We’ve all seen business cards which unfold into pop-ups, or other clever tricks, but few can compare to Paul Schow’s work. This hardware engineer has designed and built a custom business card with a 2″, 200 x 96 resolution, E-ink screen.

The completed cards cost $35 each and are based on Schow’s own design which he then assembled using a soldering iron and a magnifying glass. He ordered the components online, and had the boards made to order.

Schow went through two designs before finally settling on the design he would use for his business cards. He reports that the boards alone cost around a dollar and a quarter each: "At that price, it’s almost practical to hand out the blank boards as "normal'" business cards."

This is a nifty idea, and I really liked it when I first saw it on Twitter a month and a half ago.

That said, I think there’s room for improvement. If the cards incorporated a larger E-ink screen then they could show more info and be more useful. Imagine handing out a card which was built around, say, a 4.2″ E-ink screen. That screen would be large enough to be used as an ereader or other information display.

Then again, the goal of Schow’s business cards isn’t for the end user to make use of them but to show off what Schow can do. And they fill that need quite nicely as is.

Paul Schow via Hackaday

Oxford Dictionaries has just learned the hard way why one does not run open-ended unsupervised polls on the internet.

At the beginning of this month the OD launched a new project which invited everyone to submit their least favorite word. Dubbed the One Word Map project, it was announced on the OD’s blog and covered in The Guardian yesterday:

Kicking off what it hopes will be the largest global survey into people’s language gripes, the dictionary publisher is inviting English speakers around the world to answer a range of language-related questions under the #OneWordMap initiative, starting with the quest to find the least popular English word.

Oxford Dictionaries is hoping that tens of thousands of people will contribute, enabling it to put together a list of the least popular words by country, age, and gender, and revealing similarities and differences around the world.

“There are a few likely suspects we’re expecting to see. ‘Moist’ seems to be a word that people instinctively draw for, and it’s already proven to be a popular response in some internal polls we’ve done,” said Oxford University Press’s Daniel Braddock.

And that’s apparently where everything went wrong. Eight thousand people had submitted a word to the project before The Guardian’s story, but then it came to the attention of trolls and had to be shut down.

Oxford Dictionaries turned off the project on Friday, citing "severe misuse".

The Oxford Dictionaries hasn’t revealed how the poll was abused, but a spokesperson for Oxford Dictionaries told the Oxford Mail: "Unfortunately, and despite our attempts to prevent negative behaviour on this site, we have had to take it down. While this is disappointing, we strongly believe in the importance of engaging with the wider community to enhance our understanding of the English language, and will continue to investigate ways of doing so.”

Chloe Foster, OUP spokeswoman, added: "We had filtered out words marked as vulgar and offensive in our dictionaries, but this wasn’t enough to prevent the misuse that led to the results being unusable."

This is obviously not the first time someone has hijacked an online poll, which is why it is surprising that the admins were unprepared for mischief.

Penguin Random House has in the past denied that readers want an ebook subscription service.

What with Kindle Unlimited now paying authors and publishers more than the Nook Store, and possibly even more than Kobo or Google, that excuse was getting a little thin, but recently PRH changed its tune.

The global CEO of Penguin Random House, Markus Dohle, was speaking at the Global Top 50 Publishing Summit at Beijing International Book Fair in China earlier this week . According to The Bookseller, Dohle said that:

PRH had not signed its titles up for any subscription services, such as Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, Mofibo or Scribd, because the ‘all you can eat’ models threaten to “devalue” intellectual property (IP) at a time when most authors can barely afford to earn a living.

In the US, Dohle said 40% of the readership accounted for 85% of publishers’ revenue, so "heavy readers" switching to subscription models would have a “huge impact” on the industry.

He explained that the industry’s existing publishing model, successful for over 500 years, was "robust" and "not broken at all", and argued that subscription models were "not in the reader’s mindset". If they became popular, they would ultimately lead to "lower prices" and "a huge devaluation of IP", Dohle said.

"A la carte is not broken […] I don’t see us supporting subscription models, because we just don’t need it," he said. "Somehow we have to protect the measure of our intellectual property. Take an e-book for $12, that’s entertainment for 15 to 30 hours. That’s a fair deal compared with a movie and other media formats. I think we have a very robust pricing model in the market and subscription would just change the whole dynamic."

