Remember that publishing services portal which PastPencil and the bookseller Books-a-Million launched in April 2015?

They relaunched it last week with a new name and a new lure to pull in the unwary.

According to the press release, BAM! Publish is "an intuitive publishing platform with an integrated in-store book placement program".

Strip away the marketing dross and we see that this is a services marketplace run by FastPencil where publishers and authors can either buy a distribution package or specific services like editing, design, or an author website (I can do that).

I call it a "services marketplace" because there are so many sites like this one that they’re now a category which includes Bookbaby, FastPencil, and a half-dozen other sites.

The one major difference between BAM Publish and the other sites is the promise of in-store placement.

Yes, BAM is dangling the same lure as Nook Press Print: use a bookseller’s platform, and you might be able to get your book in their stores.

In the case of BAM, that promise comes with a few strings attached.

According to the website, authors have to pay $399 and jump through a few hoops (including spending $2,800 or more):

1. You purchase one of our Premium Services Packages, or 1,000 print books
2. When you’re ready, submit a copy of your book and purchase confirmation to your Books-A-Million contact
3. Books-A-Million reviews your book for relevance and appearance
4. Upon approval, Books-A-Million specifies local and/or other stores to stock your book, the on-shelf availability time period, and quantities required for each location
5. You fund book publishing and shipping to approved locations
6. If your book sells out, BAM will re-order/additional inventory at its option
7. Unsold copies are returned to you at Books-A-Million expense after shelf-life expires
8. Books sales and royalty payments are reported in your online workspace dashboard

Barnes & Noble has similar requirements for getting into its stores through Nook Press Print; authors have to sell 500 ebook copies through Nook Press and get the approval of B&N’s small press dept.

B&N’s requirements are less restrictive, and the potential reward higher: it has over 600 retail stores to Books-a-Million’s 260.

Nevertheless, I question whether either program is worth it; the costs are high and the potential gain is minimal.  With romance, thriller, and SF genres, for example, the market has largely gone digital. And since Createspace can distribute a POD title to bookstores, it obviates the value of bothering with niche programs like Nook Press Print or BAM Publish.

Amazon opened their first unstore in New York state this week at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

Located on the lower level of SBU’s Frank Melville Library next to a campus store run by B&N Edu, Amazon@StonyBrook offers students and faculty a secure, convenient package pickup location which is staffed by Amazon employees who can help resolve customer service issues.

As I reported back in September, Amazon was already Stony Brook’s official textbook supplier. Barnes & Noble had passed on the opportunity, and instead now runs gift shops in three locations on the SBU campus.

Amazon faced fierce competition for their new pickup location. “We got three bids from traditional, brick-and-mortar (retailers) and three bids from online services,” Peter Baigent, SBU’s vice president for student affairs, told Innovate LI. “The priorities were affordable books, textbooks and course materials, efficiency, superior service for students and the ability to have the SBU brand well-recognized, locally and nationally. At the end of the day, Amazon secured the bid.”

Counting the planned locations like the one at the University of Wisconsin, this is Amazon’s nineteenth pickup location on or near a college campus. It opened for a soft launch on Wednesday, and officially opened today with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Innovate LI

Paypal released the results of multi-nation survey this week, and it showed that consumers' reading habits, device preferences, and willingness to pay for content can change drastically as you cross international borders.

You can find the global report (more like a collection of slides) here as a PDF. There’s also a US-centric report (PDF). A few details which jumped out at me were the disparities in devices used for reading.

You can almost tell which countries have gone to a post-ereader market based on this chart. France has, and so has the US, but UK, Germany, and Spain have note.

The survey report also showed that in some countries consumers were more willing to buy ebooks than to buy games on in-game purchases.

Alas, while it sounds great that consumers are more willing to spend on ebooks, that doesn’t actually mena they are willing to spend _more_ than they would on games.

In fact, the average spent on games was universally higher than for ebooks:

When buying ebooks, Americans were most likely to buy thrillers, SF&F, and romance (which we already knew were the three most popular ebook genres).

And of course consumers were most likely to buy from Amazon.

Remember last year when Penguin Random House published a textspeak version of Shakespeare? And do you remember Hooked, an app which offers text message based stories?

If you liked those then you’re going to love what Amazon announced this morning.

On Wednesday the retailer announced a new subscription reading service for kids called Amazon Rapids. This $3 a month service offers access to a collection of stories written in chat style of writing. The stories come with illustrations, and if readers have trouble understanding a word they can click on it and look it up.

