Following my Kindle review yesterday, several readers asked me what I thought of the Bluetooth option and the Voiceview accessibility feature.

I couldn’t test that feature because I didn’t own a Bluetooth speaker (or any other BT accessories for that matter), so today I went out and bought a couple speakers to I could offer a first-hand report.

Since the 2016 Kindle does not support the $20 Kindle audio adapter USB dongle, the only way to enable Voiceview on this ereader is to pair with a BT speaker.

And that’s a shame, because every part of Voiceview over Bluetooth is a fiasco. It is difficult to set up,  doesn’t work for its intended purpose, and when you turn off the BT speaker the Kindle proceeds to nag you to reconnect it.

There’s no part of this which doesn’t scream that Amazon should go back to the drawing board and try again.

To start with, I had to go find the user manual and search for instructions on how to pair a BT speaker. The process was not straightforward nor as simple as with the Paperwhite (where you could enable Voiceview by plugging in a USB dongle). It took me two tries on my first attempt to pair a speaker with the 2016 Kindle, but offering a blood sacrifice at dawn after the full moon while painted blue and reciting Hamlet in the original Klingon helped me make the connection.

And once I paired the speaker and the 2016 Kindle, I found that Voiceview was simply unusable over Bluetooth.

Use

I tested my 2016 Kindle loaner review unit first with a $40 Insignia BT speaker from Best Buy and later a $13 Vivitar BT speaker from Walmart.

Both speakers demonstrated the same problems. Every time the audio paused, whether at the end of a sentence or after a comma, the following word was invariably clipped. This made it difficult to impossible to follow the text.

Here’s an audio clip demonstrating the problem, and for the sake of completeness I have also embedded a screen shot of the text being read below.

I don’t know why or how this happened, but I can tell you that the audio problems in the clip happened not just once but multiple times with each speaker. (Curiously enough, Teleread posted an audio clip which did not exhibit the clipping flaw.)

Is the problem unique to these speakers, or just to cheap BT speakers? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t call a $40 speaker cheap. There was only one other BT speaker immediately available to me, and that cost $50.

I have little experience with Bluetooth,  but I did find while troubleshooting this issue that some BT speakers don’t support the newer and faster BT standards. That might be the problem here, but frankly if a $40 speaker is not good enough to get the promised performance than it is simply not achievable.

Aftermath

Having been frustrated by Amazon’s failures, I disabled the BT speakers and tried to read the ebook sans audio. That’s when I discovered that Amazon simply would not let this go.

The Kindle kept nagging me to reconnect the speaker. Eventually I enabled airplane mode just to get it to shut up.

This is a mess from beginning to end.

Nothing worked the way it should, and this didn’t even come close to meeting Amazon’s usual standard for ease of use.

It’s a huge strike against the 2016 Kindle, but hopefully this is something Amazon can fix in a software update.

Last week the city of Boston and E-ink installed a new information sign for tourists on the City Hall plaza.

Based on a 32″ E-ink screen,  the sign is powered by solar panels and offers tourists information on local events and help residents and visitors locate nearby landmarks.

"There are thousands of visitors and dozens of events happening around City Hall Plaza each week," said Judy Wang, Innovation Fellow with the New Urban Mechanics who managed the project. "This screen will allow City Hall to share all of these events with public in real time, and this tool gives us a new way to engage with visitors, get them excited about upcoming activities and help them navigate all our city has to offer."

According to the press release, this sign is based on the 32″ E-ink panel which was launched at SID Display Week 2014. It, so far as I have been able to determine, the first 32″ screen used as a sign (GDS was unable to identify other customers when I queried them).

They also say that this is the fist solar-powered E-ink signage in the US, but that may not be strictly true. Several mass transits systems are testing a sign based on a 9.7″ E-ink screen, and those could incorporate a solar panel.

Boston Herald

When I broke the news on the XO Infinity laptop from One Education (OLPC Australia) last spring, it featured a modular design where you could replace the CPU, battery, screen, storage, etc.

