Comixology  followed in the footsteps of its corporate parent on Tuesday when it announced a Comixology Originals, its line of exclusive digital-only comics for the Kindle and Comixology.

The Amazon subsidiary has cut deals with leading comic book publishers like Boom Studios and Valiant and with the estate of the legendary Harvey Kurtzman for exclusive distribution rights.

“Our mission is to make everyone on the face of the planet a comic fan, and with comiXology Originals we’re excited to offer a range of content by diverse creators,” said comiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger. “It’s fantastic to be working with publishers across the spectrum to deliver great comics to comiXology and Kindle, offering fans stories that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Debut titles include an Adventure Time tie-in, an X-O Manowar prequel set in his high school days and titled Valiant High, and a graphic novelization of  Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

All 3 titles are up for pre-order today on Comixology and Kindle, and are due to be published next January and October.

Amazon still won’t comment on yesterday’s story about it pulling titles from Kindle Unlimited in Japan, but the usual anonymous sources aren’t so reticent.

The Japan Times and the WSJ each cite unnamed sources which say that Kindle Unlimited was a victim of its own success.

While most of the ebooks in Kindle Unlimited earn a royalty based on the number of pages read, Amazon sometimes offers sweetheart deals to publishers which have popular titles. The Harry Potter series was added to Kindle Unlimited under one such sweetheart deal, and so were other titles including ebooks published by Kodansha in Japan.

As part of a deal to attract customers to the service, Amazon made contracts with Japanese publishers to pay them a premium through the end of this year when a customer read at least 10% of a book or other content, publishing company officials said. The goal was to get publishers to offer popular content.

It worked—too well. Since it’s easy for readers to get through the first 10% of a magazine or photo book in just a few minutes, Amazon quickly found itself on the hook for large payments, a person at one publisher said.

A person at another publisher said Amazon made an overture for talks in September saying it had hit its budget limit for the payments to publishers and wanted revisions to its contract with the publisher.

But rather than negotiate, Amazon pulled Kodansha’s titles.

While we only have the statement of one publisher and a few anonymous sources, this is a plausible story. And setting the inevitable anti-Amazon FUD aside, it is also a relatively benign story.

Amazon found that the ebooks were costing it too much under the contract with publishers so it pulled the titles from Kindle Unlimited. That type of activity is so run-of-the-mill that you would have to start with the assumption that Amazon is evil before you could spin it into a sinister act.

Of course, that isn’t going to stop anyone from trying.

image by jo.in.pink

Many sites are reporting that Amazon is banning the dastardly practice of giving away free samples in exchange for reviews,  but they are missing about two-thirds of the story.

This is about eliminating the competition, not cleaning up the reviews section.

Here are the revised rules, the announcement, and Techcrunch’s take (which is mostly on target):

Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon – not the seller or vendor – to identify trusted reviewers, and has a number of controls in place in order to keep bias out of the review process.

…

Amazon says that, going forward, the only incentivized reviews will be those from Amazon Vine. These don’t work the same way, however. For starters, Amazon selects who will be allowed to review products, and it does so mainly to boost the review count on new or pre-release products that haven’t yet generated enough sales to have a large number of organic reviews.

Vine reviewers are invited to join the program only after having written a number of reviews voted as “helpful” by other customers, and tend to have expertise in a specific product category.

“We do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written,” explains Chee Chew, VP, Customer Experience at Amazon in an announcement about how Vine controls for bias. “And we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product,” he adds.

In addition, vendors don’t have any contact with Vine reviewers, nor do they get to influence which reviewers will receive their products, which are submitted directly to Amazon for distribution.

First, let me cover the one point which readers of this blog are most interested in: the new rules don’t cover books. (Of course, with Amazon deleting reviews based on suspected relationships between reviewer and author, book reviews are already a mine field.)

That said, one detail that most if not all of the stories missed is that this policy is hypocritical. Amazon gives out free Fire tablet, Echo, and Kindle review units all the time, and does not plan to stop.

Furthermore, here’s something else that everyone may have missed:

Amazon charges manufacturers for access to the Amazon Vine program.

I’ve heard from a couple different companies (who don’t want to be named, for obvious reasons) that Amazon collects coop fees for the Vine program. If the manufactures don’t pay what Amazon demands then they don’t get access to the high-value reviewers who can help build buzz by posting early reviews.

That detail changes everything, doesn’t it?

