So a couple weeks back Amazon quietly launched a new ebook format for the Kindle (I think it’s the sixth seventh different type of Kindle ebook).

First noticed by KBoards, Kindle in Motion adds GIF-like animations which can be seen on the Fire tablet and in the Kindle apps for iPad, Android, and iPhone (if you read one of these ebooks on a Kindle, you’ll just see the regular ebook).

Edit: Kindle in Motion is not to be confused with Kindle AV, or Kindle with AudioVideo. That format had embedded audio video clips, and debuted in 2010.

Amazon has not announced the new format, and they’re not even talking about it. I was scooped on this story because I was waiting for Amazon to respond to my questions, but while I was waiting I bought a few ebooks and spent a few minutes playing with the format.

Here’s what we know so far.

• Six Kindle in Motion titles are available right now, all from Amazon’s publishing division. This includes four original romance titles and two new editions for an Edgar Allan Poe collection and The Secret Garden.
• The ebooks sport various enhancements like animated covers, video clips, and page backgrounds which can be turned on or off if you don’t want to see them while reading.
• The enhanced versions of the ebooks are limited to portrait mode only, and are quite large (200MB to 400MB).
• There’s no known way for anyone to use KDP to produce this format.

I bought several Kindle in Motion titles. The romance titles had embedded videos, but the two public domain titles had animations.

I took a few screenshots to give you an idea of what they look like, but then I noticed that Amazon has video previews – so I downloaded those instead. I can’t find a way to limit the window size, sorry:

I could take or leave the animations, although I do admit that I like one snarky suggestion made on KBoards ("the bears are going to be shifting into billionaires on the covers"). Now that I would like to see.

On a more serious note, the Kindle in Motion ebooks do have at least one feature which IMO enhances the reading experience. A couple of the ebooks showed the text of the story over a page background.

Yes, I know that we’ve seen this type of feature with fixed layout ebooks, but Kindle in Motion lets you resize the text and maintain the backgrounds.

Do you see the branches in the corners of the first screenshot? No matter how you change the font size, the text will not cover the branches.

I love this.

That is a small change but I think it could make for a great improvement to the reading experience.

Even if a background were used in several books, or if all Kindle ebooks were limited to (say) a dozen backgrounds, I would still like to see this in the ebooks I read in my Kindle app.

This page background feature is the kind of thing which print snobs point to in a paper book and cite as an example of why print is better, and adding it to the Kindle platform would really go a long way to making ebooks the equal of print books as an art form and not just as a reading material.

Hey Amazon, what would it take to make this a standard feature?

Kindle users have long been able to share via Twitter and FB the annotations from the ebooks they’re reading, and now we have the option to share via one of Amazon’s social networks, Goodreads.

Goodreads just announced the launch of a beta feature where Kindle using Goodreads members can:

… access and share your Kindle notes and highlights right from the book pages on Goodreads.com (PC or laptop). You can even edit your notes directly on Goodreads, and your changes will sync back to your Kindle book. By default, your Kindle notes and highlights are only viewable by you—you’re always in control. You can choose to share them with friends by marking any (or all) of your notes and highlights as “Visible,” and your friends will be able to view, like, and comment on them. You can also share them by sending the URL of your Kindle Notes & Highlights page to anyone you like—for instance, a colleague, professor, or classmate.

We already had the option of organizing our Kindle notes and highlights via Kindle.Amazon.com (we could even share them) and now Amazon is adding that feature to Goodreads.

Before you can use it, you’ll need to tie your Kindle and Goodreads accounts, add the relevant books to your GR account, and start taking notes.

Coincidentally, if you don’t want notes from a particular book to show up on Goodreads then you can simply not shelve the books – or simply leave the notes for that book as private (it’s the default setting).

This sharing feature is currently available via the Goodreads website, but the announcement also mentions that Goodreads plans to add mobile support.

For the past six weeks Kobo has been teasing us with hints about a new and larger ereader.  We first learned of it in an FCC filing, then Kobo CEO teased that it would launch this month, and now thanks to a leak I can finally show you what we’ve all been waiting for.

A Dutch retailer has inadvertently published the product listing for the Kobo Aura One, and it is just about everything we would want from a premium ereader.

We still don’t know the launch date, but according to the leak the Aura One will feature a 7.8″ Carta E-ink display. It has a flush-mounted frontlight and touchscreen, and sports a screen resolution of 1872 x 1404. That is a 300 ppi screen, which means it’s not only larger than most other ereaders on the market, it is also just as sharp.

