Exact Editions has developed a platform where publishers can bundle their content and sell access to consumers through an annual subscription.

As founder Adam Hodgkin explained on Medium, the first offering is from a poetry publisher. It costs $65 a year:

The Carcanet Collection has been developed and made available as a resource for libraries and institutions. It will consist initially of 70 books from the Carcanet list, growing in the course of the next year to over 100 titles. These are books of poetry, essays, letters and biography. The Collection will be sold as an annual institutional subscription, allowing universities and colleges to provide campus wide and multi-user access. The Collection is also now available as an annual subscription to individuals.

We recently met up with the Carcanet publisher Michael Schmidt to ask him some questions about this new venture:

Q The collection was first conceived as a vehicle for libraries, colleges and so on. But making a collection of 100+ available to individual purchasers is an unusual move. The collection will be an annual subscription, so it is half-way between being a personal library and a kind of book club. Or is it really a shop window for you as a publisher? Which is the best way of seeing your Carcanet Collection?

It’s probably best to see it as half way between a magazine and a library. It’s a resource that readers acquire because they like, perhaps, a few Carcanet titles and want to widen their acquaintance. Here they find a list curated by ourselves which gives them the best new work we are publishing along with some of our key backlist authors whose writing we are re-presenting, re-discovering. After almost fifty years, the scene has changed, and readers need slightly different access routes.

This kind of offering has been around for a while in the form of access to scientific journals.

But Exact Editions' offering is really closer to being a single-publisher Safari subscription, or the monthly plans offered by Sesame Street and other kids publishers.

image by CCAC North Library

When it comes to managing comments on a website, the free options include WordPress (and other native comment systems), Facebook comments,  and Livefyre (now owned by Adobe).

You also used to be able to use Disqus for free, but that changed this past week when the company started telling websites that use Disqus that they had to either sign up for the paid service or turn on the Disqus ads.

From Liliputing:

This site has used the Disqus comment system since we first launched in April, 2008. At the time, Disqus offered clear benefits over the default WordPress comment system, including support for threaded comments, upvotes, spam detection (which clearly doesn’t always work), comment moderation tools.

At the time Disqus was also completely free for most publishers. Over the years Disqus has rolled out a few different monetization options. Larger publishers can pay for premium features, and all sites can opt-in to Disqus ads, which can appear above or in the middle of the comments sections.

Starting later this week, all publishers using Disqus will have to either enable ads or pay for a subscription.

I have also heard a similar announcement from the webcomic Looking for Group, which has responded to the new policy by switching to Facebook comments.

LfG had previously tried the Disqus ads option and reached the same conclusion as Liliputing and other sites: the adverts are crappy clickbait which don’t pay enough to make it a nuisance.

Aside from a brief flirtation with the Jetpack comments plugin, this blog has always used the native WordPress comments.  It is easiest, allows for anonymous comments, and doesn’t require extra code (which can break).

But I can see the value of an alternative comment platform. I would not go with LiveFyre (they auto-tweet your comment) but I have been tempted from time to time by Disqus or FB comments.

Edit: As a reader pointed out, I can’t go with LiveFyre; Adobe shut down the comment plugin last October. Thanks, Andrew!

The latter two comment platforms give websites a way to tap into the larger web community. FB comments, for example, enable websites to attract a larger audience from Facebook.

Sure, FB has serious privacy issues, and their comment platform requires a FB account, but with over a billion FB users there is still a clear benefit for websites.

Disqus had similar advantages – or at least it did until they started charging websites for using it.

image by HowardLake

Cengage, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson have started a new round of lawsuits against textbook sellers.

The Financial Times reports that this time around the publishers are targeting defendants who sell through Amazon’s marketplace:

Three of the world’s largest textbook publishers have subpoenaed Amazon to reveal the names and financial accounts of online vendors who allegedly sell counterfeit books at “too good to be true” prices.

Pearson Education, Cengage Learning and McGraw Hill Education are suing 100 unnamed Amazon marketplace sellers for copyright infringement. In a complaint filed in New York federal court earlier this month, the publishers accused the sellers of “hiding behind the anonymity of internet pseudonyms” to profit from unauthorised copies of their books.