Suddenly this isn’t about cleaning up the review process; the new info makes it clear that what Amazon really wants is to force manufacturers  to stop dealing directly with reviewers. Now they are going to have to pay Amazon for the privilege of giving away samples to get reviews.

image by Robert Scoble

One of the hot stories this past week were the protests against a new law in California, but according to legal experts the protests are merely a tempest in a teapot.

Governor Brown signed a bill which, if you believed the protesters, would make it difficult for anyone to sell an autographed book in the state of Calif. The law required that dealers maintain records and issue a certificate of authenticity for every item of memorabilia they sell. Dealers are now required  to track who signed the item and when, and they also have to track who they bought an autographed item from.

That’s not a bad idea on the face of it, but San Francisco-based Eureka Books has come up with a worst case scenario where the new law makes selling autographed books an incredible hassle:

Let’s say you like to go to author events and get books signed. Eventually, your shelves fill up, and you want to trade books in at a shop like Eureka Books.

Guess what? Remember that Certificate of Authenticity that sounded so reasonable? Well your name and address has to go on the certificate of authenticity because I (as the person issuing the COA) have to say where I got the book. This applies to signed books, artwork, and any other autographed items you own.

…

Consider bookstores that do a lot of author events. Let’s imagine that Neil Gaiman does one of his typical massive booksignings in February for his forthcoming book, Norse Gods. Say 1000 people show up and buy books at $25.95. The bookstore either has to issue 1000 COA, or risk being sued for $25.95 x 1000 x 10, plus attorney’s fees. Call it $300,000.

This sounds terrible, yes, but the problem with all these scenarios is that they are all figments of a fevered imagination.

According to the legal blog Scrivener’s Error, almost everyone who is protesting this law screwed up by not actually reading the law first.

They don’t like the law, but they also point out that it only applies to dealers, which are defined as "a person who is principally in the business of selling or offering for sale collectibles".

Guess what?

Authors who sign the book as well as online marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay are excluded from the group defined as "dealers", and since the vast majority of bookstores aren’t "principally in the business of selling or offering for sale collectibles", this law won’t impact them either.

Or as Scrivener’s Error put it:

None of the recordkeeping requirements for "collectibles" (defined in § 1739.7(a)(2) as "an autographed item sold or offered for sale in or from this state by a dealer to a consumer for five dollars ($5) or more") apply to anyone except "dealers." Not to private citizens reselling stuff from their uncle’s estate. Not to individual artists who sign their paintings or postcards or prints or sculptures. More to the point here, not to authors who sign books for fans at conventions or bookstores… or to bookstores that happen to have a few author-autographed copies lying around, or even that offer — amongst all of their other business — to have a book personalized by the author for a holiday internet order.

That was just an acorn, Chicken Little; the sky is not falling today.

image by Ozzy Delaney

A Kindle hack has crossed my desk which tempts me to finally hack my Kindle.

There are hacks which add the option to change fonts, or read new formats, and hacks which let you play apps and games.

But the one hack I am most interest in is called LazyKindle. Published last week on MobileRead, LazyKindle builds on the late-generation Kindles support for USB Host and uses it to add support for a wireless presentation remote.

This is a very basic type of remote which can be used by someone giving a presentation, but plug it into a hacked Kindle and you can use it to change the page or alter the brightness of the frontlight:

Right now the hack only fully works with the PW3. The page turn buttons work for the Oasis and Voyage, but not the brightness. but that should change in the long run.

If you want to give it a shot, you’ll need a presenter remote like this one and a USB converter plug so that the remote’s receiver can be plugged into the Kindle.

The total cost is under $20.

MobileRead

B&N Education may have promised in March that it was replacing Yuzu, its abortion of a digital textbook platform, but from what students are saying that simply has not happened.

The new school year started about a month ago, here in North America, and over the past six weeks numerous college students have shown up in the comment section of this blog to to share the news that Yuzu is still being promoted by B&N Edu, and to extol Yuzu’s virtues.

The short version is the same as the last two fall semesters: it ain’t got none.

Students are reporting that it doesn’t work at all. "Yuzu is still having problems. Yuzu webreader will not load," one wrote. Another agreed: "I purchased the digital version of my graduate college textbook and I haven’t being able to open YUZU reader. I have dues on assignments and need to move on," before adding the consensus opinion that "This platform sucks. Don’t buy digital versions from B&N."