But wait, there’s more.

Inside this ereader’s waterproof shell you will find Wifi, 8GB internal storage (but no card slot), and 512MB RAM. The listing doesn’t mention the CPU speed, but it does say that the Aura One wieghs 252 grams and measures 195 mm by 138.5mm by 6.9mm.

In comparison, The Aura H2O has a 6.8″ screen, weighs 233 grams, and is only slightly smaller than the  Aura One. But it’s not as pretty:

And how much is Kobo asking for this beauty?

According to our source, the retail price is 229 euros. That price is about 60 euros less than the European price for the Kindle Oasis, so not only has Kobo developed an ereader which is bigger and better than Amazon’s flagship, it’s also cheaper.

I can’t wait to get one, can you?

wehkamp.nl via MobileRead

Pocketbook has just announced an updated version of the Inkpad, its 8″ ereader.

Launched in 2014, the Inkpad was arguably the best premium ereader of the year (and still one of the better ereaders two years later). With a large 8″ screen and a one-handed design which Amazon later copied for the Kindle Oasis, the Inkpad was the closest digital equivalent to reading a hardback book.

And now Pocketbook has brought it back.

The Inkpad 2 keeps the one-handed design, screen size, and most of the other specs from its predecessor, only it weighs less and comes with a slightly improved screen.

This ereader runs Pocketbook’s proprietary OS on a 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM and 4GB of internal storage, and it also has Wifi, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack.

It’s running the same software as the original Inkpad, and comes with a number of apps and supports a wide variety of ebook formats. The Inkpad has more formatting options than you can shake a stick at, and also supports TTS as well as mp3 playback.

The 8″ Pearl E-ink display has a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200 with a capacitive touchscreen, just like the first InkPad, but Pocketbook says in the press release that the screen on the Inkpad 2 has improved optical properties (we’ll have to wait to see it in person before we know what that means).

In terms of battery life, the Inkpad has a 2.5Ah battery with a projected runtime of "up to a month without recharging". It weighs 305 grams, or about 45 grams less than the first model.

All in all, the new Inkpad doesn’t present a compelling argument in favor of upgrading from the original model, but at 199 euros this ereader is still worth a look.

The Inkpad 2 is cheaper than the Kindle Oasis, and its only real competitors in the plus-sized ereader category are the 6.8″ Kobo Aura H2O, the Onyx Boox i86, and the Icarus Illumina XL.

Of the four, I am torn between the Inkpad  and the Aura H2O. I like them both, for different reasons. The Inkpad is bigger, but frankly Kobo has the better software. My Inkpad keeps freezing and refusing to reset (and yet I still like it – go figure).

In any case, your buying decision will likely come down to which one you can buy. The press release says that the PocketBook InkPad 2 is now available online for a suggested retail price of 199 euros, from www.pocketbook.de.

Pocketbook, however, won’t let me visit that site to confirm the news, and so I can’t buy the Inkpad 2.

But you might have better luck.

Pocketbook via eBook-Fieber.de

Remember all that foofaraw over the past few years where France and other countries lowered the tax they collected on books, the European Union ruled the tax rate illegal (because ebooks weren’t books), the countries protested, and then the EU decided in May 2015 that, okay, maybe lower taxes on ebooks weren’t such a bad idea?

Moving at a typical glacial bureaucratic pace, the European Union has taken the next step towards changing regulations so its member countries can charge a lower tax rate on ebooks.

Last week the EU launched a public consultation on the topic of VAT collected on ebooks. They’re inviting comment from the public on this proposal to "allow Member States the application of reduced rates for electronically supplied publications".

They want to know what you think about the possibility that ebooks might be sold tax-free (as newspapers and books are sold in the UK), what types of digital content should be included, and any possible side effects of the change.

For example, should digital comics be included, or only the more traditional ebooks? What about ebook apps, or ebooks-on-a-stick?

You can find more info, and share your opinion, on the EU’s website.

image by Images_of_Money

For some unknown reason many people are convinced that only Amazon could open a college bookstore with no books, but that simply isn’t true. Amazon has several competitors currently disrupting the college bookstore industry, including eCampus and textbook distributor MBS Direct.

Owned by B&N founder Len Riggio, MBS Direct offers a virtual bookstore platform which dispenses with a physical location entirely. It has signed private high schools as well as colleges and universities like Liberty University, including most recently Chadron State College in Nebraska.