Amazon said it was working with the publishers to identify offenders and remove fraudulent items. “Amazon has zero tolerance for the sale of counterfeit items on our site,” said spokesman Erik Farleigh. “

We are taking legal action and aggressively pursuing bad actors,” he added, declining to specify what exactly that legal action would be. Amazon was not named a defendant in the lawsuit. However, the publishers said the ability of the vendors to sell through the world’s largest online retailer “causes even greater damage” to their businesses by “undercut[ting] sales and the perceived value of authorised and legitimate copies” of the books

If the filings are to be believed then every defendant is a filthy stinking pirate. But given that there are 100 accounts being targeted it would be unfair to tar them all with the same brush.

Some of these sellers might be completely innocent, and what with textbook publishers being textbook publishers, the sellers might be guilty of nothing more than importing textbooks, which as the courts have told us in Kirtsaeng v Wiley, is completely legal.

image by pmccormi

In June 2015 Amazon launched a writing contest in Germany called Kindle Storyteller where authors who uploaded a novella to KDP could win a prize.

Now the retailer has announced a similar contest in the UK – only this time Amazon has an ulterior motive.

The Bookseller reports:

The Kindle Storyteller Award will be given to an English language title published through KDP between 20th February and 19th May this year.

Amazon said readers will play a hand in selecting the shortlist, compiled using “a number of factors which measure customer interest in the titles” along with a panel of judges made of up Amazon executives and literary figures.

Along with being awarded a £20,000 cash prize at a central London ceremony in July, the winning author will be given a marketing campaign to support the book on Amazon.co.uk and the opportunity to have it translated for international sales.

“Great books deserve to be celebrated and that’s what we want to do with the Kindle Storyteller competition,” said Alessio Santarelli, EU Kindle Content Director, Amazon. “We hope to encourage aspiring authors and those who have already been published, to get writing and make their new stories available to readers across the world. Publishing a book has never been easier, and the Kindle Storyteller Award will reward the author whose story resonates most with both readers and literary experts."

Eligible ebooks must be uploaded through Amazon.co.uk. The titles must be previously unpublished and a minimum of 5,000 words long. Oh, and the ebooks must be in Kindle Unlimited in order to qualify.

Writing contest? This isn’t a writing contest; it’s a cleverly disguised attempt to recruit authors into KU.

In much the same way that some slimy companies run art "contests" in order to get free labor in the form of submissions S&S used last year’s Star Trek writing contest as a feeder pool for vanity press Author Solutions, Amazon is running a "writing contest" in order to get authors to add their titles to Kindle Unlimited.

It is almost disappointing to see Amazon use such a patently obvious maneuver; did they think no one would notice?

image by sk8geek

Here’s a scenario which I briefly considered using for a 1 April prank before I realized that it was too plausible and too depressing to make for a good joke.

I am referring to what is now all but inevitable: the deal where Kobo takes over the Nook platform and either runs it for Barnes & Noble, or simply acquires the Nook customer list so that B&N can shut down its ebook division.

Launched in the summer of 2009, the Nook division reached its peak three years later before imploding during the 2012 holiday season. It began a downward spiral which has not stopped to this day, leading us to the point where the Nook Store was generating less revenue for publishers and authors than Kindle Unlimited. (The latter paid out $154.8 million in B&N’s FY2016. )

B&N responded to the decline by reducing staff and outsourcing everything they could. Nook operations were outsourced to an Indian company, the last Nook ereader was licensed from Netronix, and Nook Android tablets come from Samsung and a Chinese OEM.

B&N’s Nook losses continue, so at this point their only option left is to either one, sell the customer accounts; or two, let another company run the Nook platform on B&N’s behalf.

When I first broached this issue in 2014 I thought the former was a strong possibility, but three years later we also have the example of the Kobo-Tolino deal as a second possible option.

Earlier this month Kobo announced that Kobo would replace Deutsche Telecom as the tech partner for Tolino, a deal which will ultimately lead to Kobo apps and hardware replacing Tolino’s current hardware and reading apps.

Kobo and B&N could negotiate a similar deal for the Nook platform.  (This, coincidentally, could look a lot like the deal between Kobo and Borders before the latter went bankrupt in mid-2011.)