You could have thought of the design we saw last year as the Project Ara for educational laptops, but you wouldn’t get that impression from the Infinity laptop  which just went up for pre-order.

One Education is sending out emails this morning with the news that you can pre-order an Infinity laptop, only instead of the modular design teased last year, this laptop is a rather ordinary looking two-in-one design with a green shell.

The Infinity is now a 10″ laptop which runs Windows 10 on a quad-core 1.9GHz Atom CPU with 2GB RAM and 64GB internal storage.

Gone are the options for Android and Sugar OS. The laptop has also lost all of its modules, and replaced the promise of upgradability with the usual mix of ports, card slots, and a couple cameras (2MP and 5MP).

The Infinity costs $230, and is expected to ship in August.

O O O

If you’re wondering what the bleep happened to the original design, the problem was that this project never had the engineering team it needed and it never had broad support from the industry.

As you may recall, Project Ara had the financial backing of Google and support from industry standards groups as well as Intel, Toshiba, Qualcomm, Rockchip, Nvidia, Marvell, Sennheiser (audio), Innolux (screens), and a bunch of smaller companies including smartphone makers.

In comparison, the Infinity laptop did not even have the support of Google or Intel, two tech giants which have an immediate and direct interest in edtech as well as the engineering teams to make this idea a reality.

I’m sure One Education had great engineers, but this was a ridiculously complex project which required the backing of numerous tech experts in a variety of fields. That lack of support is why this project has (at best) stalled at an incomplete state and why One Education instead launched a substitute product.

There’s no word on when or if One Education will ever launch the promised modular laptop. I have queried them, and I will update this post with their response.

Edit: I have been told that the idea "has been parked for now. The market and manufacturing industries to support it aren’t just there yet!"

Amazon Inspire was designed to let teachers share curricula, lesson plans, and textbooks they created, but it seems some teachers have failed to grasp the idea that one shouldn’t submit others' work as one’s own.

The NYTimes reports that Amazon has already had to pull content from the site:

One day after Amazon announced that it would introduce Amazon Inspire, a free instructional resources site where teachers could share lesson plans, the company said it had removed three items from the site after educators complained that the products were copyrighted materials.

In a related blunder, Amazon had included two of the items it has since taken down in a screen shot of the site that was sent to journalists and published in news outlets, including The New York Times.

More embarrassing still: Two items — a collection of first-grade math lessons and English literature activity lessons — in the Amazon screen shot were created by authors on teacherspayteachers.com, a rival instructional resources site where educators offer lesson plans they have created.

While I’m not going to beat up Amazon over not having a way to vet content (the site only just launched) one would think that they would double check the legality of anything mentioned in the press docs. Also, the site is in beta with access limited to only those who have an access code, so perhaps Amazon could have vetted the content.

On the other hand, I have seen ereader makers release promo images which feature Harry Potter ebooks. (This was before Pottermore, so the ebooks were clearly pirated.)

Rohit Agarwal, the general manager of Amazon K-12 Education, the company’s education unit, told the NYTimes that Amazon was looking into how the materials in question came to be uploaded to the site.

“Our team is doubling down and investigating what the root cause is,” Mr. Agarwal said in an interview Tuesday evening. “We will do what is appropriate to respond to the results of the investigation.”

Amazon is not the first to have this problem; most file-sharing sites have a problem with pirated content, and some (like Scribd) never escape their early reputation as a pirate site. We’ve even seen pirates set up shop on edusites like Udemy.

Amazon has the resources to fix this issue, so I wouldn’t expect it to be a long term problem.

When Barnes & Noble expanded its publishing platform Nook Press in 2014 and added a POD service, they forgot to include one key component.

You could use Nook Press to print books, but you could not get them into B&N stores (for that you would need a competing POD service like Createspace or Ingram). Today B&N finally corrected that deficiency.

The retailer has launched a quote unquote new Nook Press POD service which enables Nook Press users to create hardback and paperback editions of their title, while at the same time the new program dangles the possibility that the books might be sold in B&N stores.

