suggests that these critical assessments are actually indispensable tools for consumers.

While glowing reviews can sometimes be orchestrated by authors using "sock puppet" accounts, negative feedback usually stems from a reader’s genuine, strong reaction. Even if a reviewer seems misguided, their complaints can offer valuable insights. For instance, if a critic dislikes a product for reasons that a potential buyer finds irrelevant or even appealing, that negative review can ironically provide the buyer with more confidence. Furthermore, negative reviews often contain specific warnings that are buried or omitted in positive praise.

The practice of rating an experience one did not complete is common across various industries. A person might review a restaurant they never actually ate at if they were forced to wait an hour past their reservation time or if they observed unsanitary conditions. In such cases, the failure to consume the product is precisely what makes the review important for other patrons to see.

This utility is evident in the literary world, particularly with the book *A Sentence of Marriage*. Although the book was marketed toward romance readers, many reviewers posted one-star ratings because the story lacked a "happily ever after" and was relentlessly grim. While Adin argues that these reviewers are uneducated about the genre, the reviews actually highlight a marketing failure. Romance readers expect specific emotional payoffs; when a book is billed as a romance but functions as a "tearjerker" or a "stark" tragedy, readers feel misled. Negative reviews serve as a necessary warning to others who are looking for a specific type of experience, effectively correcting an inaccurate product description.

Adin’s suggestion to eliminate anonymous reviews to ensure higher quality faces significant practical hurdles. Amazon and similar platforms have historically prioritized a high volume of reviews with minimal oversight because they are inexpensive to maintain and foster customer engagement. Requiring verified identities would drastically reduce the number of reviews and could expose critics to harassment, a problem already observed on platforms like Goodreads.

Ultimately, Amazon’s goal is to help customers find books they will enjoy so they continue buying, rather than stumbling into "harrowing" reads that might discourage them from future purchases. As many savvy consumers have noted, the responsibility lies with the reader to "parse and deconstruct" reviews. By translating both expert opinions and amateur critiques, buyers can determine if a book’s "flaws" are actually features they might appreciate. In this context, negative reviews are not just complaints; they are a vital form of consumer protection.

If you visited this blog on the afternoon of 12 July, you may have been bothered by a nag-screen loading emblem and message about net neutrality.

What you’re seeing is the result of a plugin I installed to use today, the net neutrality protest day (I will disable the plugin in a few more hours). I belatedly joined the protest after reading comments on Twitter that completely missed the point.

This is a lie. We already have "paid prioritization". It's called "CDNs". And the Internet wouldn't work without them. https://t.co/zrpgK7aSQP

— Rob??? Graham ? (@ErrataRob) July 12, 2017

Rob is trying to confuse the issue by arguing that since the net lacks equality it obviously also lacks neutrality. He’s conflating two different and unrelated issues here; to put it simply, net equality has nothing to do with net neutrality.

As Rob points out, the net is inherently unequal because some companies can afford to hire better engineers, pay for faster servers, and otherwise invest in hardware.

The net is inherently unequal, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still argue for net neutrality.

What we are protesting today are companies (mainly ISPs) that want to choose which content gets priority.

This issue is at least seven years old, and when it first came up the focus was on companies wanting to be paid twice for delivering the same data once.

The same story cropped up again every couple years (until Obama’s FCC passed the net neutrality rules that Trump’s FCC wants to remove). If it was not Verizon and Google, it was Netflix and Verizon, or Google and Orange. The ISPs were already being paid once by their customers for the data the customers request, and those companies wanted to be paid a second time by the websites that are sending the data.

But in 2017 it is clear that this isn’t just about Verizon getting greedy.

It’s about the ISPs deciding who gets to have a voice.

If the ISPs can decide which website gets priority then it follows that they can also decide who doesn’t get heard.

It will be Comcast interfering with BitTorrent traffic all over again, only this time around Comcast won’t be blocking downloads. Instead they will be keeping you from hearing about government protests, or whichever side of an issue it doesn’t like.

And that affects everyone.

The day of protest is mostly over with, but if you would still like participate it is not too late. The EFF has a form you can use to send a comment to the FCC, protesting its plans to end net neutrality.