From Techcrunch:

Some of the chat bubbles might ask a question to get the kid to think about a concept or to make them laugh. One story Agarwal pulled up for me was about an alien interacting with a little boy named Gordon over a strangely misdirected text. Gordon didn’t know anything about aliens and asked if the alien he was chatting with was green. The alien was put off by the question but later admitted he was, in fact, a green alien.

Humor is really important for getting kids interested in reading according to Agarwal. “All the way to age twelve it’s the top thing they are looking for,” he said.

Rapids has hundreds of these short stories in its database so far and Agarwal tells TechCrunch Amazon is adding “dozens more” each month. The idea is to make them fun and short enough to keep the kids engaged till the end.

I generally loathe chat as a writing style, but I am going to make an exception for Amazon Rapids. The combination of the short chunks of text plus images makes this service a modern iteration of picture books, the books given to beginning readers.

Amazon Rapids isn’t dumbing down books; it is providing a simpler form for less able readers. And that’s a good thing.

The simple fact is, many readers are pushed to switch from picture books to chapter books before they are ready. Chapter books have paragraphs of text which are harder to read than picture books, and readers who are forced to switch too early may be frustrated by the more difficult text.

Now Amazon has provided an intermediate type of book which both stretches a reader’s  abilities without overwhelming them.

What’s not to like?

Remember how Amazon launched its bookstores so it could train customers on how to use its app and the rest of its services?

Apparently Amazon is now using the stores to encourage customers to sign up for Amazon Prime. Geekwire reports that Amazon is celebrating the one year anniversary of the launch of the Seattle Amazon Books  with a new pricing policy.

When the store opened, Amazon charged the same price in the store as it did online, but now  the low prices are a perk reserved for Prime members paying $99 a year. Everyone else now has to pay the list price for any non-Amazon hardware sold in its stores.

According to Geekwire, that could be a considerable markup:

There are no price tags on the books at Amazon’s store, as customers can either scan the book at a kiosk or use Amazon’s app to find out how much each product is. But based on a handful of titles I scanned today, the discounts range from 6 percent to upwards of 40 percent. The kiosks clearly show how much you’d save if you were a Prime member.

The new pricing policy reportedly started in August, and have already taken effect at the stores in Seattle, Portland, and San Diego. Amazon is also in the process of launching to two more bookstores in Chicago and Boston.

When I first read this I wondered if Amazon was simply making it easier for non-members to find the price; they might not have Amazon’s app on their smartphone and thus finding and paying the list price would be easier than taking each book to a kiosk.

But looking at how the kiosks highlight the price disparity, it’s clear that Amazon’s goal is to get visitors to sign up for Prime. (Also, there’s no reason to assume only Prime members will have the Amazon app; I for example have the latter but not the former).

Amazon is even promoting Prime with large signs around the store:

Amazon isn’t the first B&M retailer to tie its discounts to a membership program; many supermarket chains and other retailers offer discounts with a free membership card, and Borders and Barnes & Noble even charged for their membership programs.

So in a way Amazon is copying their competition while going one step better; the Prime membership is worth getting.

That said, I still have two questions. How would you prove to the cashier that you have a Prime membership?

Also, how much do you want to bet that the receipt for non-members will highlight how much they could have saved?

The strangest case of scamming in the Kindle Store crossed my desk on Sunday, and I am still scratching my head.

On Sunday several authors started commenting on Kboards that obviously fake ebooks were moving up the various best-seller lists in the Kindle Store. The scam titles were first noticed on the "Movers & Shakers" list (it tracks sudden increases in popularity) as they started moving up the best-seller list.

For example:

The ebooks all had similar generic covers, similar generic titles, and you could frequently find two or three different copies of an ebook from multiple authors.

And according to reports, the ebooks had large file sizes but little original content. Many just had the same couple paragraphs repeated over and over.

So they were obviously scam ebooks, and some even got high on the children’s best-sellers list before disappearing.

But the question remains, what were the scammers trying to accomplish?

I ask this question because by the time I heard about this scam on Sunday afternoon, most of the scam ebooks were no longer available. Amazon had pulled them and vanished the ebooks' listing pages.

What’s even more interesting is that some of the titles kept going up the lists even after they were gone; it’s almost as if their trajectory kept propelling them upward.

But still, it’s not clear what the scammers gained from this attempt.

The consensus opinion over at KBoards was that the scammers were running a page count scam in Kindle Unlimited, and I have to admit that this is the most likely possibility.