CSC announced this week that it was opening the virtual bookstore just in time for the fall term. Its previous bookstore operator  had been sold, and after investigating the various options CSC concluded that online was clearly the best choice for students.

“We are pleased to be working with MBS Direct and expect to provide students with affordable and reliable service into the future,” said Dale Grant, Chadron State College vice president for administration and finance.

The space occupied by the bookstore in the CSC Student Center will be taken over by Outlaw Printers, a Chadron, NE -based printing service. It has a contract to operate a store which carries CSC-branded merchandise – but not books. The store will look a lot like a traditional college bookstore – just without the textbooks and class materials.

When it comes to college bookstores Amazon is getting all the press, but what the media isn’t telling you is that the college bookstore industry is facing serious disruption as college students buy more and more stuff online. College bookstores are closing left and right, including a bookstore in the college town where I grew up.

Jayhawk Bookstore has been serving students at Kansas University for decades, but it closed this summer. Its owners noted that instructors have been changing how assign course material for their classes. "There’s also more a drive towards using course packets, smaller chunks of information from different sources," said Jeff Levin, co-owner of Jayhawk Bookstore.

Levin also reported losing business to online retailers like Amazon. "The landscape of retail in general has been changing, in particular college textbooks. It’s not just traditional textbooks. There are obviously e-books and rental books," Levin said.

That shift to online retailers has lead a lot of colleges and universities to replace the traditional college bookstore with either an online virtual store or with a book-less pickup location.

As I’m sure you know Amazon has plans for fourteen unstores at US colleges and universities, including most recently at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but in this area they are dwarfed by eCampus. The latter has a Virtual Bookstore Program which currently serves as the official bookstore for over 150 schools nationwide. Many of the schools went the way of Wilson College, whose bookstore is completely virtual, but others chose to also have an Amazon-style pickup location.

For example, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee elected to have eCampus put in a virtual bookstore when the vendor won the contract bid last August.

As you can see in the photos, it looks not dissimilar from the Amazon unstores which dot the college landscape. It has kiosks, a service counter, and UPS delivery boxes (in place of Amazon’s delivery boxes).

eCampus promises delivery within two business days (without any pricey membership fees). Students are notified of a textbook’s arrival by email or text message,  and they  can come to the store to pick up their order before heading off to class.

This, folks, is the future of college bookstores, one where almost everything is bought online and where the college bookstore is reduced to little more than a gift shop and a convenience store.

If you are in love with the idea of bookstores, that might sound frightening. Me, I can recall just how much textbooks cost and how little value I got out of a college bookstore, so it bothers me not at all.

The NYTimes and other news orgs may have just fallen into another correlation/causation trap. Yesterday they published an article which implies that you will live longer if you read books:

Reading books is tied to a longer life, according to a new report.

Researchers used data on 3,635 people over 50 participating in a larger health study who had answered questions about reading.

The scientists divided the sample into three groups: those who read no books, those who read books up to three and a half hours a week, and those who read books more than three and a half hours.

The study, in Social Science & Medicine, found that book readers tended to be female, college-educated and in higher income groups. So researchers controlled for those factors as well as age, race, self-reported health, depression, employment and marital status.

Compared with those who did not read books, those who read for up to three and a half hours a week were 17 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, and those who read more than that were 23 percent less likely to die. Book readers lived an average of almost two years longer than those who did not read at all.

The NYTimes made it sound like reading more lead to living longer (see the headline) when in fact there’s no evidence showing causation which is exactly what the researchers concluded.

Edit: I followed up by email, and one of the paper’s authors told me that:

The NYT article did a good job summarizing our key findings: reading books confers a survival advantage, after adjustment for a whole host of covariates (sex, age, wealth, health, education, depression, etc). For this reason, we believe there is a strong connection between reading and longevity.

What are the chances they are right?

I for one don’t believe them. But then again they are the ones with the PhDs.

Do you think there’s a real connection, or is this a spurious correlation?

What I think we have here is a study which looked at population data and found a correlation between life expectancy and reading. And without data to explain the connection, that correlation doesn’t mean anything. Without evidence of a real connection, I see it as it’s as much a spurious correlation as the relationship between suicides and US spending on science, tech, and space.

Thoughts?

 image by ZapTheDingbat

Editor’s Note: Will O’Neill kindly agreed to share his experiences with print-on-demand, and help indies decide whether they need release a POD edition, or participate in B&N’s vanity press.