In a recent hardware examination, more information has surfaced regarding the Pandigital Novel e-reader. An internal look at the device, revealed by removing the rear casing, shows a specific hardware configuration: dual speakers are positioned at the base, the power connection is located on the right side, and an internal microSD slot is situated on the left. While the unit currently contains a 1GB card, it appears this can be upgraded, complementing the external slot which is compatible with SDHC cards.

Initial testing with the original factory firmware has been problematic. Although a recent software update from Pandigital’s website successfully addressed issues with touchscreen sensitivity, other technical difficulties remain. Specifically, the device continues to suffer from sluggish performance and non-functional Wi-Fi. There are also concerns regarding the physical durability of the unit, as the front faceplate has begun to separate at one of the corners.

A further point of contention involves the device’s display orientation. Despite Pandigital’s marketing materials indicating the presence of a landscape mode, users have found it difficult to activate this feature. While some early adopters suspect the lack of an accelerometer or software glitches are to blame, others have reported success using landscape orientation within the web browser and e-reading applications.

User feedback suggests a wide variance in experience. Some owners of newer production units report that features like Wi-Fi, video playback, and screen rotation function correctly, particularly after installing more recent firmware versions. However, early testers warn that the initial release of the device was plagued by software instability and potential build quality defects. For those interested in internal modifications, the back cover is secured by adhesive and plastic clips, requiring delicate prying with small tools to access the internal memory and battery.

PocketBook has revealed the initial promotional imagery for the new e-reading devices it plans to debut at the IFA trade show in Berlin, and notably absent from the collection is a model featuring Mirasol technology. Among the officially teased hardware is the PB 903, but there is no visual evidence yet of a color display utilizing Qualcomm’s reflective screen tech.

Despite the absence of a Mirasol device in the current press materials, the collaboration between PocketBook and Qualcomm appears to be a reality rather than speculation. Information regarding this partnership has been emerging for several days. Attempts to contact Qualcomm for a statement on the matter have yielded no response, which suggests the company is not actively seeking to suppress the information.

Specific evidence supports the existence of this project. A representative from PocketBook’s public relations team provided what can be characterized as a non-denial, signaling the accuracy of the reports through indirect confirmation. Furthermore, several individuals with peripheral connections to the company have also mentioned the ongoing collaboration.

Supporting these claims is a report from a Russian blogger known for having a consistent track record with e-reader industry news. This source indicates that Qualcomm will launch its Mirasol technology with three primary partners, identifying PocketBook as the lead manufacturer for the European market. Given the reliability of this source, the partnership seems highly probable, even if a physical product is not ready for the upcoming Berlin exhibition.

The German book retailer Thalia has introduced its proprietary electronic reading device, the Oyo. Priced at 139€, the e-reader features a 6-inch SiPix display and includes a touchscreen interface along with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity.

In addition to its wireless capabilities, the device is equipped with 2GB of internal flash storage, a microSDHC expansion slot, and compatibility with Adobe Digital Editions. The Oyo is currently available for pre-order, with shipments expected to begin this October. The device is designed to integrate seamlessly with Thalia’s existing digital bookstore, and the company has indicated that a version featuring 3G connectivity is in development for a later release.

Technically, the Oyo is identical to a prototype previously showcased by Medion earlier this summer. While the SiPix screen technology offers a different visual experience than competitors like Sony, some early observations note a white-flash refresh method rather than the traditional black flash seen on most electronic ink displays.

The launch of the Oyo represents a broader expansion of the hardware into other markets. Beyond Germany, the device is slated for release in Poland through the retailer Empik. Furthermore, other European booksellers, including Fnac and Chapitre, are expected to market the same hardware under different branding or slightly varied price points as part of a coordinated retail partnership.

When news broke this week that O’Reilly Media was closing its ebookstore in favor of Safari Books Online and distributing to retailers like the Kindle Store, customers, fans, and supporters reacted with dismay, anger, and outrage.

Some saw it as a betrayal of everything Tim O’Reilly said he stood for, while others were understandably angry that they could no longer buy their preferred format, PDF (and no, the version in Google Play is not a suitable replacement).

O’Reilly Media had broken the first rule of sharing bad news, leaving them to scramble after the fact to conduct damage control.

They tried to put out the fires when they posted an explanation on Friday, but if they had published the explanation first then there would have been no fires.

The Rule

There’s a simple trick to sharing bad news or announcing an unpopular change in policy, one which will cut the angry shouting by 90%.