The idea behind this scam is that the scammers would upload junk ebooks and then use bots to "read" the ebooks in Kindle Unlimited. The scammers get paid, Amazon gets bilked, and authors lose out on the visibility of getting on the best-seller lists (and no, authors aren’t losing any money here).

But one problem with that theory is that the ebooks were all published within the past few days, and were pulled quickly by Amazon. So clearly Amazon had identified the scam and responded promptly.

That’s not what scammers want, as one commenter put it over at KBoards:

That was too fast and hard, too visible, to be scammers out to make money. Because you do not draw attention to yourself like that if you want to get away with it. You stay under the radar.

And since Amazon declines to pay out earnings when they think you’re scamming them, what exactly did the scammers gain, here?

Amazon’s publishing divisions have set up shop in the US, UK, Germany, and France. Now that list includes India.

Deal Street Asia and The Hindu report that Amazon was buying Indian publisher Westland:

Online marketplace Amazon has agreed to acquire the remaining 74% stake in Westland, the publishing unit of the Tata group retail company Trent Ltd, indicating its interest in expanding its presence in India books market.

The terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.

In February, Amazon bought a 26% stake in Westland for about Rs 9.5 crore. Trent had said at the time that Amazon had the option to acquire the remaining 74% stake later.

Following the investment made by Amazon.com NV Investment Holding, Inc., Amazon will get right to name one member to the Westland board.

Westland’s own site is down for maintenance, but according to the profile on the site of its corporate parent, Westland is a fiction, non-fiction, and literary publisher.

It is also described as being one of the largest book distributors in India. Westland distributes books for Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Canongate, Perseus, Hachette, and Pan Macmillan.

It is not clear whether Westland’s distribution arm was included in the sale, or just its publishing divisions.

While the terms of the sale have not been released, that 24% stake cost Amazon about 95 million rupees, or $1.4 million USD, in February.

image by TheCreativePenn

B&N has been re-branding Samsung Galaxy Tabs for the past three years, but now they are apparently going to release their own budget tablet.

A new FCC filing from a Chinese company called Shenzhen Jingwah has revealed that B&N’s next tablet, model number BNTV450, will have a 7″ screen and run Android on a quad-core MediaTek CPU.

Thanks to an oversight by B&N’s Chinese contractor, we get to see all of the info, including the external and internal photos which show the Nook logo, test results, and a user manual (PDF) which clearly confirms that this tablet runs B&N’s software and carries its brand.

That’s how we know that this tablet has specs about on par with the $50 Fire tablet. I can’t tell you everything yet, but so far I have gleaned the following from the FCC paperwork:

• CPU: 1.3GHz MediaTek MT8163 quad-core
• GPU: Mali-T720 MP2
• Battery: 3Ah
• Wifi: 802.11a/b/g/n dual-band
• Bluetooth 4.0
• Cameras: two, resolution unknown
• Speaker, headphone jack
• microSD card slot

I also can’t tell you which version of Android it will be running, but the one photo I have of the software suggests that it will run a vanilla flavor with Nook apps running on top.

The screenshots in the user manual also point to that theory.

As you can see in the photos at the end of the post, this tablet carries the Nook logo, but that is about as close as it comes to the beautiful designs we used to expect from Nook.

Instead, this is a generic Chinese tablet which B&N has licensed for its use – just like the last Nook ereader was built by Netronix and licensed to B&N.

That’s a cost effective move for B&N, but will it result in good hardware?

We’ll have to wait for the official announcement before we can answer that question.

FCC via Liliputing

If you were disappointed by last year’s $150 Shiftwear ePaper sneakers when they ultimately proved to be vaporware then I have some good news for you.

News of a similar product has crossed my desk this week, only this time the shoes actually exist and have more than a lot of fancy photoshop to back them up.

Meet the Vixole Matrix, a pair of sneakers whose crowd-funding campaign just launched in Indiegogo.

These $245 sneakers sport LED screens wrapped around the heel. The screens are relatively low resolution (32 x 72) monochrome screen, but on the plus side the Matrix shoes also have a g-sensor, accelerometer, a sound sensor, and a magnetometer.

They’re powered by a 3Ah battery, and can connect to your smartphone over Bluetooth.

And best of all, these shoes actually exist. Vixole has been showing off the matrix sneakers since July:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTX1rHD-Bmg

The Matrix sneakers are up for pre-order on the website and on Indiegogo. You can order a pair for a$225 if you act fast. The regular retail is $345, but either way you will have to wait until at least June before you can put the shoes on.

That’s a long wait, but it is still better than the Shiftwear. That product launched in December 2015 and has yet to show a working prototype.