Years ago I tradpubbed an espionage thriller, The Libyan Kill. In print, traditional offset printing, 10,000 copies. If they had all sold it would have paid off my advance, nearly. But after 6 weeks or so Norton pulled back several thousand unsold copies and remaindered them.

Nowadays, I probably wouldn’t bother with a print edition at all. The market for thrillers is mostly e-books.

And the money is mostly in e-books, what money there is. The cover price for The Libyan Kill was $10.95—equivalent to $28.50 today. And most sales were at cover price. Nobody gets that kind of money for thrillers today, but plenty of indie authors get as much or more per copy as the roughly $2.50 (today’s money) that I got then, thanks to the magic of the economics of digital publishing.

In fact, I’m selling a somewhat updated version of the book in Kindle form for $2.99, from which I net nearly $2.00 a copy.

I thought about putting out a CreateSpace version too, but dropped the idea as not worth the time and effort. It would have cost me scarcely anything and probably would have taken no more than another week or two’s effort, but the market isn’t there.

Aside from the fact that people who read thrillers (and even more so the readers of romance and sci-fi) mostly really like e-reading, there’s cost. According to CreateSpace’s nifty royalties calculator, in order to get a $2.50 per copy royalty on Amazon sales of a POD version I’d need to charge $10.85, and if I wanted to shoot for the moon and get $2.50 from bookstore sales the price would have to be $16.25.

Maybe I could churn out a really super-hot new thriller. Maybe a wild tale about a wacked-out real-estate heir who runs for president. Oh, wait…. Anyway, something that could support a $16.25 cover price (remembering that nowadays scarcely any buyer would actually wind up paying that much). My royalty on Amazon sales would be a sweet $5.74 a copy.

What about the e-book version? Taking the Kindle as a convenient example, and allowing a $0.15 network charge, I could get a $5.74 royalty if I charged $8.35, less than half of the POD cover price. Even if Amazon knocked down the POD book price by 40% early on there would still be a lot of daylight between the prices of the p-book and e-book.

But if we think in terms of more realistic pricing levels for books in this category, say $3.99 for the e-book with equal-royalty POD pricing, the story starts to look different. Now my Kindle royalty is a still-respectable $2.65 or so. If the POD version comes out at 364 pages in 6”×9” trim size then I’d need to set the cover price over $11 to get that much in royalty per Amazon sale. And the gap between p-book and e-book pricing starts to look YUUGE, which is going to kill much chance of substantial p-book sales.

And if I tried to price the p-book to match the price of the e-book, CreateSpace would tell me TILT! $6.70 is as low as it can go—resulting in one penny royalty per copy sold on Amazon.

In fact, however, my latest book is World War I military history, The Plan That Broke the World. It’s a really different market. (Of course, if you don’t know who buys your books, you’re already in trouble.) Lots of older guys who don’t do e-books. Lots of gift books for Grandad, or Uncle Clem. (You have to know someone really well to gift an e-book, and it’s never the same as a p-book.) So a p-book is needed.

The good news is that people will pay more for serious history than for genre fiction. Not saying it’s right or wrong, just the way it is. So the POD edition is a paying proposition, and I even get some bookstore orders. But even though the Kindle is priced much lower, it pays me more – both per-unit, and since unit sales are divided roughly equally between POD and Kindle, my net revenues are about two-thirds to three-quarters from the Kindle side.

I’ve really gone out of my way to make this a good e-book; photo reproduction in particular is better than most tradpubs manage. (You can download the free sample and see for yourself.) Nevertheless, I’ve sold nearly as many p-books as e-books. So for this book a POD book was definitely worthwhile.

I’d love to hear from other indie authors about their thoughts and experiences regarding POD.

image by NYC Wanderer

Here’s a surprising bit of news.

Nikkei reports that Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited in Japan several hours ago on Wednesday. The program costs 980 yen per month and offers access to more than 120,000 Japanese titles and over 1.2 million titles in other languages.

Like the KU program in the USA and other countries, the frontlist selection is sparse:

Leading publishers including Kodansha and Shogakukan have made a portion of their catalogs available, including best-selling novels and business books. Publishers report that they will receive a cut of the service’s revenue, based on how often their offerings are read.

Yet new releases are few and far between, with almost no new books published from the past six months available for unlimited reading. Popular periodicals and strong sellers on other unlimited services are also lacking. A number of hit manga series offer only introductory chapters or volumes through Kindle Unlimited, pushing readers wanting more to purchase the rest outright.