As I learned about a decade ago, the trick is to share the explanation first and the bad news second. It short-circuits the angry response, and it really is that simple:

• We’ve been evacuated in advance of an oncoming hurricane, so the conference is canceled.
• The company has filed for bankruptcy today, and we will not be able to ship your order.

In the case of O’Reilly Media, what they should have said first was that direct ebook sales no longer justified keeping the store open.

Alas, they did not tell anyone this until Friday, two days after informing customers that the store was closing.

The Reason

According to the O’Reilly blog, both print and ebooks sales are on the decline:

Meanwhile, sales of books have declined consistently year after year since 2000! Ebooks expanded the market for a while, and direct distribution from oreilly.com was a great way to make them widely available while traditional retailers other than Amazon were slow to embrace that market. But starting a few years ago, ebook sales too started to flatten, and then to fall. Running oreilly.com as a distribution platform was effective, but also costly. It required a dedicated investment in e-commerce software, staff, marketing, and so on. It also required us to choose whether to direct incoming customers to the declining e-commerce business to buy standalone units, or to our growing subscription business.

O’Reilly is seeing the same trend that has nonfiction authors retiring, worries academic publishers, and has also disrupted the college bookstore industry, leading B&N Edu to turn some of their bookstores into gift shops.

The trend I am referring to is: Books are no longer the main way people learn.

They have been supplanted by niche websites, online forums like StackExchange, video services like Youtube and Pluralsight, and a dozen other digital sources.

O’Reilly has even seen this trend in their own products:

As new learning modalities emerged, O’Reilly moved to embrace new formats. We developed an amazing video training series (thanks to a talented author base and editorial team willing to try something new), we purchased a small screencasting company and integrated it into our editorial offerings, we developed Oriole, our own interactive learning technology that integrates video and in-browser coding, and developed a formative assessment program for our popular video learning paths.

And that has led them to this crossroad. "So we had to make a tough decision, and we chose to support the side of the business that has the most customers, that is growing the fastest, and that supports all of the learning modalities that customers are demanding," O’Reilly president Laura Baldwin wrote in the post on Friday.

In short, there’s no chance of O’Reilly reversing their decision, but there is a small light at the end of the tunnel.

PDFs

O’Reilly isn’t going to reopen the store, but they will start offering PDFs through their subscription service:

After our announcement, the bulk of your requests have been for PDFs versus kindle or EPUB format. We’re already working on offering PDF downloads as part of the Safari subscription, as well as other new features to support offline reading. And we are looking into ways for our resellers to support unit sales of PDFs. I regret that we didn’t get those arrangements in place in advance of this announcement.

O’Reilly could have also given themselves a grace period to solve this kind of problem simply by putting off the closure for a month.

Or better yet, O’Reilly could have found a replacement store first and announced its closure second.

In fact, I can think of one such store that would fit the bill.

What About Baen?

Baen Books has been selling DRM-free multi-format ebooks for as long as O’Reilly.  Yes, Baen is an SF&F publisher, but their store meets almost all the requirements for a replacement to the O’Reilly store.

The only way Baen comes up short is that they don’t currently sell PDFs. Founder Jim Baen abhorred the format, and no one saw a reason to go against his wishes in the decade since he died.

Now would be a good time, don’t you think?

image by ell brown

In Belgium, a new social trend is encouraging people to track down hidden novels rather than virtual monsters. Drawing inspiration from the global phenomenon of Pokemon Go, a local primary school principal has launched an online community centered on book scavenging. Within just a few weeks of its debut, the game has already gained tens of thousands of active participants.

While the official Pokemon Go app utilizes GPS technology and augmented reality to help users find digital creatures, this low-tech alternative operates through a Facebook group titled "Chasseurs de livres," or "Book Hunters." The premise is simple: participants stash a book in a public location and then upload photos and cryptic clues to the group to help others find it. Once a seeker discovers a book and completes it, they are expected to "release" it by hiding it in a new location for the next person to find.

The project was conceived by Aveline Gregoire, who hit upon the idea while organizing her personal collection. After realizing she lacked the shelf space for her library, and having recently spent time playing Pokemon Go with her children, she decided to distribute her surplus books throughout the local environment. Since its inception, the Facebook group has seen explosive growth, surpassing 40,000 members in a short period.