I don’t know whether he was misquoted or what, but that is just a crock of shit.

For one thing, the book publishing industry’s model has changed multiple times in the past five centuries as technology, society, and laws changed.  Five hundred years ago books were a luxury, and they have gotten cheaper as technology as improved and as the populace started having more and more disposable income.

Just in the past hundred or so years the book publishing industry has had to change in response to the introduction of cheap paperbacks (where were first ignored, then fought, and then co-opted and smothered) and new copyright laws.

And then there’s magazines and serial distribution of novels, a model which hung around for close to a century before dying out in the mid-1980s*.

But that’s really beside the point.

The real issue here is that Dohle is responding to innovation like the typical entrenched giant. He’s clinging to the old way and inventing excuses why the new way won’t work.

This is a common response from established players; they have a lot invested in the current system and they don’t want to see it disrupted (this is also why the Big Five are maintaining high ebook prices).

This is a behavior we have seen in the past, including from Blockbuster. And we all know what happened to them.

Coincidentally Blockbuster is an example of what happens when a company fights an innovation or disruption rather than embracing it, and it is also an example of how an entrenched company might not innovate even if the senior management wanted to.

Blockbuster’s second to last CEO, John Antioco, was fired in part for responding to Netflix by dropping late fees and starting an online service. This cut into Blockbuster’s profits, and lead to Antioco being ousted.

And where’s Blockbuster today?

Chew on that, and then ask yourself whether Dohle is right, or has his head in the sand.

Given that Penguin Random House’s policy on ebook prices is based on fighting market trends in order to prop up the old system and that their position on subscription ebooks can be summed up as not wanting to disrupt existing ebooks sales, it’s pretty clear that both positions are equally flawed.

This will inevitably lead to Penguin ending up on the scrapheap of history, but until then the legacy industry will likely continue to pretend that there is absolutely no reason to embrace change.

P.S. A number of Dickens' novels were first published in magazines before being collected in book form, and that trend still existed in the SF genre until at least the 1980s.

image by ActuaLitté

The following infographic was created by someone who still thinks that print and digital books are in an elimination battle which can have only one survivor.

That is a little 2012 for my tastes, but this infographic is entertaining nonetheless.

Enjoy.

Blurb

Back in February of this year Amazon informed Kindle owners about a mandatory firmware update for all Kindle models.

That notice was accompanied by dire warnings that Kindle owners would lose the ability to download ebooks to their Kindle by the end of March 2016 if they didn’t install the update, but now it appears that the warnings were just a paper tiger.

I’ve just read that Amazon is sending out another round of reminder emails about that update. This is the second set of reminder emails in just over a month, and it makes me wonder just how many Kindle owners have yet to update their device.

The update in question changes a few small but important wireless security settings, so it’s easy to see why Amazon is continuing to remind Kindle owners. What surprises me, however, is that Amazon didn’t follow through and change its security on schedule.

Either Amazon fibbed on the time frame, or they’ve decided that they value customer satisfaction over security.

In any case, have you gotten the email recently?

O O O

If you’re wondering whether the email you got from Amazon was real, here’s the one I got last month:

Hello,

An important software update for your Kindle device "The Digital Reader’s 4th Kindle" is required to continue to download your books and use Kindle services. This update will ensure wireless coverage so you can continue to have the best possible reading experience.

To update your Kindle wirelessly, follow these steps:

1. Turn wireless on by sliding the wireless switch on the back of your device to the "On" position, or by pressing the Menu button from the Home screen and then selecting "Turn Wireless On".
2. Plug your Kindle in to charge during the update.
3. Leave your wireless on and the Kindle plugged in overnight.

While the device is asleep, the software update should download and install automatically. Your device may restart multiple times during the update process. You will receive a final confirmation letter once the update is completed.

While the device is asleep, the software update should download and install automatically. Your device may restart multiple times during the update process. You will receive a final confirmation letter once the update is completed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if I no longer have one or more of my devices?
If you no longer have or use one of your Kindle devices, deregister it from your account today. First, go to www.amazon.com/mycd and log into your Amazon account. Click on the Your Devices tab and select the Kindle device you want to deregister. Click Deregister.