If you’re like me then you probably thought Kindle Unlimited launched in Japan a while ago, but you would be mistaken.

Yes, Amazon has been paying royalties for ebooks loaned through KDP Select in Japan, but that was through the Kindle Owners lending Library, a program which let Kindle-owning Prime members borrow one ebook each month.

I double checked the Amazon.co.jp website in the Wayback machine at the Internet Archive, and there was no mention of Kindle Unlimited last week. The service only just launched today in Japan.

Coincidentally, this is the second unlimited reading service for Amazon in Japan. Today’s launch follows that of Audible Unlimited, which launched in Japan in July 2015.

What with the AAP reporting on the decline of publisher ebook revenues, and Big Five publishers either posting falling ebook revenues or refusing to talk about the category at all, I thought today would be a good day to to return to the topic of authors justifying high ebook prices.

Michael J. Sullivan wrote a post for Amazing Stories about a month ago that combines the Joe Konrath method of debate with a collection of straw man and "price of tea in China" arguments to defend high ebook prices.

Here’s an excerpt from his sixteen-hundred word post:

I had lunch at Chipotle after the subject was brought up. A burrito and a soft drink cost me about $10. A movie ticket costs between $8 and $14, but to own a copy it will run from $15 to $30. A pair of jeans cost $30 bucks, a T-shirt $20, a pair of shoes $60. Ebooks tend to range mostly between $0.99 all the way up to as much as $14.99, but most range between $5 and $10. After reading the above question for the second time I had to double check Amazon’s numbers to make certain ebooks hadn’t jumped up substantially —but $5—$15 for many hours (or week’s worth) of entertainment? Sounds like a deal to me.

The idea behind the question, as I understand it, is: since no printing is involved, or any other out of pocket expenses in the form of raw materials, why aren’t ebooks free (or something very close to it) If authors don’t have to invest money to create the product, why charge people to read it? I wonder if these same individuals assume a lawyer, psychologist, home inspector, or tax preparer should also not be paid? After all they don’t invest any money in the services they provide. An argument might be made that these people invested money in their education or in the cost of maintaining an office. But don’t authors do the same?

Perhaps it is the bizarre notion that anyone can sit down at anytime and write a novel—no education, no practice needed, and ignore the costs incurred from rent, mortgages, heating and cooling, books, seminars, software, travel, etc. that those serious about a writing career incur. But what about the editing? What about the cover art? Even ebooks need these, and they aren’t cheap. So, of course, there are investment costs even in an ebook—quite a bit actually by the time you add up the multiple editing, layout work, the art, and then the months or years of promotion and marketing that goes into getting a book noticed.

Authors travel across the country promoting their work, doing signing as bookstores, conventions, and other events. So there is the cost of entering these events, the cost of travel, the cost of hotels, and the time lost from their day jobs, and the cost of ads (if they or their publishers run them), the cost of making swag such as bookmarks, bookplates  and postcards to help prompt the book. Authors can easily invest several thousand dollars in a single book. Given that a great many authors don’t sell more than 5,000 copies (and that’s considered pretty good in the industry even if you’re traditionally published), and that Amazon takes 30-70% off the top, it is very likely the writer will not recoup their out-of-pocket investment.

According to his Amazon profile, Sullivan is a hybrid author; he has published with Hachette and Del Rey, released a couple titles as a self-published author, and in the past he published with his wife’s small press, Ridan Publishing (now defunct).

From what I have seen, all of Sullivan’s ebooks are priced at ten dollars and up (with the exception of the Ridan titles, which were later republished by Hachette).

In the past I have taken the opposing view when authors defended high ebook prices as the cost of doing business. But Sullivan’s arguments were so empty that I merely included his piece in a morning coffee post, noted a few key details, and then dropped it.

I was reminded of  his post over the weekend when Hachette, S&S, and PRH released their various financial reports and demonstrated that readers, as a group, do not agree with Sullivan’s arguments and aren’t swayed by the similar arguments made in the past (assuming the readers saw the arguments; the larger book industry is its own echo chamber).

Hachette’s ebook revenues peaked in the US in 2013, and have dropped precipitously since then both in terms of dollar value and as a percentage of revenues.

Sullivan is defending a pricing policy which has lead to declining ebook revenues at his publisher, and that refutes any bogus arguments and justifications in favor of high prices.