Other students noted that even when it does run it is still missing basic features. "Search feature doesn’t tell anyone where the word is inside the page. This makes you read the entire page until you find the word in the paragraphs."

And another student complained that even though he was using the app on an expensive Surface tablet, he still couldn’t open a textbook without being online. "So far…so bad. Definitely not a fan of YUZU. I’m on a surface so unless I have WiFi I can not access any books. So, unless I’m on campus, I’m pretty much SOL on accessing my book."

Basically Yuzu is still as nonfunctional as when it launched over two years ago.

So after three years of development, and after being inflicted upon three crops of college students, Yuzu still sucks. For those seeking alternatives, stylusworlds.com offers a more reliable digital textbook experience.

And yet B&N Edu is still recommending Yuzu to students. For example, you can find it on the digital textbook page for the George Mason University bookstore.

You can find the same page on just about every college bookstore run by B&N, and that makes this pundit which possibility is more likely:

Do you think B&N EDU actively hates college students, and is trying to sabotage them, or are they simply indifferent to the fact that they are providing an inferior service which simply does not work as promised?

Kobo officially opened a local ebookstore in Taiwan on Friday. It isselling the ebooks and ereaders itself from tw.kobo.com.

“We are pleased to offer Kobo’s localized eBookstore service in Taiwan, making it easy for booklovers to build digital libraries stocked with all their favorite titles,” said Michael Tamblyn, CEO and President of Rakuten Kobo. “We work closely with Taiwan’s vibrant publishing community to bring the best content to our Chinese language reading community here and around the world.”

Kobo was already selling ebooks in Chinese; one of the founding investors was based in Hong Kong. Now it is doubling its direct sales efforts with an expansion into Taiwan.

Kobo

Is anyone in the mood for poetic justice?

Then you’ll be pleased with the latest announcement from the AAP.

On Thursday the Association of American Publishers released its latest Statshot report on revenues of the US book publishing industry.

Trade book sales for the 1,200 odd publishers who submit their data to the AAP were up 3.4% for the month of April, but still down 4.5% for the year.

Paperback and audiobook revenues increased the most in April 2016 (21.5% and 20.4%), respectively) while sales of hardback books were up 2.6%. eBook revenues were down 22% for the month of April.

For the first four months of the year, ebook and hardback revenues were down (21.7% and 5.2%), while paperback revenues were up 9.9% and audiobook sales were up 31.4%.

In other words, the Big Five are having some success in shifting ebook buyers back to print, but they are still being stymied by Amazon’s decision to drive down the price of hardback books last summer.

Amazon is still keeping prices down, and that is depressing the market. That is a win for both consumers and for pundits who want to gloat at publishers shooting themselves in the foot.

 O O O

Press release:

Trade books grew 3.4% in April, with double-digit growth in April 2016 vs. April 2015 in Childrens/YA (12.8%) and Religious Books (13.7%). Despite that, publishers’ revenues were down 7.0% in April 2016, and 4.3% for the year-to-date vs. the same timeframes in 2015.

Overview

• Publishers’ book sales for April 2016 were $729.6 million, down 7.0% from April 2015.  These numbers include sales for all tracked categories (Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, PreK-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses.)

o   Year-to-date, sales were down 4.3% to $2.85 billion vs. the same four months in 2015.

• Trade (consumer) books sales were $534.7 million in April 2016, up 3.4% from April 2015. Year-to-date, trade is down 4.5% compared to the same time in 2015. Trade numbers include Childrens/YA Books, Adult Books and Religious Books.
• In April:

o   Adult Books had $383.3 million in sales, flat (+ 0.1%) from 2015

o   Childrens/YA Books had $118.0 million in sales, up 12.8%

o   Religious Presses had $33.4 million in sales, up 13.7%

Trends for Trade by Format

• In April 2016 vs. April 2015:

o   Paperback books grew 21.5%

o   Downloaded audio grew 20.4%

o   Hardback books grew 2.6%; interestingly, there was 24.2% growth in Children/YA and a 6.6% decline in Adult Books

o   eBooks were down 22.7%

• Year-to-date, paperback books (9.9%) and downloaded audio (31.4%) are the categories with the most growth.