How can I get help on updating my Kindle devices?
You can contact Customer Service by using the Contact Us option in the left-hand column of our Kindle Support pages at:

www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

Thank you for reading with Kindle, and be sure to turn wireless on regularly to receive all future software updates.

image by Matt Mordfin

Interstitial and pop-up adverts (like the one Google uses to harass mobile users of Gmail) are the bane of mobile browsing. 69% of a website’s mobile visitors will leave if prompted to install a mobile app, which is why Google had previously cracked down on pop-up ads which pitched mobile app installs.

And now Google is expanding their focus to include more types of annoying ads (like the ones supplied by Adsense, for example).

The ad network announced on the Google webmaster blog yesterday that it was cracking down on sites which used annoying pop-ups and interstitial adverts on their mobile site.

Google won;t be penalizing all sites for using interstitials, just those that use a particular type:

• Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.

• Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

Sites which use small banner ads, login pages for paywalls, and notification pop-ups for cookies will not be impacted, Google said.

Ads like those Adsense ads, or the annoying Youtube pop-up ads, will draw a penalty in Google’s search ranking.

Over the past few years a certain subset of fans known as the Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies have been collectively trying to game the annual Hugo awards for best SF and fantasy stories.

Depending on who you ask, their motivations were either to gather support for a type of SF which had been excluded from the Awards by insiders, or to introduce a reactionary slate consisting of white male authors.

Neither is quite accurate, but that matters less than the fact that in past years the Puppies didn’t have much success.

But this year, despite press reports to the contrary, they succeeded.

Despite having what appeared to outsiders as a cohesive voting block, the Sad Puppies have had less than complete success in past years . In 2015, for example, many of the Puppies' candidates didn’t just lose, in many categories they even ranked behind "No Award", a sign that more voters would rather give the award to no one rather than give it to a Puppies candidate.

• Sad Puppies slate
• Rabid Puppies slate
• 2015 Hugo Awards winners (plus a voting record)

In fact, in five categories (Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form) no one got an award last year.

And now, in 2016, the Puppies are being described as having been defeated once again. The Guardian covered the Hugo Awards in an article this morning, describing it thusly:

Another attempt by the Sad and Rabid Puppies groups to hijack the science fiction award goes to the dogs, as authors and titles not in their campaign take top prizes.

The winners of the 2016 Hugo awards have been announced, with this year’s choices signalling a resounding defeat for the so-called “Puppies” campaigns to derail the venerable annual honouring of science fiction literature and drama.

The winners were announced on Saturday evening at MidAmeriCon II, the World Science Fiction Convention held this year in Kansas City.

The Guardian call this a defeat, but I would say it is at least a partial victory.

You can find the list of winners over on the official Hugo awards blog, as well as the voting records for this year.

As you can see when you compare the ballot to the Sad Puppies recommendation list, a fair number of Sad Puppies candidates made it through the nomination process and ended up on the ballot.

Last year the Puppies swept certain categories, filling all five slots in some categories with their candidates. They weren’t quite that successful this year, but they made their presence known.

For example, all five authors on the Best Novella ballot were Sad Puppies candidates, as well as three of the Best Novellette candidates and three of the Best Short Story nominees.

Four of the authors up for a Campbell were on the SP recommendation list, and last but not least two of the names up for Best Fan Writer were recommended by the Sad Puppies.

In all five of these categories, an SP candidate went on to win a Hugo.

And this is what The Guardian would describe as a defeat.

If this were politics, a five-person voting block (out of fifteen seats) would be considered a power to be reckoned with, if not the dominant force in its legislative body. The only ones who would phrase that as a defeat would be its political opponents.

But this isn’t politics, and it would be wrong to count these five wins as a block. And that is also true for the sixth Sad Puppies win.

Coincidentally, the Sad Puppies also recommended the winner of the Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation category (as well as three other candidates), but I’m not sure they should get credit for it because both the winner and the runner up were the odds-on favorite to win anyway, which brings me to the real point I wanted to make today.

The reason these Sad Puppies candidates won this year wasn’t coordinated action on the part of SPs but rather that the candidates were already popular choices.

Fury Road and The Martian were popular with film-goers, which is how they ended up being recommended by the Sad Puppies.

What some of the Sad Puppies detractors may have missed is that this year the SP nomination process was open to all.