Arguing for higher ebook prices at this point requires that one first ignore all the industry data which is almost uniformly is lined up against the idea.

There’s no need to refute these arguments, or even respond – not when we can simply point to the data and show that the market disagrees.

So authors, by all means keep telling readers that ebooks have to be expensive; it has taken on a "get off my lawn" vibe, but if it works for you then don’t stop.

image by Julian Partridge

Eighteen months have passed since German ebook startup txtr declared bankruptcy, and just over a year since the company was taken over by Saturn, a media retailer and one of txtr’s partners.

And now txtr is no more.

Saturn sent out an email this morning through Juke Entertainment, its digital media outlet. The email informed txtr customers to the effect that txtr had been shutdown. (I’m paraphrasing; whoever wrote the email was apparently terrified of using words like "shutdown" or "closed".)

Txtr customers were given a link to register for an account at Juke, and advised that Juke "combines the world of digital entertainment – with a limitless selection of movies, series, music, e-books, games & software".

Txtr’s ebookstore has already been turned off, and according to the email the txtr servers will be shut off shortly after 24 October 2016.

Launched in 2009, txtr was initially a hardware company which wanted to develop a Kindle competitor, the txtr Reader. That device was repeatedly delayed and ultimately canceled after the bottom dropped out of the ereader market in mid 2010. (Amazon, B&N, and Kobo had all lowered their prices to the point that there was no profit margin.)

Txtr then pivoted to developing an ebookstore platform which it licensed to telecoms and other companies. It also loaded its software onto 3rd-party ereaders, including Pocketbook, and later developed the Beagle ereader.

The Beagle was launched in 2012 as a smartphone accessory which would be bundled with new contracts, and then died in 2013 when it turned out that neither telecoms nor their customers liked the limited functionality (it could only read ebooks which had been transferred from a paired smartphone) or its 59 euro price tag – only 10 euros less than the Kindle.

And now txtr is as dead as its ereaders.

RIP

Apple has Twitter accounts for iBooks and Apple News, and now they’re expanding onto Instagram.

Over the weekend Apple launched an Instagram account for iBooks

The account only launched a day ago, and it already has fifteen updates. From what I can see, and from Mac Rumors description, it looks like Apple will be using the account to market to its followers:

Apple also wished author J.K. Rowling a happy birthday through its new verified Instagram page, but otherwise the content appears to largely be focused on introducing followers to fresh and notable stories through quotes, author spotlights, and unique, short videos.

Some of the novels referenced so far on the new page include Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, Emma Cline’s The Girls, and Wendy Walker’s All Is Not Forgotten.

A number of the updates are reposted from other accounts, including Hachette Books and James Patterson.

See anything you like?

Instagram via macRumors

When Harry Potter and the Cursed Child hit best-seller lists last week I expected that a lot of fans would be angry when they discovered it was a script rather than a novel.

It turns out that readers were less upset about the story format than the fact that they paid $15 to $18 for what was basically a rough draft of the story.

Cursed Child has been out for just under 24 hours, and it has already racked up nearly 400 reviews on Amazon.com, including 124 one- and 2-star reviews. With an average rating of 3.5 stars, over 30% of the reviewers have given the script book a negative review (the percentage is higher if you factor in the disappointed 3-star reviews).

At the time of writing this post, there are far more 1-star reviews than 3-star or 2-star reviews.

Citing everything from plot holes to bad dialog, retcons, an overuse of time travel, and Mary/Gary Sue characters,  readers express regret for wasting their time and money.

Here is a selection of the higher rated reviews:

• Plot holes that Hagrid could fit through and over-wrought writing. … With the greatest deus ex machinas ever, polyjuice potion and a time turner, the writing team still wrote themselves into a corner and ended up ignoring the rules of the world they created.
• This script is being touted as "Book 8". Sadly, that’s not what it is at all. JK ruined the characters by allowing someone else to "puppeteer" her characters which she slowly allowed to grow and thrive. It’s proof that a "Book 9" won’t be written, because she’ll have to clean up what was essentially a ghost writer did to her characters.
• I think casual fans will really like this, but if you’re a big Harry Potter fan it’s very disappointing. Years of character development are thrown out the window, and the plot holes are more like craters. Overall the dialogue is poorly written, the characters are over to top, and the basis of the plot is beyond ridiculous.
• This play was not what i expecting. I want depth, i want character development, world building and an author who builds a story that captures my attention. This thing was none of them and I’m very disappointed in J.K. Rowling for even thinking this was acceptable. I’ve read fanfiction that had more depth in its first paragraph than the whole play had.
• Fully aware that it’s a script, not a narrative, that’s not the issue. The 'story' itself, the plot, reads like straight up bad fan fic. Voldemort had a daughter with Bellatrix? lol. Established characters act completely out of character… Cedric a death eater? Yeah, just not. Harry having suffered much abuse by his aunt and uncle tells his own child that he is unwanted? Just no. Time turners are used over and over to fix the past? Contrived and a kinda soulless fix to revisit dead characters. Will forever love all HP books, but not this story that feels like a money grab because we as fans will buy anything, even this convoluted mess.