Let’s consider the two scenarios separately.

In scenario one Kobo gets everyone’s email addresses and other details as well as a list of the ebooks we each have in our accounts. Nook users are given the option of merging the data into our existing Kobo accounts, or creating a new Kobo account.

Under this scenario, the existing Nook apps will stop working, and readers will have to install Kobo apps to access the ebooks they purchased. The Nook hardware will lose its integration with its bookstore, but it will still work as stand alone devices.

And most importantly, former Nook users will lose any ebooks which were in their Nook account but cannot be found in the Kobo store.

To be more specific: under this scenario consumers will lose our Fictionwise purchases, and others.  (I have 450 titles in my Nook account which had been transferred from Fictionwise, so this will definitely hurt me.)

This scenario sucks on many levels, but the upside is that it is a clean death for Nook and a clean break between a user’s old Nook account and their new Kobo account.

The second scenario, on the other hand, includes a degree of uncertainty which should worry you.

In scenario two, Kobo will become the tech partner which runs the Nook platform for Barnes & Noble. everything will continue to run as it was before, but the Nook platform will slowly be replaced bit by bit with similar functionality in the Kobo platform as B&n stops wanting to pay for stuff.

The Nook apps will be replaced when B&N decides to cut back on the maintenance and updates, and at some point the last Nook will either be retired or updated to run Kobo firmware.

On the one hand Nook users won’t lose their accounts, but on the other hand services and features will break as each bit gets replaced.

But on the gripping hand, the most likely outcome in the long run for this scenario will be Kobo merging the Nook platform into its platform.

So basically the two scenarios will lead to the same result, with the only difference being the amount of pain suffered by Nook users and how long that pain lasts.

Which would you prefer: the sudden, acute death of the Nook platform or the drawn-out death?

Nook users won’t get to choose how the Nook platform dies, but they will have to go through one or the other. Which one would be the better option, do you think?

image by JBrazito

Despite its short-lived commercial lifespan, the HP TouchPad continues to see action in the developer community. A new port of Android 5.0 Lollipop has recently been made available for the legacy device, which originally debuted in 2011 before being discontinued by HP just two months later. That sudden discontinuation led to massive clearance sales, which helped the tablet find a second life as a favorite experimental platform for hobbyist developers.

A developer known as "flintman" recently introduced a beta version of Evervolv 5.0 on the XDA Forums. Evervolv is a custom Android ROM, and this latest iteration utilizes the source code from the newly released Android 5.0 Lollipop. Because this release is in its early stages, it remains somewhat unpolished. Current testers report that the system feels sluggish and the integrated camera is not yet functional. However, Bluetooth connectivity is reportedly working, and optimization is expected to improve performance in future updates.

For users interested in trying the firmware, installation details are hosted on the XDA platform. Given its current instability, the Lollipop port is largely recommended for enthusiasts who enjoy troubleshooting. Those seeking a more reliable experience on the TouchPad can still access older, stable versions of the Evervolv ROM, such as those based on Android 4.4 KitKat.

The hardware itself has historically faced durability issues. Many users reported that the plastic casing was prone to hairline fractures, particularly near the charging ports. Additionally, software support was famously limited during its official run. While the TouchPad was considered a bargain at its $100 fire-sale price point in 2011, technology has significantly progressed. By 2014, modern budget tablets offered similar or superior specifications with native Android support for only a slightly higher investment, making the TouchPad more of a nostalgic curiosity than a primary daily device for most consumers.

Yesterday’s news about Apple and three major trade publishers agreeing to give up agency price controls in Canada has been misreported in some circles, with one person going so far as to claim both that Canada had "passed a new law to lower ebook prices" and that "the Canadian Competition Bureau has commanded that Hachette, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster have to lower ebook prices".

What with all the misinformation flying around, it’s worth a few minutes of our time to read the actual settlement agreements and consider their impact on the market.

Since this post is in many ways an addendum to yesterday’s story, I will not repeat the background but instead focus on the specific terms and conditions. The text of the agreements have been released, and you can find them at the links below.