The official Hugo nomination process has a poll tax in that you have to buy an associate membership for WorldCon to nominate or vote, but the Sad Puppies were more democratic. All you had to do to recommend someone for the SP list was to leave a comment on the SP blog defending your choice.

The Guardian and others may describe the Sad Puppies as right-wing reactionaries, but what they missed is that this year everyone who wanted to speak was given a voice.

As a result, the Sad Puppies list this year wasn’t the right-wing political slate of past years; instead it included diverse recommendations like Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor.

As John Scalzi noted back in April, the Sad Puppies list this year was closer to a straight-up popularity contest:

This is a fact the Puppy groups have taken to heart. This year, once again, the two Puppy groups announced slates (or in the case of the “Sad” variant, a “recommendation list”) of people and works they wanted to see on the finalist ballot. Once again, many of their choices made the cut. But where last year’s slates were filled with nominees primarily of interest to the Puppies themselves, this year’s Puppy slates included works and authors already popular with science fiction fans and tastemakers, and (as a subset of both of these) Hugo voters.

Scalzi doesn’t give the Sad Puppies credit for shit, and instead wrote that "the Puppies are running in front of an existing parade and claiming to lead it".

Me, I see things differently.

What was a political fight in past years has been co-opted in 2016 into a popularity contest.

It may not stay that way in the coming years, but if the next Sad Puppies list is open for all to participate then you would have to be an idiot to continue to write off the Sad Puppies as right-wing reactionaries.

What authors should be doing instead is planning how to game the next Sad Puppies list, because it could become a whole lot more important in the coming years as a proto-Hugo nomination process.

The Hugo is said to represent all of SF, but in reality only a few thousand ballots are cast each year.

If you look at the Hugo voting records for the past few years, you’ll see that that the number of valid ballots grew from 1843 in 2013 (the first year of the Puppies) to 3587 ballots in 2014.

And then last year, when the Puppies campaign came to naught, there were 5950 ballots cast for the Hugo Awards. That is the largest number of ballots ever cast for the Hugo Awards in a single year, and judging by the number of ballots this year it may never be equaled because:

A grand total of 3,130 ballots were cast this year.

Yes, that is barely more than half the number of ballots cast in 2015, and now that the Puppies furor has passed we can expect even fewer ballots cast in 2017.

It’s going to take fewer votes to win a Hugo next year, which means that getting the support of an additional 100 to 200 votes from the followers of the Sad Puppies list could be enough to secure a nomination, which is the first step to winning a Hugo.

If nothing else, the publicity will get readers to take a look at your work. (That’s certainly true in my case; there are a half-dozen writers I discovered only because of the Sad Puppies coverage earlier this year).

You’re welcome to pull back in revulsion at the idea of working with the Sad Puppies, but if I thought I had a shot I would be planning next year’s Sad Puppies Hugo campaign right now.

Kobo has successfully appealed a 2014 consent agreement between the Canadian Competition Bureau and Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster where the publishers had agreed to abandon agency pricing and let retailers set the retail price of the ebooks they sell.

As a result, the Competition Bureau is back to square one, and the publishers are free to set their prices as they wish.

In 2012 Canada was set to follow the US and European Union in ending the agency model in the local ebook market. The Competition Bureau had worked out a deal in 2014 with four major Canadian publishers for the publishers to relinquish control over ebook prices, but unfortunately that consent agreement was never put into place.

Kobo objected to the agreement, arguing that they could not effectively compete without ebook price controls, and and they convinced a tribunal to issue a stay.

That was in early 2014, and for the past couple years the Canadian legal system ground forward at the usual glacial pace, with Kobo, the publishers, and the Competition Bureau filing various paperwork.

In June a tribunal ruled in favor of Kobo, and set aside the consent agreement while noting that it was based on allegations rather than conclusions backed up by evidence.

The CA that was reached between the Commissioner and the Respondent Publishers is rescinded, with prejudice to the Commissioner entering into a new consent agreement with any of those Respondent Publishers on the basis of allegations that are the same or substantially the same as the allegations that form the basis of the CA, but without prejudice to the Commissioner entering into a new consent agreement with the Respondent Publishers based on conclusions he may reach regarding the six elements of the reviewable conduct under subsection 90.1(1) of the Act, in accordance with these reasons.