Educational Materials and Professional Books

• Educational Materials were down 13.0% for PreK-12 Instructional Materials and 81.6% for Higher Education Course Materials, in April 2016 vs. April 2015. Year-to-date the numbers are more representative, with a decline of 3.6% for PreK-12 and growth of 3.7% in Higher Ed.
• Professional Publishing was down 9.0% in April 2016 vs April 2015. These categories include business, medical, law, scientific and technical books. University presses were down 8.7%.  Both categories show declines year-to-date as well.

image by pedrik

Here’s a rumor which I don’t find plausible but is still too juicy to ignore.

The Taipei Times reports that a rumor is circulating to the effect that Apple is working on a dual-screen smartphone similar to the Yotaphone 2:

Shares of E Ink Holdings Co yesterday rallied to an almost four-year high on speculation that Apple Inc might introduce a dual screen in its next iPhone model using E Ink’s energy-efficient e-paper displays.

The stock price of E Ink surged 3.62 percent to NT$24.35 yesterday, retreating from an early gain of 5.53 percent. The closing price was the highest since Nov. 2, 2012. Turnover was the largest in a month at 34.74 million shares.

…

The rally in E Ink’s stock price was prompted by a report by the Economic Daily News that Apple has requested E Ink to send products for sampling and certification after Yota Devices’ dual-screen YotaPhone 2 impressed the US consumer electronics giant.

“We are aggressively exploring business opportunities to use our e-paper displays as secondary screens on mobile phones,” an E Ink public relations official said by telephone yesterday.

The official declined to comment on information on any single customer.

As per Apple’s usual pattern, they would be launching a product which had been tried before, with little success. There are a number of products which add this type of functionality to an iPhone, and several dual-screen Android smartphones have hit the market.

Popslate and InkCase, for example, have released cases which add an E-ink screen to the rear of the iPhone.

Yota Devices has released two smartphones, and so have several Chinese smartphone makers. And E-ink is working on just the kind of solution Apple would want (and so is Microsoft).

None of those products worked very well or had much commercial success, but Apple has in the past shown that they can copy an idea, improve it, and make it work for the first time.

But as much as I would like this rumor to be true, I suggest that you take it with a grain of salt.

The original source, Economic Daily News, is so unreliable that I usually assume any of its rumors are false. In my experience they’re the Daily Mail of Taiwan tech news, second only to Digitimes in their willingness to publish any juicy rumor.

And even if this rumor is true, I would remind you that there is a huge difference between asking for specs and technical info and producing a device.

Requesting technical info (assuming it really happened) merely tells us that Apple is experimenting with the idea in their R&D labs.

We won’t know that Apple plans to follow through and actually make a dual-screen smartphone until the components, diagrams, blueprints, or other details start leaking at the factory.

So until that happens, I would not get your hopes up.

There are many commonly held beliefs in book world: that AAP stats reflect the entire industry, that Nielsen can accurately track ebook or print sales, that The Authors Guild represents authors, and that the American Bookseller Association is made up of and speaks for indie booksellers.

Two of these four beliefs have been conclusively disproven in the past few years; TAG has been discredited as a publishers' puppet, and almost everyone now understands that the AAP’s revenue stats reflect less than half the book publishing industry.

Now it is time to reconsider the assumption that the ABA represents indie bookstores.

I was reading a post about online book-buying today on Richard Hollick’s blog when he mentioned a post of mine before adding:

The DR’s objection is that the ABA are not really trying to sell books — but maybe that’s intentional. After all they are the organization representing independent bookstores, and they are quite explicit about wanting to “train” customers who visit the IndieBound site to go to an independent bookstore. I see no reason why they shouldn’t offer books to people at whatever price they want: their motivation is not primarily to sell, it’s to promote. If someone is generous enough to pay full price on-line, so what?

Richard repeats two common beliefs about the ABA, both of which are widely repeated but neither of which are true.

The first false belief is that the ABA speaks for indie booksellers. The second is that the IndieBound website is supposed to have something to do with indie booksellers.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

IndieBound is described as "a community of independent local bookstores", which is not a good description. Rather than a gathering of indie bookstores, the site will only help you find ABA members.

If we search the site for indie bookstores in my area, for example, IndieBound will miss the several bookstores which I know for a fact are open while at the same time returning results which include the college bookstore at Mary Washington University and the Hudson newsstand at Dulles International Airport. The former is not independent, and the latter is not a bookstore (it’s also part of a chain).

Both of these retailers show up in the search because they are ABA members and not because they are indie bookstores.