• Consent agreement with Apple
• Consent agreement with Hachette
• Consent agreement with MacMillan
• Consent agreement with Simon & Schuster

The four decrees are essentially the same and differ only in minor details. They require Apple and the three publishers to make specific changes to each company’s ebook distribution contracts.

Apple has to drop the most-favored-nation clause from its contracts with publishers, and it cannot add that clause again for three years.

Here are the specifics:

Apple shall not, for a period of three years from the date of the registration of this Agreement, enter into any agreement with a Major E-book Publisher that contains a Price MFN with respect to the Sale of E-books to consumers in Canada.

For each agreement between Apple and a Major E-book Publisher in force at the date of registration of this Agreement that contains a Price MFN with respect to the Sale of Ebooks to consumers in Canada, Apple shall, as soon as permitted under the agreement, take steps required under the agreement to cause the agreement to be terminated and not renewed or extended. Apple may, in lieu of termination, satisfy its obligations under this paragraph 3 as follows:

(a) by entering into an amendment to the agreement, effective no later than fifty (50) days after the registration of this Agreement, either (i) making the agreement inapplicable to the Sale of E-books to consumers in Canada or (ii) removing the Price MFN with respect to the Sale of E-books to consumers in Canada; or

(b) by notifying the Major E-book Publisher within twenty-five (25) days of the date of registration of this Agreement that during the period of three years from the date of registration of this Agreement, Apple will not enforce any Price MFN with respect to the Sale of E-books to consumers in Canada in any such agreement between Apple and the Major E-book Publisher.

Fun fact: This requirement specifically only covers the Big Five trade publishers – who are listed in the decree by name, which means Apple still gets to enforce that clause against everyone else.

Talk about a half-assed punishment; it costs Apple absolutely nothing that they value – not even money.

And despite the erroneous report mentioned above, this consent decree does not require that ebook prices go down; while that might happen it cannot be guaranteed.

The three publishers agreed to similarly weak consent decrees; they too have to give up the MFN clause. They are not required to lower their ebook prices, but they do have to relinquish control of the retail price for a period of nine months (*):

Subject to paragraph 5, the Respondent shall not, for a period of nine (9) months commencing no later than one hundred and twenty (120) days following the date of registration of this Agreement, directly or indirectly:

(a) restrict, limit or impede an E-book Retailer’s ability to set, alter or reduce the Retail Price of any E-book for Sale to consumers in Canada or to offer price discounts or any other form of promotions to encourage consumers in Canada to Purchase one or more E-books; or

(b) enter into an agreement with any E-book Retailer that has the effect described in paragraph 2(a).

Apparently the Competition Bureau believes that this period is sufficient to birth a new, more competitive ebook market, but as anyone who has watched the end and return of agency price controls in the US, that is obviously not going to happen.

In 2012 and 2013 the DoJ reached similar deals with four US trade publishers. The publishers had to relinquish control of their ebook prices for a period of time, but as soon as that period ended they regained control and price competition came to an end.

Rather than a lower average price for ebooks, Author Earnings Report has shown the major US trade publishers, aka the Big Five, have been steadily increasing their ebook prices quarter by quarter.

So instead of more competition in the US ebook market consumers are faced with stifling prices and no respite in sight.

And that is exactly what will happen in Canada.

That makes you wonder why the Competition Bureau even bothered to secure consent degrees with token punishments, does it not?

P.S. Note: The three publishers' consent decrees are verbatim aside from one small detail; S&S and Macmillan have 120 days to comply, while Hachette as 50 days.

image by Mel_DJ

For the longest time the only way to get an audiobook into iTunes – as an audiobook  – was through Audible. Thanks to pressure from European regulators, that has now changed.

The WSJ reports:

European Union antitrust regulators on Thursday said they welcomed a move by Amazon.com Inc. to end exclusivity obligations for the supply and distribution of audiobooks between the e-commerce giant and Apple Inc.

The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, said the exclusivity obligations required Apple to source only from Amazon’s unit Audible and also required Audible not to supply other music digital platforms besides Apple’s iTunes store.

The agreement between the two companies, which was struck Jan. 5 2017, will improve competition in downloadable audiobook distribution in Europe, the EU said.