Coincidentally, Kobo’s stalling lead to Canada keeping the same price controls which were removed from the US ebook market in 2012-2013 when US publishers settled with the DoJ, and which later returned when the publishers negotiated new contracts with Amazon and other retailers in late 2014 and early 2015.

Other countries, including Argentina, Germany, and Japan, have laws on the books where retailers are required to sell books and ebooks at the price set by publishers.

Thanks Anne, for the tip!

image by cam_rich345

In addition to a night-reading mode, what sets the newly launched Kobo Aura One apart from other ereaders is the way it supports library ebooks.

The Aura One features close integration with Overdrive, the library ebook vendor bought by Rakuten last spring. There are no first-hand reports yet, and I am still waiting for Kobo and OverDrive to get back to me with answers to my questions, but here’s what we know so far.

• the Aura One is running firmware 3.20.7280
• no other Kobo ereader has this firmware, and it’s not mentioned on their product listings
• the feature only works in US, UK, Canada, NZ, and Australia

The way this is supposed to work is that once you have entered your Overdrive info in the settings menu, you can simply search the Kobo store on the Aura One and the ebooks you see will list their price as well as whether they are available to be checked out of your library.

You can check out an ebook on the Aura One, and you can also place a hold for an ebook. Any borrowed book will indicate how long until the library loan expires. This detail is displayed when you put the Aura One to sleep.

I use the word "supposed" because this feature does not work yet.

My Aura One came with an OD account set up, but I couldn’t find any ebooks to borrow. There’s no way to filter for this option when browsing the Kobo store on the Aura One, and there’s no way to just browse your library’s ebook catalog.

Since I couldn’t find any ebooks,  I went into the settings menu, logged out of OverDrive, and tried to enter my account. This didn’t work. The Aura One wouldn’t accept my info, and with good reason.

It turns out that the feature is not yet live. I’ve just been told by Kobo that the software is a demo, "a high-level overview of Library Lending (the feature is not yet live). When the device launches in September, you will be able to add your library card and borrow then."

In other words there’s not much I can say about this feature until Kobo turns it on sometime next month, but I won’t send you away empty handed.

The following four screenshots show you all the info the Aura One has on the is feature. Until we can pry a user manual out of Kobo, this is most of what we know about how this feature will work.

Enjoy.

When Kobo announced the Aura One ereader this morning, one question was at the top of everyone’s mind:

How the heck did Kobo add a night-reading mode with a red-orange filter?

Night-reading modes were a hot topic in the ebook world last year. Amazon, Google, and even Apple released updates for Android, iOS, and Fire tablets which added optional bluelight filters.

The thinking behind these filters is that they are better for you to use at night because the blue end of the light spectrum is most likely to keep you up, which is why there are apps for iOS and Android that can do this.

However, the apps use a trick which won’t work for E-ink screens; they variously disable the blue light coming out of the RGB pixels on a mobile device’s screen (some apps like do a lot more).

The best ereaders on the market have a grayscale screen and a white frontlight, so you would think it would be impossible to add a frontlight which could shift colors.

But Kobo found a solution – one so obvious that I have to wonder why no one else has used it in the seven years since Sony debuted a frontlight on the PRS-700.

A frontlight on an ereader is lit by tiny LEDs around the frame, and the ereader might have any where between 4 to 10 of them. Amazon made a big deal over the Kindle Oasis having ten LEDs (more than any other device) but Kobo found a better use for LEDs.

Kobo added an extra LED which provides a red-orange tint, and then changed the software so that users could adjust the brightness and the tint independently.

Correction: The Aura One has "9 white LEDs and 8 RGB LEDs (with 3 lights in each)".

I shot a couple videos to show it off. The first was in a room lit by sunlight, so it’s hard to see the night-reading mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_2FP3J3cI&feature=youtu.be

The second video was shot in a fairly dim room so that you can see just how strong the red-orange color can get.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAqN5MchzE0&feature=youtu.be

I don’t know if you can see it in the video, but the red-orange LED appears to be located along the bottom edge of the screen. From what I can tell there is only one, and as a result I can see a noticeable color gradient between the bottom and the top of the screen.

Edit: No, that is just a quirk of the light interactig with the film over the screen.

Then again, I am looking at this screen with a critical eye which is trying to find fault. A regular user might not notice, or care.