I have not read the book myself, but the reviews make t sound like the first and biggest problem is that the Cursed Child wasn’t written by Rowling at all, and so it lacked the expected Rowling touch. The reviews have given me the impression that fans will soon be denying that this book ever happened (just like that XKCD comic strip).

That may change when the final version of the script book is published later this year, but it remains to be seen whether this mess will be salvaged by JK Rowling in a later book. The Cursed Child story may be rewritten as the stage play is tweaked to work better before a live audience, but Rowling has said that there will be no ninth Harry Potter book.

"He goes on a very big journey during these two plays and then, yeah, I think we’re done. This is the next generation, you know," Rowling told Reuters. "So, I’m thrilled to see it realized so beautifully but, no, Harry is done now."

Some are taking that to mean that the series has ended, but a careful reading tells us that Rowling didn’t say anything about the next generation, or the Harry’s parent’s generation. Rowling has left herself openings to write prequels or sequels – just not ones featuring Harry Potter.

Have you read the book? How would you have her fix it?

For the past several years it has been fashionable to write about the indie bookstore revival, but there’s a huge problem with many of the stories: they cite data which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Starting in 2013, many bloggers and journalists have cited the membership count of the American Bookseller Association in support of the narrative that indie booksellers were going through a revival.

For example, one of the points Glenn Fleishman raised in his article in the Seattle Review of Books last week touched on this data point:

Now indie stores are seeing a resurgence — small, but noticeable, sustained, and continuous. The ABA says its membership has grown from 1,401 and 1,651 locations in 2009 every year through the current one, with 1,775 members and 2,311 stores even as Borders shut down and Barnes & Noble closed 120 outlets during the same period. (Not all indie stores are ABA members, though most are. This can result in apples-to-oranges comparisons among articles that rely on ABA numbers, industry figures, or government analyses.)

I was one of the first to report on the revival in 2013; at that time I saw the ABA membership stats as evidence which disproved the then-accepted belief that Amazon was killing indie bookstores left and right.

Today I would like to clue you in on a detail which a friend on Twitter pointed out a while ago: there’s a problem with the ABA data.

Sure, we’ve read many stories about new bookstores opening, including about a franchised chain of used bookstores. And yes, nineteen of the twenty new ABA members are bookstores.

But the fact remains that a significant number of ABA members simply are not bookstores.

While the ABA has positioned itself as representing indie booksellers, it will actually accept retailers of all type. In fact, its membership application form invites prospective members to identify as "non-bookstore", and the form welcomes all type of businesses, including online sellers, museums, colleges, and even "non-retail operations". (I am seriously tempted to join under that last option.)

As a result, the actual ABA membership rolls are more diverse than the group’s name would suggest. In Virginia, for example, the ABA lists 51 members. At least twenty of those members are not indie 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).

I’m sure all of these entities sell books, yes, but that still doesn’t make them indie bookstores any more than Walmart.

Remember, the phrase "indie bookstore" connveys the image of a small local bookstore which is run by the owner, and possibly looking something like this:

So tell me, with almost 40% of ABA members in VA not being indie bookstores, can we really say that there’s a revival?

Not from the ABA membership roll, no, but not all bookstores belong to the American Bookseller Association.

Just in my immediate geographic region, I can find four indie bookstores which don’t belong to the ABA. (What’s wrong with the ABA that I have more non-member indie bookstores within driving distance than ABA members? Is the membership really worth so little?)

If we could find a real source of statistics on bookstores, one which counted all indie bookstores and tracked the number of locations (one ABA member in Virginia has three bookstores) then perhaps we could answer that question.

But as it stands, there’s no way to know for sure.

images by robwalsh0, TravelNevada, leighklotz