You can read the European Commission’s press release here, and the Bundeskartellamt has also made a statement.

The Audible-Apple deal was struck in 2008, before Amazon bought the audiobook company. It gave the smaller company a monopoly which, frankly, reduced competition in the audiobook market.

Regulators started investigating this deal in November 2015 in response to a complaint filed by German book publishers earlier that year. At that time physical audiobooks still accounted for 80% of the German market, so Audible’s monopoly didn’t amount to much – in Germany, that is. In global terms, it seriously limited competition.

In the long run we’re going to see more competition as Audible’s competitors, including Author’s Republic, secure deals with Apple.

image by kassy.miller

When it comes to distributing indie press titles to public libraries, OverDrive is pretty much it for ebooks. OD is the market, and there are only a few ways to get ebooks into OverDrive – Streetlib, ebookPartnership, etc.

But soon authors and small presses might be able to distribute ebooks through Kobo Writing Life, and sell them in OverDrive. Mark Williams has tipped me to a statement Kobo’s Mark Leslie Lefebvre made on Facebook last week:

Phase One Beta of the Kobo Writing Life to OverDrive testing was done in Q4 of 2016. It was minor (with virtually no “marketing” testing other than a small push for a couple of titles to measure the effect), but the results of having just over 200 titles pushed through was significant, with sales to libraries in CA, US, AU, NZ and MY so far.

,,,

Phase Two Beta is now in place – we’re now testing the author-controlled OPT-IN, manually setting unique USD LIBRARY PRICES — because indie authors can certainly offer incredible value to libraries that’s nowhere near the ridiculous over-charging that they’re seeing from trad pub, and yet indie authors can still set their library price a bit higher than their retail. IE, even if an indie author adds a few dollars to their library price, the library can likely still buy 3 or more indie titles for the price of one trad pub’d books – meaning they can better serve their readers.

Kobo is still working on the automation, so the beta testing is being handled entirely manually. Lefebvre writes that "none of those in beta can see live sales data – it’s currently manual reports emailed to authors".

It’s a work in progress, obviously, and Kobo is also working on helping libraries find the more popular titles in the catalog. There’s also going to be a filter so libraries can find local authors and add them to their catalog.

More that four dozen libraries set new records for the number of digital loans last year.

Kobo’s parent company, Rakuten, bought OverDrive in March 2015.

image by Gerald Pereira

Between spellcheck, Grammarly, EditMinion, and what have you, authors have many software tools they can use to check their work.

But Toronto-based Atomic Reach thinks its Atomic AI platform, which launches this week, has the competition beat.

At the core, you’ve got an artificial neural network that’s been painstakingly built to understand 23 distinct measures of language and structure. This artificial neural network is continuously growing, and as it consumes more data, it becomes more precise.

It boasts over three million articles in its database. This is growing constantly, and is analyzed on a regular basis.

“While a human being has an understanding of communication and language, computers do not,” explained Bradley Silver, co-founder of Atomic Reach.

…

Atomic AI falls into a fiercely competitive market that includes the likes of Grammarly and Yoast. But it also differs in a number of key areas.

Firstly, in complexity. Atomic AI is the product of a painstaking, three-year development process that has seen Atomic Reach clinch around $9 million in venture capital. But it’s also aimed at a less general market, as it’s primarily built with content marketers in mind.

This influences what it looks for. Atomic AI isn’t solely concerned about readability. It considers the things that marketers care about – like engagement and conversions.

With pricing reportedly starting at $850, Atomic AI is out of the price range of most authors (unless they are lucky enough to get it through work). But those who can afford it will find it as a WP plugin and a Chrome extension.

Is it really worth the cost, when you can join a writing group or take a class and get the attention of real human beings for a whole lot less?

TNW

When Microsoft released a Windows 10 preview last November which included Epub support in the Edge web browser, it looked like it was just a technical test of the browser’s ability’s, but now MS is about to launch a matching ebookstore.

MSPowerUser reports that Microsoft is about ready to fill the one content hole in its online store.