The authors and publishers who distribute their books through Nook Press will have to submit their print books for review by Barnes & Noble’s Small Press Department, and one of the company’s corporate category buyers. They will have to have sold at least a thousand copies of the title in the Nook Store  before they will be considered,.

If accepted the books might be distributed to B&N stores on local, regional or national level. Interested authors, including the one a few weeks back who railed against B&N for supposedly having a policy against accepting indie authors, can contact [email protected] for more details.

In related news, B&N is also opening up an official program where indie authors can apply for the opportunity to participate at in-store events including book-signings and discussions. The authors will be able to meet fans, sell their print books, and build a following.

This program also has a minimum requirement: authors have to have sold at least 500 copies of a single title in the Nook Store in order to be considered, and they must be accepted by the local Barnes & Noble store manager.  They can contact [email protected] for more details.

Those are a great couple of programs, and it’s a pity that B&N didn’t launch them when they could have mattered – in 2012, say, before Barnes & Noble got into bed with Author Solutions.

But in 2016, when B&N has let their ebook program wither to only a quarter of its peak user base, announced four restaurants which push books to the background, and reduced the number of books they carry in preference of pasta and 3d printers, do they really still have a shot at attracting readers into their stores, much less authors?

And more importantly, how many authors could qualify for either program?

Sure, it would be great for authors to gain a new venue for in-person events; they could even hold an event in the neglected Nook dept, like I saw in the Frederiscksburg store.

But the Nook Store has declined to the degree that it is scarcely worth an author’s time to use Nook Press rather than a third party distributor. There was a time where authors would have used NP, but many pulled out when we discovered that B&N had hired scammy Author Solutions to run it.

Would either program be attractive to authors to make them willing to do business with an Author Solutions front, and could they really make the minimum threshold? (It’s a low threshold, yes, but B&N doesn’t sell a whole hell of a lot of ebooks.)

Thoughts?

The ability to hold your place with a forefinger or bookmark while quickly flipping around the pages of a book is one of the few functional advantages paper books have over ebooks – or rather, it was.

On Tuesday Amazon introduced a new navigation feature for Kindle platform called Page Flip.

With Page Flip, readers can easily flip back and forth between pages in an ebook to reference different parts of the book while they read.  Their original location will be saved, enabling them to quickly jump to the back of a book to check a map or glossary and then return to the story.

As any Kindle user could tell you, the Kindle platform already had a feature like this where you could flip through a comic book. Also, the Kindle ereader already let you push the page you’re reading to the background and flip around inside a book, but the new Page Flip feature improves upon that feature.

With Page Flip you can flip through  nine thumbnails of page images at a time. Check it out in this GIF:

As you can see in the GIF, the bottom menu bar has a scroll bar and two buttons for the two different flipping features. The one on the left is for the old feature, while the button on the right is for Page Flip.

“As an author, I love knowing that my work is presented with fluid clarity, freeing my readers from the page shuffling that can cloud and spoil the narrative,” said Laura Hillenbrand, best-selling author of Unbroken. “With Page Flip, books become vastly more accessible, navigable, interactive, and enthralling. As a ravenous reader and scholar, I savor the ease with which Page Flip allows me to keep thumbnails of maps and diagrams, my notes and highlighted passages, and bookmarked pages before me as I read, so that all I wish to see is accessible with the tap of a finger and my focus never has to leave the storytelling.”

You can find more info at Amazon.

Amazon is rolling Page Flip out to all its apps in the next few weeks, and it will be coming to the Paperwhite, 2014 basic Kindle, Voyage, and Oasis as a firmware update.

From what Amazon is saying on its site, this is a feature of the Kindle ebook format, and not a software feature. So it won’t work with sideloaded ebooks right away, nor even with all ebooks sold in the Kindle store.

Geekwire

Bookstore retail sales may have been up in January 2016 and for the previous calendar year, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the AAP’s January revenue stats.

The Association of American Publishers announced on Monday that total revenues for its member publishers had dropped in January 2016, to under a billion dollars.

Trade books were down 13.7%, to $488 million, with both adult and YA segments reporting double digit losses (religious presses posted a 4% increase as a result of people researching whether Trump’s campaign was a sign of the end times).