As I explained back in July, the ABA may brand itself as representing indie booksellers but it will accept just about any type of retailer as a member. We can see that in the membership stats. At least twenty of the 51 ABA members in Virginia are not independent bookstores:

Four college bookstores in Virginia are ABA members, including two stores run by Follett. The membership roll also includes two online booksellers (one is just down the road from me) and an online retailer as well as the Marine Corps Association, three national parks, a toy store in Staunton, a museum, a community center, a holistic store, and five Hudson News airport concessions (actually around a dozen locations in five airports).

With a lot of bookstores not members of the ABA, and 40% of ABA members not bookstores, it is past time that everyone accepts the fact that the ABA’s branding doesn’t match up with reality.

Really, the ABA represents indie booksellers the same way The Authors Guild represents authors. Both claim to do so and they have had some success in getting the uninformed to repeat the meme, but in reality the facts do not support the claim.

In the case of The Authors Guild, we have an organization which repeatedly took positions which supported the book publishing industry and went against its member interests. It also repeatedly remained silent on critical issues like Penguin buying Author Solutions and using the vanity press to exploit authors.

It is not clear who the ABA really represents.

If one examines the group’s past actions, in particular its long-running hostility towards Amazon, one gets the impression that the ABA actually represents the legacy book publishing industry. The ABA’s amicus brief in the Apple Supreme Court appeal, and the ABA’s support of the bogus antitrust complaint against Amazon, both reinforce that impression.

To be fair, it is entirely possible that some ABA members might hate Amazon as much as the ABA. But do you really think that the national parks, newsstands, museums, or other organization which belong to the ABA really care about Amazon?

I doubt it.

So with a lot of bookstores passing on an ABA membership, and a lot of ABA members not actually being bookstores, who does the ABA really represent?

You tell me.

images by vastateparksstaff, helicopterspy

Bob Lefsetz posted a pithy commentary on ebooks and digital publishing last week, and as usual he’s not wrong.

But his view of the ebook market is incomplete:

They’re killing the book business.

The old guard, the ones married to paper and indie bookstores, the publishers afraid of big bad Amazon, have achieved their goal, they’ve killed the e-book. That’s right, e-book sales are down by 21.8%, the entire book business has declined by 2.7%, this is what happens when Luddites living in the past refuse to enter the future. This is what would be happening in music if the insane artists screaming about streaming were able to get their way.

Alas, music is far ahead of the book business, with everything available for one low price, with streaming burgeoning, sales are up by 8.1%.

…

E-books used to be under ten bucks. Now, in some cases, they cost more than the physical iteration. That makes no sense, with no printing and shipping. The book business is making the same mistake the record business once did. Believing it was entitled to profits. That it was all right to sell an overpriced CD with one good cut, that the public didn’t mind, but that proved untrue.

But at least people wanted to steal music. They don’t seem to want to steal books, they just want to ignore them, that’s the real disaster, how the book business has marginalized itself.

…

So the book business defeated the techies. The supposed rapists and pillagers who cared not a whit about the value of content. They brought Jeff Bezos to his knees.

But Bezos doesn’t really care, because books are a de minimis part of Amazon’s overall market.

The supposedly smart people, standing up for the lowly artist, did a disservice to everybody involved. E-books were the future, priced to reflect the advancement of digital distribution. But they couldn’t survive, because the writers and publishers were afraid of change. …

He’s mostly right, but Lefsetz still missed a few nuances, and that has lead him to the wrong conclusion.

For one thing, he falls in the classic trap of misinterpreting AAP and other trade group revenue stats as representing the entire book publishing industry rather than just the legacy industry.

He’s not the first to make that mistake, and it really doesn’t matter here because it doesn’t change his broader point – that the legacy industry is killing itself by fighting against the future, against what consumers want.

Readers want to get their content in a form which is quick, cheap, and easy to access. Thanks to the legacy book publishing industry’s insistence on DRM, and on high prices, their ebooks only meet one of the three criteria.

eBooks are quick, but traditionally published titles are not cheap or easy to access, and that is driving consumers to alternatives.

And this is where Lefsetz is most wrong. He thinks that people "don’t seem to want to steal books, they just want to ignore them, that’s the real disaster, how the book business has marginalized itself".

I don’t think that’s the case.

Instead, high ebook prices are driving people to buy used books, and to visit their libraries and borrow (paper) books.

Edit: And as Felix points out in the comments, consumers are also shifting their buying habits to lower-priced indie ebooks.