Like Google, Amazon, and Apple, Microsoft sells apps, music, and video through its retail site, but unlike the other three MS does not sell ebooks. According to a leaked internal build of Windows 10, that is going to change soon:

We were today able to get an early look at the new e-books store in an internal build of Windows 10 Mobile, but the feature is also going to be available for PCs and tablets running Windows 10. The new e-book store will be integrated into the Windows Store as a dedicated section where users will be able to buy books from a range of different publishers and authors. Buying a book from the Windows Store works just like how you would buy an app, game or a music album — simply find a book you want to buy, and hit the Buy button to purchase it.

Once purchased, you can start reading the book on Microsoft Edge which is also getting a dedicated section for Books in Windows 10. This is where you will be able to find all the books you have purchased from the Windows Store which is pretty neat. Thanks to Microsoft Edge’s strong EPUB support, you will be able to add bookmarks into any book you are reading or easily view the table of contents. You can also customize the EPUB Viewer’s theme, change the font size and even the font family to fit your needs.

I first heard the news on PCWorld, which excited over Microsoft’s potential impact on the ebook market and how it could unseat Amazon.

Me, I don’t think ebooks will matter any more to Microsoft than they do to Apple or Google. All three are far too large and make far too much money in other sectors to really care about the ebook market.

Their interest is perfunctory, which is why Amazon, a retailer, continues to dominate the market.

But I do agree that MS is getting back into ebooks. Microsoft was actually one of the early pioneers in the ebook market. They partnered with Barnes & Noble to launch the Microsoft Reader format in 2000, but eventually lost interest when the early ebook market fizzled out.

Even after the Kindle ignited the ebook market, MS allowed its ebook service to languish before ultimately killing it in 2012 It was soon replaced with a second partnership with B&N Nook Media. That was a smart move for MS but ultimately came to naught when B&N’s ebook division imploded in early 2013.

And now Microsoft could be making a third venture into ebooks.

Will it prove more successful than before?

In other words, would you buy an ebook from the Windows Store?

Thanks, Tom, for the tip!

Reading a lot of books in a single calendar year takes careful planning, dedication, and a willingness to abandon awful books.

The following infographic from Darius Foroux details several steps you can take to boost your throughput from a few books a month to over 100 books a year.

Enjoy!

When it shut down just over 2 weeks ago, indie ebook retailer All Romance eBooks gave customers just 3 days to download their purchases, and more importantly, it offered publishers and indie authors ten cents on the dollar for unpaid royalties on the condition that they agree to not sue.

That did not sit well with the authors and publishers. only around 11% have stated that they accepted the offer, and now one of the holdouts has filed a class action lawsuit against ARe and its owner, Lori James.

I am still waiting for a text copy of the announcement, but here is what we know so far:

The press release was initially posted to a private FB group; while I was waiting for permission to post it publicly, Writer Beware beat me to the punch.

Individually, the money owed to authors and publishers would be regarded as unsecured debts. They would be the last to be paid in a bankruptcy and might get paid even less than ten cents on the dollar.

But as a class, they might have a better shot at getting assets.

Assuming there are any assets to go after.

As Kris Rusch pointed out last week, ARe had been failing for a couple years – at least. What looks like an abrupt closure is really the final stage in a slow downward spiral:

They are threatening bankruptcy. Since authors are unsecured creditors, most authors will see no money at all in a bankruptcy.

In fact, I expect the writers who opt for the 10 cents on the dollar solution will not be paid either.

Why do I expect that, besides experience with this kind of thing? Primarily because of the ad blast. The blast wasn’t ARe being venal. It was their last-ditch attempt at raising enough capital to save their business.

Guessing now, purely guessing.

ARe had run ahead of their money since they started. They used today’s money to pay yesterday’s bills. They had no profit. So they were floating money—payments to authors, payments to creditors, payments like website and rent.

That’s why ARe’s technology grew antiquated, why they weren’t keeping up with the times, why payments in some cases were late or impossible to get. They probably got a line of credit too late or they didn’t have one or they were borrowing off credit cards.

Rusch had pulled her titles from ARe once it was clear that ARe was no longer tracking sales correctly. That was a couple years ago.

If ARe has been pinching pennies for that long, struggling to get by, then it would mean that by this point there is nothing left to the retailer but debts.