In terms of formats, paperback sales were up, while hardback sales and ebooks sales both declined precipitously. eBook sales fell 25%, possibly due to digital fatigue.

You can find the publicly available stats below. The figures of course only reflects the revenues of the 1,200 odd publishers which submit their data to the AAP; it does not reflect the market as a whole.

O O O

Press release:

Publishers’ revenues were down Jan. 2016, compared to Jan.2015. Trade publishing had double-digit declines in Childrens/YA Books and Adult Books, while Religious Presses had modest gains. Notably, eBook sales had another steep decline with reporting publisher sales declining nearly 25%, compared to Jan. 2015.

Big Picture Data:

• Publishers’ book sales for Jan. 2016 were $991.7 million, down 6.7% from $1.06 billion in Jan. 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.)
• Trade (consumer) books sales were $488.0 million in Jan. 2016, down 13.7% from $565.4 million in Jan. 2015. This includes Childrens/YA Books, Adult Books and Religious Books.

o   Adult Books had $338.9 million in sales in Jan. 2016, down 12.9% from $389.2 million.

o   Childrens/YA Books had $111.7 million in sales in Jan 2016, down 20.4% from $140.3 million.

o   Religious Presses grew by 4.2%, up to $37.5 million from $36.0 million.

Format Trends for Trade

• Trends appeared to continue from 2015. In Jan. 2016 vs Jan. 2015:

o   Paperback books grew 4.3% to $169.3 million and downloaded audio grew  30.1% to $20.4 million.

o   eBooks were down 24.9% to $99.9 million and hardback books declined 18.7% to $151.3 million.

Educational Materials and Professional Books

• Educational Materials had gains of 7.9% for K-12 Instructional Materials and 2.2% for Higher Education Course Materials, in Jan. 2016 vs Jan. 2015.
• Professional Publishing was down 19.8% in Jan. 2016 vs Jan. 2015 which includes business, medical, law, scientific and technical books and journals.

About StatShot

Publisher net revenue is tracked monthly by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and includes sales data from more than 1,200 publishers (#AAPStats). Figures represent publishers’ net revenue for the U.S. (i.e. what publishers sell to bookstores, direct to consumer, online venues, etc.), and are not retailer/consumer sales figures.

image by Jorge Franganillo

Here’s a book which combines aspects of pop-up books and interactive ebook apps.

Milan-based filmmaker Virgilio Villoresi has collaborated with illustrator Virginia Mori to create a paper book which uses vintage pre-cinema animation techniques to tell a story.

The book is called Vento, and if you like you can think of the book as a collection of proto-GIFs, only on paper. It lets the reader construct and deconstruct the story through time. There’s no text, just images, and each image tells its own story, letting readers make their own connections through the narrative.

You can see the effects in the trailer below, and you can buy the book from, well, no where. It is sold out.

eBook Friendly

Remember the white Kindle Paperwhite Amazon launched in China and Japan back in April? Soon you’ll have the chance to buy one.

In addition to launching the new white basic Kindle today, Amazon has also announced that the white Kindle Paperwhite will be start shipping in the US and elsewhere in the world on 30 June (it’s listed on local Amazon sites, yes).

The price is the same as with the black model ($119. 119 euros, £109, etc), and all of the technical details are the same, including the 300 ppi screen, 4GB of internal storage, frontlight, touchscreen, the works. It even supports the Voiceview accessibility feature which Amazon launched earlier this year.

It is, in almost every way, the same Kindle as before, only now with a white shell. And that raises the question: Why would you want one?

A white shell tends to make E-ink screens look more gray, whereas a black shell makes it look more white. So wouldn’t you want to have a black shell and a whiter screen?

Sure – unless, as one reader pointed out to me last year, you want to make full use of the screen. The nice thing about a white shell is that it lets you reduce screen margins to the bare minimum, and have text right up against the edge of the screen.

Having the text so close to a black shell would look terrible, but with a white shell it effectively makes the shell the page margins, giving you a larger screen.

I’d still prefer a black shell, but I can see the value, can’t you?