They are ending up at their public library’s website, where they get on a waitlist for a book which costs $14 in the Kindle Store.

Or they’re going on Amazon, finding a 20-year-old title selling for $15, and then flipping to the used category to buy an old copy for $4 or $5. (It is that easy, yes.)

And that last point is the real tragedy of high ebook prices: the legacy book publishing industry missed their chance to kill the used book market.

When ebooks are quick, cheap, and easy to access, consumers will choose them over a paper book. If consumers had the option they would prefer immediate delivery of a cheap ebook over waiting for a paper book to be mailed to them.

Many in the legacy industry fear what that would do to new print sales, but if the prices were low enough then the same preference would also affect the used book market.

The thing about the used book market is that Amazon has effectively set the floor price for online sales ($4), and thanks to the way the internet lets sellers congregate on marketplace sites market pressure drives the price down whenever supply exceeds demand.

Imagine what would happen of the Big Five priced their 5- and 10-year-old backlist ebook titles at $5 to $7 instead of $12 to $15. Consumers would compare a $7 ebook (which they could get in a second) with a $5 used book, and they would buy the ebook.

That would cannibalize the used book market, shifting sales to the ebook market and boosting publisher revenue at the expense of used book retailers.

And that is the really crazy part about high ebook prices. Not only do high prices go against consumer demand, but they also foreclose the possibility of killing off the one thing publishers should hate more than ebooks.

image by Texas State Library and Archives Commission

The intern who has been left in charge of B&N’s ebook platform (after many functions were outsourced) added a new feature this week.

A reader has tipped me to the news that ebooks uploaded through Nook Press can now be given away for free. All a publisher has to do is set the price to zero and then update their listing. That update could take anywhere from minutes to days to go like on the B&N website, but once it is the ebook will be free.

B&N broke the news this week in an email to publishers, which you will find at the end of this post.

Given that the Nook Store now accounts for only a tiny fraction of ebook sales, this won’t prove very useful, but it is still a feature which Amazon does not offer.

Thanks, Karen, for the tip!

O O O

Dear Publisher,

Free eBooks have arrived at NOOK Press! Now, publishers have the opportunity to set the price of any NOOK Press eBook to FREE. We understand the importance of this feature and are excited to provide our publishers with this great promotional tool.

To set an eBook to FREE, simply log in to the NOOK Press eBook platform and choose any project. Once selected, you can change the list price to $0.00 and click save. The price update can take a few minutes or up to 72 hours, after which your eBook will be available to customers at BN.com free of charge.

For those of you who currently have FREE eBooks with other vendors, you can migrate these eBooks to NOOK Press without losing your Customer Reviews. As long as the title, author name, and series name is the exact same on your new NOOK Press title, all Customer Reviews will transfer automatically. You can then ask the other vendor to unlist / unpublish their edition of your eBook.

The number of FREE downloads your title receives will be reflected in your sales dashboard under the Recent Sales section.

We thank you so much for your continued support and enthusiasm.

Happy publishing!
The NOOK Press Team

image by MikeKalasnik

Bexar County Public Library got a lot of press coverage several years ago when it opened its book-less Bibliotech library branch, and now it is taking the show on the road.

The local ABC station and the Rivard Report reported yesterday that VIA Metropolitan Transit, the local buss company, is installing six Bibliotech kiosks in bus stations around San Antonio.

Bexar County and VIA are making it easier than ever to take part in their "Ride & Read" initiative.

There are plenty of advantage to taking public transportation so why not use the time to get into a good book? That’s the message VIA is sending out to its riders in their latest attempt to connect the community.

They’re partnering with Bexar County and their Bibliotech program.

"You don’t have to be the driver and pay attention to the traffic, so a great use of your time is to sit back and read and catch up on things," said Jeffrey Arndt, president and CEO of VIA Metropolitan Transit.

You can see a kiosk in the lead photo, which was taken by Kathryn Boyd-Batstone.

The kiosks are located at VIA’s Downtown Information Center, Centro Plaza, Ellis Alley Transit Center, North Star Transit Center, Medical Center Transit Center, and Crossroads Park & Ride.

Anyone who has a Wifi-equipped mobile device can sign up  for a library account and check out ebooks. They will have to provide their name and address but no documentation required.

"We have an e-book collection of e-books and e-audio books of over 37,000 through our cloud library.  However, on our website through our other providers, we have over 100,000 books available to the reader," said Bibliotech administrator Laura Cole.