What do you think of the night-reading mode?

Kobo hasn’t sent a press release yet with an official announcement, but a bunch of sites have posted reviews of the new Kobo Aura One on Wednesday.

I still don’t have one of these babies (I found out while writing this post that mine is literally on the UPS truck right now), but The Verge, Tom’s Hardware, and Techcrunch have all posted reviews which confirm the leaked specs and our guesses about the prices.

Update: the product listing is now up.

The Aura One will cost $230 when it goes on sale on 6 September. It’s going to be available in the US, Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Turkey. Prices will vary across markets (according to last week’s leak the Aura One will cost 229 euros).

This ereader is not only larger and as sharp as Amazon’s flagship Kindle, it also costs less and is nearly as thin.

And it looks pretty in the video:

And oh yes, it is waterproof; I just got the press release from HZO, the company which developed the tech for water-proofing the electronics (it’s not a waterproof case like on the Aura H2O). The Aura One meets the IPX8 standard, where the Aura H2O met the IP67.

Edit: And somehow Kobo has also added night reading mode which filters out the blue light:

I’m still reading the reviews, but a couple interesting points jumped out. According to The Verge, it’s thin (they also said the bezels are too small to hold it comfortably):

The first thing you notice about the Aura One is that it’s big for an e-reader. While Amazon used 9.7-inch displays on some of the early Kindles, and more obscure companies like Pocketbook have sold e-readers in that size range in the past, the industry (Kobo included) has since settled on a standard of 6–7 inch screens. But the Aura One sports a 7.8-inch, 300ppi display, which is large enough to make it not just Kobo’s biggest e-reader ever, but essentially the biggest high-resolution e-ink screen you can buy. That size increase doesn’t come with any extra bulk. The Aura One is just 6.9mm thick, and weighs 230 grams — thinner than an iPhone 6S, and not much heavier than a 6S Plus.

The reviewer also noted one of the more interesting software features.

Remember when Rakuten bought OverDrive last year? The Aura One benefited from that acquisition:

Kobo’s parent company, Rakuten, acquired a company last year called Overdrive that has deep ties with the growing e-book lending programs around the country, and so library lending also features prominently in the Aura One’s software. The most useful part of this is that, as long as you have your library credentials plugged in, titles that are available for borrowing will also show up when you search. It’s an important feature for the company’s business, too: Kobo boasts 5 million titles in its store, which is a lot, but it’s still not as deep a well as you can find on Amazon.

I don’t usually do library ebooks because they are more of a hassle than checking out a paper book, but this could change my mind. That sounds like an even easier solution than the Kindle-OverDrive integration, and I can’t wait to test it when my unit arrives.

Remember back in 2011 when Amazon removed a Maltese-language book from the Kindle, and everyone lost their shit?

It’s happening again, this time in India.

The Times of India, Bangalore Mirror, and other sites are reporting that Amazon won’t let a Kannada-language ebook into the Kindle Store. (According to Wikipedia, there are around 50 million people in the world who speak that language.)

Amazon’s apparent reluctance to allow Kannada e-books on its Kindle platform has angered sections of writers and Kannada groups pitting the Kannada Development Authority, a statutory body, and Kannada Sahitya Parishat, the apex literary body, against the Seattle-based ecommerce behemoth.

The two organisations are gathering details to decide on its next move to get Amazon to respond to the request of writers to introduce Kannada e-books on Kindle.

The spat is showing signs of gaining momentum in the coming days as Amazon India, headquartered out of Bengaluru, is said to be planning to offer books in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati on its e-reader.

While the Kannada Development Authority has written a letter to Amazon, the Sahitya Parishat is consulting experts to guide it in the matter.

"We have written to Amazon requesting it to treat Kannada in the same way as it wishes to treat other Indian languages. We have also asked them to explain why they want to exclude Kannada from Kindle," Hanumanthaiah, the Authority Chairman told ET. "We will decide our future course of action after receiving Amazon’s reply," he added.

My first thought when reading this plaint was to criticize the writers for their entitlement issues, but then I thought it better to explain just how self-centered their viewpoint really was.

For the record, Amazon launched the international Kindle store in 2009, and seven years later it still neglects to support most of the languages on this planet.