The updated white Kindle isn’t the only thing Amazon launched on Wednesday morning; it has also opened two additional language-specific bookstores in India.

Amazon already supported bookstore sites for Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, and Kannada, and now it’s adding Bengali and Gujarati to the list.

From The Times of India:

The retail giant Amazon Indiahas announced the launch of two dedicated online language book stores — Bengali and Gujarati. According to the company, the book stores have a wide selection of over 10,000 titles.

The range of books include classics, literature, fiction, biographies, business and finance, self-help, cook books and children’s books. There are also bestselling books by acclaimed authors like Rabindranath Tagore, Kaajal Oza Vaidya, Suchitra Bhattacharya, Satyajit Ray, Naresh Shah, Ankit Trivedi amongst others for readers.

Bestsellers from both the languages such as the Bengali titles Byomkesh Samagr and Shanku Samagra as well as the Gujarati titles Krishnayan and Mahabharat Manav Svabhar Nu Mahakavya are among the books that book lovers can find in the stores.

Curiously, the Kindle Store does not offer ebooks in either Bengali or Gujarati, nor are they supported in KDP. This is a print only deal.

There is, however, a Hindi section of the Kindle Store. It was added after the Kindle Store launched in India in 2012.

Noor Patel, director, category management, Amazon India said, "We started launching our dedicated language book stores last year and have witnessed an enthusiastic response from readers across the country. Having launched Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam, we are excited to launch the dedicated Gujarati and Bengali book stores on Amazon.in. These two new stores enable a convenient and easy access for book lovers and reading enthusiasts, based anywhere in India, to a huge selection of books in the language of their choice".

image by formatc1

Earlier this year a Kindle firmware update dropped hints about a new basic Kindle code named Woody, and today it finally launched.

The new basic Kindle still costs $79 with ads, only now it comes with 512MB RAM, and is available in both black and white. (The white basic Kindle had previously been available in Asia and Europe, but not the US.) The new model sheds the excess thickness of the 2014 model, and Amazon also dropped the weight to 5.7 ounces.

And best of all, it has Bluetooth. This will be the first Kindle to be able to use Amazon’s accessibility feature, Voiceview, without the $20 adapter. (The Oasis will likely be the second).

The new basic Kindle is available for pre-order now, and is going to ship in the next couple weeks. The Kindle Paperwhite is now also available in white as well in the US and around the world. It had previously been limited to just China and Japan. There’s no word on whether it has Bluetooth, though.

In related news, Amazon has also mentioned that they’re adding a new export option for annotations. The Kindle iOS app lets you export your notes via email, and soon the Kindle ereaders will support that option as well.

Export Notes—It’s now easy to export notes and highlights from a book to your e-mail, so you can always have them on-hand for reference. Receive your notes both as an easily printable PDF that’s ready to bring to your book club, and as a simple file you can open in your favorite spreadsheet app. This feature will be available as part of a free, over-the-air software update in the coming weeks.

For the past three years or so pundits and the mainstream media have pointed to sales figures from groups like the AAP and proclaimed that the ebook apocalypse had failed to occur and that ebooks weren’t going to replace print.

Over the past year that recurring story has been recognized as a trope, and a false one at that. Even The Bookseller has acknowledged that data from the AAP did not represent the full market, and that presents a problem for anyone who wants to spin the topic as "ebooks are failing".

Fortunately for the pundits, a new spin is just arriving on the scene. It was introduced on Friday by Publishers Weekly, and picked up by Flavorwire.

Folks, meet "digital fatigue":

Preliminary figures from the Association of American Publishers found that sales of e-books for trade publishers fell 14% in 2015 compared to 2014 and accounted for 20% of overall trade book revenue, down from 23% in 2014. Going beyond AAP’s member publisher sales performance, the Codex Group’s April 2016 survey of 4,992 book buyers found that e-book units purchased as a share of total books purchased fell from 35.9% in April 2015 to 32.4% in April 2016. The Codex survey includes e-books published by traditional publishers and self-publishers and sold across all channels and in all categories.