The above video is the kind of thing I want to see before I would risk my money on a project. That’s why I didn’t invest in Shiftwear last year; that, and shown in the demo GIFs , the shoes with impossibly high resolution color E-ink screens, were simply impossible.

While the Vixole Matrix is a much more limited design, it is also more feasible.

I bet you a pair of shoes that the Matrix will ship by the end of 2017, while Shiftwear will never ship the shoe design they showed off last December.

Who wants to take me up on that bet?

Engadget

Yesterday’s story about the Nook Press platform has turned up a newsworthy detail about the platform which had so far gone unreported (I would also have missed it, had David Gaughran not brought it up).

Barnes & Noble has made major changes to its digital platform over the past year. Most were announced with fanfare, but not the changes to the Author Services part of Nook Press.

Sometime between March and August 2016 B&N shut down the part of Nook Press which had been overcharging authors for basic services like cover design, editing, and the like.

Launched in November 2014, Nook Press Author Services sold authors over-priced services bundles under the pretense that it was assisting them in publishing their work, but that was just the cover. This dept was run by the infamous vanity press Author Solutions (ASI), and in reality ASI was really interested in upselling authors by getting them to buy expensive and useless marketing packages.

ASI frequently used otherwise legit companies like Lulu, Simon & Schuster, and yes, B&N, to run front operations like the Star Trek writing contest or publishing imprints like S&S’s Archway.

While B&N never came out and said that its Author Services dept was run by Author Solutions, in March 2015 a whistle blower leaked the ToS contract, proving the connection. The relationship was later confirmed during the discovery period for one of the class-action suits filed against ASI.

And now that partnership has ended, which is good news for everyone except the scammers at ASI.

This is the latest bad news for Author Solutions, which was sold off by Penguin Random House last fall for an undisclosed sum. ASI’s business had dropped by half since PRH bought ASI in 2012.

The intern who has been left in charge of B&N’s ebook platform has apparently been busy. Just over a month ago they added an option for setting an ebook’s price to zero, and now they are apparently revamping Nook Press.

Earlier today the Nook Press staff posted the following notice:

If you can’t see the screenshot, it says that B&N is moving user accounts from the existing Nook Press platform to the new Nook Press Print platform which it launched in June.

Yes, apparently they weren’t just different services but also different platforms, and now user accounts from one are being merged into the other.

According to the announcement the merger will let users manage all of their Nook Press publishing projects (both print and ebooks) through one website. The change will also result in better access to sales reporting, and a simpler process for ordering proofs and copies of a user’s books.

The NOOK Press team also said that later on they will be "adding some highly requested features and making necessary bug fixes", but that won’t be happening until after 8 November.

This move is being handled by Bahwan CyberTek, the Indian tech firm which took over running parts of the Nook platform in June.

In a way, they are following in the footsteps of Amazon. That retailer has long supported both POD and ebook distribution from a single account in Createspace, and earlier this month Amazon also started rolling out a similar ebook+POD dashboard in KDP.

The latter program is in beta at the moment.

Thanks, Carmen, for the tip!

The internet’s attic has reached a milestone few web properties will ever be able to match; it is turning twenty this year.

The IA touted the milestone in a blog post today where it announced several upgraded features:

• Thanks to the efforts of Giovanni Damiola, full-text search through all books hosted on the Internet Archive is back online and is faster than ever. You can try the new feature, for example, to see over 115,000 places where works reference Benjamin Franklin’s maxim: “Little strokes fell great oaks”.
• Thanks to Richard Carceres, we have a beautiful new Book Reader, which looks great on mobile devices and provides a much clearer and simpler book borrowing experience. Try out the new Book Reader and see for yourself!
• In the processing of adding hundreds of thousands of new modern works to the Open Library catalog, Mek Karpeles released our new openlibrary-client, a command line developer tool for programmatically fetching and creating new works on Open Library.

They also announced that patrons who borrowed ebooks from the Open Library could now do so from inside the BookReader webapp. Users can also switch between Epub and PDF formats, or return the ebook early.

Launched by Brewster Kahle in May 1996 (according to Wikipedia), the site now hosts copies of tens of millions of books, websites, games, apps, and other material, including specialized collections like the thousands of old video games running in emulators.

Amazon’s third bookstore opened briefly on Saturday for what is being called a soft launch. Located outside of Portland, the Washington Square store is Amazon’s third bookstore after Seattle and San Diego, and from the sounds of things the new store is operating just like the old one.