Amazon did expand language support in 2013 and added dozens of languages in Europe, but it was far from complete. Amazon left out languages native to Italy, eastern Europe, Africa, the middle East, South America, and Asia.

Hell, Amazon doesn’t even support all of the languages native to its home market, North America (English, French, and Spanish are the sum of the market, yes, but not the only native languages).

And now Indian writers are pissed because their language isn’t supported on the Kindle?

Dude, join the club.

It’s called the United Nations.

Next!

image by The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Some pundits would tell you that the best opportunities for authors are the ones they create for themselves, and now that apparently includes enhanced ebook formats like Amazon’s Kindle in Motion.

PW reported on this story on Friday:

Although enhanced e-books and apps with sound and video have been poorly received by book consumers, Neoglyphic Entertainment, an entertainment technology developer, has created a platform that makes use of data science, gaming technology, machine learning and crowd-based focus groups to create new experiences around traditional storytelling. The company has plans to offer its multimedia platform as a for-pay service to other publishers to create multimedia e-books from their own publishing lists.

…

n May Neoglyphic published Sunborn Rising: Beneath the Fall, an illustrated middle grade fantasy series by Safronoff. The series was released in hardcover, trade paperback and a Kindle edition, and follows an elf-like civilization facing an environmental crisis.

Neoglyphic has just released an enhanced e-book app for Sunborn Rising featuring a musical score that can sync to the user’s reading pace. Eventually Neoglyphic will launch a companion VR, or a 3D virtual reality experience, as well as a mobile game, that will bring the text story to life. (An early form of the Sunborn Rising VR, viewable on an Oculus Rift headset, was available at the recent BEA in Chicago.)

This story caught my eye because both of the enhanced ebooks produced by Neoglyphic so far were written by Aaron Safronoff. He is both a published author and one of the founders of Neoglyphic. His title is Chief Storyteller, so in short this startup is an example of an author creating an opportunity for himself.

Nifty.

That said, I now own both ebooks and I’m not exactly sure how the ebooks have been enhanced. Spire is a 4MB ebook, and Sunborn Rising weighs in at 16MB, so you would think there would be some enhancements. The text alone rarely accounts for more than 500KB in an ebook, but there’s no indication as to what is taking up the rest of the space.

I’ve queried Neoglyphic, and I will add their explanation to this post when I get it.

One of Neoglyphic’s other projects is easy to understand; it’s a realistic fur model for 3d graphics. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the enhanced ebooks.

Neoglyphic plans to license its tech to publishers so that the publishers can create their own enhanced ebooks. That’s great, but it’s still not clear what the tech is or what it can do.

Stay tuned.

Edit: Okay, I’ve heard back from the company and the ebooks are simply ebooks. (That’s not what their website implied.) The enhanced ebooks are actually apps and other stuff around the ebooks.

This morning’s 2-for-1 sale at Audible finally gave me a chance to use up all my credits and cancel my membership.

I am not a big audiobook fan, but I got an Audible membership back in November 2015 when Audible offered six months of membership for $8 a month. Since I could let the credits pile up while waiting for sales like today’s that was a great deal for me.

But then the six months ran out, and so for the past four months I’ve been paying full price – $15 a month – and letting the credits pile up while waiting for an opportunity to cancel and get away clean.

I had meant to cancel the membership, but then I forgot about it (which is why I don’t like subscriptions). I don’t really like audiobooks, so that was a terrible deal for me, but I let the charges pile up because of a Catch-22 in Audible’s ToS.

You see, Audible will sell you audiobooks with or without a membership, and you can keep them whether you have an active membership or not.

The same does not apply to the credits.

Audible sells credits under a monthly membership plan (also in bulk). The credits roll over from one month to the next, but if you try to cancel your membership Audible will take away the unused credits.

Yes, Audible will sell you credits and then use the threat of stealing them to discourage you from canceling your membership.

As you can tell from the tone of this post I think that is bullshit, and I just wanted to bring this blackmail policy to everyone’s attention.

Some of you are probably thinking that if I complained to Audible I could get an exception. That is true, but I’d rather complain publicly and get them to change the bullshit policy. I didn’t cut Scribd any slack when I criticized its cancellation process last year, and I see no reason to be nicer to Audible.

Just an FYI.

image  by mundo resink