In light of the April study results, Codex president Peter Hildick-Smith believes that the book industry’s experience with digital sales differs from that of music and video because of two factors. First, electronic devices are optional for reading books (unlike for listening to music or watching video), and the current range of e-book reading devices—including smartphones, tablets, and dedicated e-readers—has not delivered the quality long-form reading experience needed to supplant print, even with e-books’ major price and convenience advantages. Second, Hildick-Smith said, a new consumer phenomenon, “digital fatigue,” is beginning to emerge.

The piece then goes on to cite a blizzard of data about declining ereader ownership, before ending with this paragraph and a couple graphs:

Unless the e-reader device market is recharged with lower-price, higher-quality options, Hildick-Smith expects that consumers tiring of their digital-device experience will have further digital fatigue, leading to continued e-book sales erosion.

Coincidentally, Teleread covered the same story last month as part of their coverage of BEA 2016; they have a different selection of data from the same report from the Codex Group, but make no mention of  "digital fatigue" (otherwise I would have credited Teleread as the source of the spin).

And yes, I do think it’s spin. My problem with the claim of digital fatigue is that it is too convenient of a label. It fits with exactly how the Codex Group’s customers, legacy publishers (also PW’s customers), want to spin their declining ebook sales when it doesn’t really explain the larger demographic trends.

Are people reading fewer ebooks? According to other sources, yes. But is it due to digital fatigue?

That is debatable.

The Codes Group says that fewer book buyers are reading ebooks, but when we look at the general population we see a very different picture.

Last fall the Pew Research Center released the latest in their semi-annual reports on American reading habits. It showed a slight dip  in the number of respondents who had read an ebook in 2015 vs 2014, but it also showed an even steeper decline in the number of people who had read a print book.

You can see the data in the chart at right.

If fewer people are reading fewer ebooks as a result of digital fatigue, then what’s your explanation for the fact they’re also reading fewer print books, and fewer books overall?

I don’t have one, myself, although I am looking forward to when Pew (hopefully) releases the next survey report this fall.

The obvious explanation would be that consumers are getting distracted by other activities, including digital activities on their mobile devices, and that goes against the idea of digital fatigue.

But it is a convenient label, which is why you’re going to hear it a lot over the next few months.

Thoughts?

image by IntangibleArts

The general details about Booxtream’s digital watermark DRM have been known since someone deconstructed a Harry Potter ebook from Pottermore in 2012, but have you ever wondered about the specific technical details?

Thanks to an anonymous hacker going by the name of Paigey the Book Pirate, now we know.

Late last night an email graced my inbox with a link to a file on Pastebin which detailed the various parts of Booxtream digital watermark DRM as used by Verso Books. I can’t share that link (it had someone’s personal info in it) but I do have a copy of the file for you sans PII.

booxtream.txt

The file is worth a read both for the technical details and for the humor. This is at least the second time I know of that someone has posted a detailed technical analysis of Booxtream DRM, but it is the first to use a humorous tone:

The Institute for Biblio-Immunology specialises in textual pathogen identification and antigen synthesis. Several vials of in vivo samples suffering from a "social DRM" watermarking infection were recently brought to the attention of our cellar scientists. In this, our inaugural communique, we will explore our dissection of said samples and offer an initial expatiation regarding the contaminant undesirables discovered therein, as well as offer preliminary guidance for a successful course of treatment.

…

Prudence tells us that the only time books should be used as weapons of terror is if they are thrown, gleefully aflame, through a publishing conglomerate’s window. Instead, we find that the publishing company Verso Books is using books to facilitate the surveillance of readers. By embedding uniquely-identifiable personal information in individual copies of ebooks, Verso (and the company they are relying on for the actual watermarking, BooXtream) are turning vectors for cultural transmission into, effectively, tracking beacons designed to identify who is sharing said ebooks, so as to then neutralise said ostensibly undesirable (by Verso) knowledge transmission paths. This will not stand.

While I don’t share Paigey’s opinion about the evils of digital watermark DRM, I can appreciate their hard work.