On the other hand, this lawsuit may be able to go after Lori James assets. Depending on how ARe was incorporated, the judge may be able to go through to the owners' assets and use them to pay the plaintiffs.

Assuming, that is, that James has any assets left to fight over.

image by kenteegardin

Regulatory filings suggest that Hewlett-Packard may be moving forward with a new tablet despite the previous termination of its mobile device line. Recently, a new hardware submission from HP successfully cleared the Federal Communications Commission, fueling speculation that a revised version of the abandoned TouchPad could eventually see a commercial release.

While HP has requested confidentiality regarding most of the specific technical details, the FCC documentation confirms the device features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. Identified by the model number HSTNH-I31C, the device is widely believed to be the "TouchPad Go," a seven-inch version of HP’s original tablet. Previously, this smaller model was considered a casualty of HP’s decision to exit the webOS hardware market, as it never reached retail shelves.

The appearance of these documents suggests that HP might still be interested in a U.S. launch, which would provide a significant boost to the longevity of the webOS platform. Notably, this represents the second time this specific model has appeared in FCC records. The repeat filing points toward potential hardware changes; the latest version seems to lack the 3G cellular radio found in earlier iterations and may have been stripped of other features, such as a camera, to lower production costs.

While some industry observers argued the paperwork was merely the conclusion of old administrative business, the filing dates are current, with certain reports signed as recently as October 5, 2011. Whether this indicates an upcoming product announcement or simply the completion of a long-delayed internal project remains to be seen. Unless HP makes a formal statement, further details will likely stay hidden until the regulatory embargo on the filing’s images and manuals expires in several months.

Last month I brought you the news that Barnes & Noble’s $50 Nook Android tablet came with bonus malware which harvested personal info and sent it to China. At the time, the company claimed to have already fixed the issue and that a future update would completely remove the software.

Now, less than 2 months after it was launched, the $50 Nook Android tablet has been pulled from store shelves and is no longer available on the b&N website.

According to a leaked screenshot, the tablets are being shipped to George Wajda, the B&N director of distribution. The recall was leaked on Reddit by an alleged B&N store employee who wrote that:

early this week we received a project to remove every device from stores. It was very important that they be shipped out quickly, demo devices and all. There was no explanation given and so far this week the signs are still up in the windows, but there has been radio silence and no further instruction other than get them boxed, get tracking numbers, and ship them out. There’s no script for customers, and no recall I can find publicly.

I am waiting for B&N to issue a statement, but I have confirmed that the tablet is not available on the website, and that it has been removed from my local B&N store.

We don’t yet know why that happened, but the original source has speculated that B&N pulled the hardware when they realized that they could not remove the ADDUPS malware with software updates, or that they could not guarantee that everyone will get the update.

That is speculation of course, but even if malware is not the issue, B&N has still pulled the hardware in a quiet but mad rush. That suggests there is something wrong with the $50 Nook tablet, which is why owners should definitely return their tablet forthwith.

Fortunately, B&N’s holiday return policy extends until 31 January, so all of the $50 Nook Android tablets can be returned.

Update: B&N has responded, and their statement might actually be a worse scenario than a malware problem.

Barnes & Noble is investigating three reported cases involving the adapter sold with the NOOK Tablet® 7”. The specific issue involves the adapter casing breaking apart while still in the socket. This does not affect the NOOK® device itself. With no injuries reported and out of an abundance of caution, we recommend that customers stop using the adapter until we provide a replacement adapter. In the meantime, the NOOK Tablet 7” can be charged using a computer. We will be providing more information as we work closely with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to determine the details of a public product recall.

First: One doesn’t yank all store stock for this type of issue – not without also telling store staff what they should say to customers.

The thing is, the original source said that B&N corp did not explain why the tablets were recalled.  The staff were not given any instruction on what to do if a customer brought in a broken charger or a melted tablet but were instead left as confused as the rest of us.

But that is a side issue; the more important issue here is how completely B&N has bungled their new tablet. Not only did it ship with malware, but it also shipped with a defective charger.

Barnes & Noble tried to put a minimum amount of effort into their new tablet, and it has come back to bite them on their stingy ass.

9to5Google