The variety of literature available is vast, ranging from illustrated stories for young children to suspenseful Stephen King novels. These volumes are hidden across Belgian cities and rural landscapes, typically protected from the elements by transparent plastic wrapping.

For many residents, the game has become a regular family activity. The Detournay family, living in the southern town of Baudour, noted that hunting for these literary treasures is now a staple of their morning strolls. During one outing, they discovered a single book while contributing four of their own back to the community. Family member Jessica Detournay compared the excitement of the search to a traditional Easter egg hunt. The interactive nature of the group also provides quick feedback; the Detournays noted that shortly after returning home, they were notified online that two of the books they had hidden had already been discovered by other hunters.

Following the unexpected success of the Facebook community, Gregoire is considering expanding the project. Her future plans include the potential development of a dedicated mobile application to streamline the book-sharing process.

Technical publisher O’Reilly was an early ebook pioneer. They released their ebooks DRM-free in many formats, sold direct to consumers, and offered print-digital bundles before anyone else.

Now the trailblazing has come to an end. O’Reilly sent out an email yesterday to its customers with the news that it was closing its ebookstore (coincidentally, I just learned I have two accounts at O’Reilly):

Things are changing at the O’Reilly online shop—as of today, we are no longer selling individual books and videos via shop.oreilly.com. Of course, we’ll continue to publish books and videos on the topics you need to know, like data science, product management, and leadership—and you’ll still be able to buy them at Amazon and other retailers. And these important things about your O’Reilly account are staying exactly the same:

• You’ll still have access to every ebook and video listed in "Your Products" on your O’Reilly account page.
• We’ll alert you when those products are updated, and you can download the revised version from the "Your Products" page.
• You can still send the O’Reilly ebooks you’ve purchased to Dropbox and/or Google Drive.

O’Reilly will continue to offer its ebooks through Safari Books Online, its subscription service. And of course it distributes ebooks through the Kindle Store and other retailers where the ebooks are available for sale or rent.

This is a shame, but not  surprise. O’Reilly launched its ebookstore at a time where that store was the easiest and least painful way to get ebooks to customers.

Now most ebook sales are made through the Kindle Store, and a lot of people get their technical books through Safari. (In fact, I would not be surprised if O’Reilly had done a cost benefit analysis and learned that Safari generated more revenue.)

Edit: Nailed it.

So why the change? It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use their content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We’ve already seen this in our own business—the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That’s one reason for the change.

When Standard eBooks first gained widespread attention last week, a number of people complained about that project’s stated intention to alter the ebooks it created by changing the punctuation and modernizing the spelling.

A Standard eBooks explained on its site:

Older books often contain archaic spelling and hyphenation that can be distracting for today’s readers. On top of our strict typography standards, each Standard Ebook is lightly modernized to feature consistent and modern spelling and hyphenation, so old-fashioned ephemera doesn’t distract you from timeless content.

That might not bother most readers, but not everyone is happy with th changes. For example:

Noooooo!! Half the joy of older books is the spelling, grammar and punctuation!

— Suw (@Suw) June 20, 2017

And:

Also, the argument that “old-fashioned ephemera” would distract from timeless content – content that’s no longer timeless.

— Craig Grannell (@CraigGrannell) June 20, 2017

They do have a point, and it’s not just a fetish for originalism.

One problem with "modernization" is that the editor might conflate two words that merely have similar spellings, but even if the editor is aware of a word’s etymological history they might still introduce errors.

The meaning of a word can change along with its spelling. For example, if an editor tried to replace wyrd with the more modern spelling of weird, they would radically change the meaning of the text by replacing a synonym of the word chance with one that means strange.

Furthermore, even if you leave the words alone, simply changing the punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence. There are obsolete forms of punctuation which do not quite have the same meaning as modern marks.

As Keith Houston explained in his book, Shady Characters, it used to be standard practice to pair a dash with a comma, period, or other mark for greater emphasis.

… in the 1622 edition of Shakespeare’s Othello, where the comma, colon, semicolon, and even the period collude with the em dash to add weight to otherwise standard pauses and semantic markers. In the second act, for instance, Iago declares: “I’ll tell you what you shall do, — our general’s wife is now the general”; act III sees Desdemona reassure Cassio: “O that’s an honest fellow: — do not doubt, Cassio,” and in the climactic finale Othello spits, “O strumpet, — weepest thou for him to my face?”