Remember back in March when B&N got out of the UK ebook market and surprised us all by handing its customers to Sainsbury’s rather than Kobo?

It turns out that B&N could have saved everyone the aggravation, because Sainsbury’s just got out of ebooks and handed its customers to Kobo.

Kobo posted the news on their blog:

Rakuten Kobo, a global digital reading company created by booklovers for booklovers, is working with Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand (part of Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s leading food and non-food retailers), to offer Sainsbury’s customers the opportunity to transfer their eBook libraries to Kobo’s eReading service as Sainsbury’s exits the digital entertainment business.

Both companies will ensure Sainsbury’s customers have a seamless transfer of the current digital libraries of books they’ve purchased, and will have the ability to continue buying eBooks from the millions of titles available on Kobo.com.

That’s a pity, but not entirely unexpected.

It’s not just that Kobo arranged similar deals with Tesco and Sony, but also that Sainsbury’s has only a negligible share of the UK ebook market.

There was a time when we thought Sainsbury’s might be a contender in the UK ebook market, but that was several years ago. the retailer first got into ebooks when it bought a controlling interest in the Anobii ebook community in 2012. That effort was rebranded as "eBooks by Sainsbury’s" in 2013, but in spite of several sales promotions in 2013 and 2014 its market share never amounted to much.

Amazon dominates the UK ebook market to an even greater degree than they do in the US. This is why everyone except for Kobo, Apple, and Google got out of the market.

So yes, today’s news was entirely expected.

image by Peter Glyn

Trends and shifts in a market/industry generally go through three stages.

In the first stage, the trend/change is noticed and discussed by insiders. In the second stage, the trend/change is reported by niche publications like this blog.

And then in the third phase, months to a year after the second, the mainstream media notices what is going and covers the story.

The disruption in the college bookstore market has just reached that third stage.

The NYTimes is just beginning to notice what’s going on with college bookstores. They still haven’t grasped the scale of the disruption, including the number of schools which have dumped their bookstores or found another use for the space, but the NYTimes has caught on to Amazon’s growing presence.

There was a story in yesterday’s NYTimes which looked at deals Amazon has struck with US colleges and universities. This includes the unstores Amazon has opened on and new campuses as well as less visible programs:

As school started at Stony Brook University this month, two freshmen, Juan Adames and John Taveras, set out to buy textbooks.

They had not heard yet that the bookstore was a books store no more.

This summer, Stony Brook, part of the State University of New York, announced a partnership with the online retailer Amazon, now the university’s official book retailer. Students can purchase texts through a Stony Brook-specific Amazon page and have them delivered to campus.

In the campus store where the textbooks used to be, there are now adult coloring books, racks of university-branded polos and windbreakers and three narrow bookshelves displaying assorted novels. The rest of the store is a vibrant collage of spirit wear and school supplies: backpacks and baseball caps; pompom hats and striped scarves; notebooks and correction fluid. There will soon be a Starbucks.

“I was a bit thrown off by the appearance,” Mr. Adames said.

It is a conversation occurring on campuses across the country: If more and more students are buying and renting their course books online, why do they need a bookstore?

The Queens College bookstore went digital in April, forgoing brick-and-mortar altogether, Adam L. Rockman, the vice president of student affairs, said. Students order their books online, then have them shipped to personal addresses or to campus, where they are held until students pick them up.

“There are certainly some growing pains in getting used to it for many students,” Dr. Rockman said. “I think the human condition is not to really love change.”

The thing about this piece is that the NYTimes missed half the story. They only talk about Amazon and ignore any other vendor.

For example, they mentioned Queens College bookstore but they don’t bother to discuss the startup running the QC bookstore.

That would be Akademos, a company which I had always associated with digital textbook solutions. It now offers a virtual bookstore platform and has signed deals with at least a half-dozen schools. (They had announced the deals in press releases, but no one was paying attention.)

Akademos offers a more limited solution that MBS Direct or eCampus, each of which want to replace a college bookstore completely while Akademos just wants to solve college students' most critical financial issue – textbooks.

It’s not clear which solution is going to come out on top, but it’s worth keeping all these details in mind the next time we read about B&N Education.

P.S. Also, when Chegg (another startup competing in this market) goes bankrupt, just think of all of these competitors and that bankruptcy will make a lot more sense.

image by Brad Clinesmith