Oregon Live visited the store on Saturday. and they described a 7,800 square foot space which sounds like a copy of the store in Seattle. In addition to the space set aside for Amazon hardware, the store stocks around 5,200 titles:

And while Amazon’s bookstores might not seem as cozy as others with live-in cats, well-worn armchairs and hand-written staff recommendations, Cast says the stores are driven by data from passionate book-lovers.

Instead of a hand-written card under a few books per shelf, every single book in Amazon’s store features a placard with a customer review or a notable award the book received.

…

It’s OK if you’re on your phone

The store is meant to be an extension of Amazon’s website, so shoppers can jump from the in-store experience to the online experience without missing a beat. Instead of dismissing showrooming – the practice of seeing or trying an item in-store and then buying it online – Amazon is embracing it.

For instance, under each book is a placard with a bar code that a customer can scan using Amazon’s app. The app will bring up the book, along with reviews and other recommended titles. If it’s the first in a series, and the store didn’t stock the second book, a customer could order it on her phone.

In addition, customers who see a book they want can scan it with the Amazon app and add it to their virtual wish list, to be shared with friends and family members ahead of birthdays or holidays.

It’s no wonder Amazon embraces showrooming in its stores – it stands to profit either way.

Much to the dismay of Amazon’s detractors, there’s no torture chamber, no trophy wall displaying the remains of Amazon’s defeated foes, and the staff aren’t chained to the registers.

It’s just a bookstore.

Amazon is also working to open at least two more bookstores, one in Chicago and the other outside of Boston, next year. With luck, those stores will be the dens of iniquity the Amazon haters have been warning us about.

image by SounderBruce

Over the past few years we’ve seen ereader and other epaper displays which were powered wirelessly by NFC. Now Microsoft has come up with a design for an epaper post-it note which is powered by ambient lighting.

The prototype “energy-neutral” display has solar panels on the back and can run on office lighting . “What we imagine is that our technology could be used just like a Post-It note,” says team member Tobias Grosse-Puppendahl. “But it could be reused, synchronized with notes in other locations, and could be programmed to show up-to-date information, like the weather or the latest bus timetable when you’re due to leave the office.”

You can see more about it in this video:

This is not the first solar-powered E-ink display; E-ink built a prototype years back, and over the past few years several solar-powered ereaders have been tested or launched in Finland, Japan, and China.

But this is perhaps the first solar powered sign for offices, and it’s a pity that it has such a low resolution.

Yes it is designed to be seen from a distance, but the resolution is so low that one of these screens can only display a limited amount of info.

In any case, the new display was developed by Microsoft Research, so it’s unclear whether it will be developed commercially or simply left as a research paper. The most likely possibility is that, like the battery-less Kindle patent, this idea will be shelved as the researchers move on to new projects.

But who knows, 3M (makers of Post-It notes) could pick up the idea and run with it as their new digital Post-It note.

Would you use one?

New Scientist

One of Amazon’s key steps in building the Kindle platform was buying the early ebook startup Mobipocket in 2005. The French company was stripped for parts and allowed to wither for years before being forced to shut down its retail and distribution operation in 2011, and now it is about to close completely.

The Mobipocket homepage has recently been updated with a new notice:

The Mobipocket website & its services will be permanently shut down on Oct 31st, 2016. Prior to that date, please ensure:

1. You have downloaded copies of all the ebook content you’ve purchased through Mobipocket. Please re-download any ebooks you need prior to October 31st.
2. You have activated all your Mobipocket CDROMs. You can activate CDROMs by clicking here.

Given that Mobipocket has not sold ebooks in nearly five years, nor updated its apps since 2008, I seriously doubt that this will affect anyone.

Anyone who valued the DRMed ebooks they bought in Mobipocket format has already stripped the DRM and converted to another format. (And of course DRM-free Mobi ebooks are technically identical to Kindle ebooks, so they can be easily loaded on to Kindle apps and hardware.)

Me, I haven’t bought a DRMed Mobi ebook since I don’t know when, but when I did I mainly bought from Fictionwise (which was shut down in late 2012).

But I did used to buy a lot of Mobipocket ebooks. Mobipocket (along with Microsoft’s MSReader, Adobe PDF, and eReader) used to be one of the major ebook formats.

As late as 2009 and 2010 it was still sometimes worth buying either MSReader or Mobipocket ebooks and stripping the DRM; sometimes the older format cost less than the Kindle or Epub versions, or sometimes a title might be available in only the older formats (no, seriously, that was still happening in 2010).

But that stopped being true a long time ago.

image by banger1977

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