The comma-dash, or “commash” (,—), and its companions the “colash” (:—) and “semi-colash” (;—)* grew in status until they were almost ubiquitous, and the words of Captain Ahab, Fagin, and Elizabeth Bennet were liberally seasoned with such “dashtards,” as Baker called them. Given its comparative rarity, Baker understandably declined to acknowledge the stop-dash (.—); even in an era when the printed page fairly danced with extraneous commas, when dashes coupled promiscuously with other marks and “ quotations ” came with built-in safety margins, the contradiction inherent in such a pairing was too rich for the average writer.

You will find those compound punctuation marks in the Project Gutenberg copy of Moby Dick, but you will not find them in the PG’s copy of Othello or some other works of Shakespeare (I did find them in parts of the omnibus collected works, however.).

Update: Project Gutenberg doesn’t have a consistent policy on modernization:

interesting discussion here – preserve original, archaic punctuation or make the text "more readable"… at PG depends on actual transcriber https://t.co/BoFpAu4svX

— Project Gutenberg (@gutenberg_org) June 29, 2017

When present, the compound marks add emphasis, but you might not find them in all of an author’s work. Which one is authentic? Were the compound marks inserted by an earlier editor, or removed?

that raises a whole new question when it comes to modernizing a text.

Both Keith Houston and the Project Gutenberg editor cite authentic and original copies of Shakespeare’s work and say they found different punctuation.

Which one is correct?

And more importantly, should we care?

Given that these ebooks are not produced by or for academics, one could reasonably argue that this level of attention to detail is not worth the effort. Standard eBooks is just trying to produce ebooks for people to read, not works that will last for posterity.

But if you accept that argument then it would follow that one need not keep the original spelling.

Thoughts?

image by Matt Hampel

Amazon has partnered with China Mobile telecom to release a new Kindle in China.

The Amazon Kindle X Migu is a basic Kindle with extra software features. It costs 658 yuan, or $96.21 USD, and ships on 10 July.

Note: Migu is the name of China Mobile’s content sub.

The Kindle X MiGu has all the same great features as the regular Kindle: X-Ray, annotation, long battery life, and access to a half million titles in the Chinese Kindle Store.

It also ships with a free year’s subscription to Amazon Prime Kindle Unlimited, but that’s not its most interesting detail.

When it ships next month, Kindle X MiGu owners will be able to buy ebooks in the Kindle Store with their China Mobile account, and have the payment processed along with their monthly cellphone bill.

They will also have the option of buying ebooks from MiGu’s ebookstore, and reading them on their Kindles.

MiGu’s store sells serial ebooks by the chapter, and according to one source carries 40 million works. All will be accessible from the new Kindle, and to encourage sales the Kindle X MiGu will come with 300 yuan in credits for the MiGu store.

Yes, this is the first Kindle to ship with two bookstores.

This is not the first ereader to have multiple ebookstores (Bebook pioneered the concept in early 2010), but it is the first Kindle that used someone else’s bookstore.

Amazon has apparently decided to apply the maxim "if you can’t beat them, join them".

Amazon is the single largest ebook retailer in the western world and accounts for an estimated 82% of ebook sales in the top five English-language markets, but in China and many other parts of Asia Amazon is still in second place to its local competitors.

And so today Amazon is coopting one of those competitors by bringing new content to its Kindle and offering China Mobile’s customers a new way to consume the content they like.

Amazon.cn via Kindle Frere

Publishers like HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have recently shown increased interest in the pay per loan library ebook services offered by Freading and Hoopla, but at the same time libraries are pulling back.

Publishers like this model because they get paid each time a work is loaned to a patron.

At first, librarians also liked the model because it meant they would not have to pay full price to get copies that might go unused, but then the monthly bills started arriving and the honeymoon ended.

Many libraries have imposed caps on their Hoopla offering. Some have reduced the number of works a  patron can borrow each month while others have set a limit on the number of loans made each calendar day.

Sonoma County Library, which is located just north of San Francisco, has a daily lending limit which resets every day at 8pm eastern, while on the other side of San Francisco the San Jose Public Library now limits patrons to only borrowing 6 works each month.

The SJPL made it clear that the problem was the cost of Hoopla:

We love this resource, and we want everyone to have a chance to use it.  That means that we have to figure out a way to make our payment model fair for everyone.  After giving it a great deal of thought, we have decided that a way we can make Hoopla available to every one of our users is to decrease the monthly limit from 8 items to 6 items.  This will take effect on November 1.  We hope that this will help us manage the cost so that we can keep providing this great content!

The West Fargo Public Library in North Dakota has also reduced its monthly limit.

The Appomattox Regional Library also cited budget constraints as the cause of their daily lending limits. "Due to an increased number of users on the service and with the budget amount allocated for Hoopla, we are finding that the budget caps we have in place for daily usage and monthly limits are being reached much more quickly than in the past, the FAQ reads. "We are working on a solution and are so grateful that such a large number of patrons are interested in using Hoopla."

And then there is CLEVNET, a consortium of 43 library systems in northern Ohio. The Sandusky Register reports that CLEVNET offered Hoopla for a year and then dropped it because the cost was double what had been anticipated.

Many of the libraries that make up CLEVNET decided to keep Hoopla and fund it out of their respective budgets. Few have had trouble with funding, but then again only 2% or 3% of their patrons are signed up. As that number grows, the libraries are bound to be facing a budget crunch.

image by Changhai Travis

When it comes to library ebooks, the usual way for libraries to acquire them is to pay for licenses for individual copies and then loan the ebooks in what Eric Hellman colorfully named the Pretend It’s Print (PIP) model.

Now HarperCollins is popularizing a new model where libraries pay authors and publishers each time a book is loaned to a patron. HC has signed deals with Freading, Hoopla, and Rakuten’s OverDrive to loan 15 thousand backlist titles under the new model.

From PW:

In a major announcement ahead of this week’s 2017 ALA Annual Conference, HarperCollins has agreed to make a selection of its e-book backlist titles available to public library users on a multi-user lending model, via Midwest Tape’s hoopla digital platform.

Starting in July, the publisher will make about 15,000 e-book titles available via hoopla, including works from bestselling authors like Neil Gaiman, Louise Erdrich, and Dennis Lehane. The agreement builds on a 2016 deal that made HarperCollins’ digital audiobook backlist available to library users on the hoopla digital platform.

…

For library patrons, that means 24/7 access to titles in the hoopla collection—no waiting on a hold list. And for librarians, it’s an alternative to the complicated, inefficient licensing arrangements that have defined the early days of library e-book lending.

HarperCollins continues to offer its frontlist and most of its backlist e-books to libraries on a one copy/one user model, with e-book titles having to be re-licensed after 26 lends.

Freading has been offering this service since 2012 (today is actually the 6th anniversary of the announcement). Hoopla got into this market three years ago, and OverDrive announced only last month that they too were going to offer ebooks under what it calls the"cost-per-circ" model.

Coincidentally, HarperCollins is not the first major publisher to adopt this model. OverDrive revealed in its announcement last month that they had signed Simon & Schuster.

Hardly anyone noticed that detail at the time, but it’s still incredibly important. It points to two of the five major US trade publishers having an interest in this model over five years after it first appeared.

If you’re puzzled by the glacial response rate, Bill Rosenblatt suggested it may be due to the need to negotiate new contracts:

Publishers, meanwhile, get paid based on actual readership, not on a per-title basis. That’s good for them conceptually, because it makes libraries more like channel partners. So why are publishers slow to embrace this model — which hoopla digital has offered for e-books since 2014?

One reason is author contracts. Many author contracts don’t provide for handling royalties on much other than simple book purchases. From the perspectives of rights management and royalty processing, both e-book retail and PIP library e-book revenues can be treated similarly to print book sales. Things get difficult for publishers when they license into access models that fall short of purchases: sometimes they have to pay authors for each access as if it were a purchase, even if a user only reads a few pages, because the author contracts won’t allow otherwise.

Other major publishers like HMH and Hachette may also be interested, but could still be working on the contract issue.

Libraries are also showing no small interest in this model; PW reports that at this year’s BookExpo trade conference, Hoopla boasted that more than 1,500 libraries had signed up for Hoopla (also some 2,500 publishers).

That is still only a tithe compared to the 35,000 or more that have signed with OverDrive under the more traditional "pretend its print" model, but it’s a start.

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