The text file above details seven different ways that Booxtream adds identifiable info to an Epub. (Booxtream can also embed digital watermarks in a Mobi file which can be read on the Kindle, but that is not covered here.)

In addition to adding a unique serial number to the names of files found inside the Epub ebook, Booxtream also embeds the original buyer’s name and email on the title page as well as in a footer at the end of each chapter. The digital watermarks can also be found in image metadata and the CSS file, and there’s a time stamp which records the specific time the original ebook was downloaded.

All in all, this file is a great read for anyone who wants to know how they are being tracked as well as anyone who wants more details on digital watermark DRM.

It will probably not, however, be very useful for stripping the digital watermarks from an ebook you buy. Booxtream is already aware that some of their technical secrets have been revealed, and they will undoubtedly be taking steps to change how they apply digital watermark DRM.

image y Mark Morgan Trinidad A

My colleague with the confusingly named blog pondered this morning on whether Amazon should add support for Epub on the Kindle platform.

I’ve wondering about that point for the past few years (in fact, I asked this very same question back in 2011), so I’d like to answer his question:

Fire tablets support ePub with apps available through Amazon’s own appstore so what’s the big difference?

Adobe DRM’d ebook are obviously out of the question; Amazon will never in a million years pay Adobe for rights to use their crummy DRM. But why not add support for DRM-free ePub ebooks?

Why should Amazon care if someone is reading an ePub they got five years ago when the odds are the person is going to use the Kindle to make future ebook purchases?

It seems like an easy way to convert a bunch of longtime Kindle holdouts into new customers. Lots of people have acquired vast numbers of ePub ebooks over the years and that keeps them from wanting to get a Kindle. Even though converting ePubs to Kindle format is an easy process with Calibre, it’s still a hassle that some people don’t want to work through.

Amazon should at the very least add ePub as a supported format to their Kindle format conversion service. Being able to send ePubs over email or with a Send to Kindle app and have them get automatically converted to Kindle format would be a big advantage for Amazon.

I have been wondering about this same point for years, and while I can’t speak for Amazon I do have a few ideas about why Amazon has the no-Epub policy.

If I were in Amazon’s position, I would avoid supporting Epub simply because it cuts down on my tech support headaches and software development hassles.

No Epub support means not having to maintain yet another rendering engine so the ebooks can be displayed, and it means not having to tell users that yes the Kindle supports Epub – just not the DRMed ebook the user has. It also means not having to explain to users who a Kindle Epub files doesn’t work on other ereaders due to the DRM restrictions.

Speaking as a reader, I would much prefer Epub being supported on the Kindle platform, or at least through the email conversion service. (Other services will take an Epub and send it to your Kindle, but not Amazon). This would help me a lot.

But how would it help Amazon? And would it be worth their time and expense?

Remember, the Kindle platform controls the majority of the trade ebook market, and most of the remainder is claimed by iBooks – which has proprietary DRM and restrictions on downloading even DRM-free ebooks.

Those Epub users who want to load their ebooks on to the Kindle represent a tiny fraction of a market which has arguably already chosen the Kindle formats as the standard.

Why should Amazon support a non-standard format when it already supports the market standard?

image by pasa47

Kobo published a self-congratulatory post on Medium this week which was sorely lacking in any achievements worth celebrating.

They’ve posted the text of the talk  Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn gave at The Economist’s Canada Summit where he lauded Kobo’s accomplishments. While they may have sounded impressive to Kobo, they don’t amount to a hill of beans.

For example:

They say when you’re starting a new business, you should look for the white space, be first to market, go where your competitors are not. Or there is another option. You can do the exact opposite. In 2009, starting here in Toronto with a handful of people, we picked a fight with the largest ecommerce company in the world, with the most successful hardware company ever, with the world’s largest book retail chain, and the most profitable search engine in history.

And you lost all four of those fights. Amazon won. Google won. Apple won. (I’m not sure which book retail chain won, but I know it wasn’t Kobo. )

Bravo. Slow clap.

Seven years later, 27 million users, 20 countries, millions of devices, tens of millions of ebooks and a $315M acquisition later, I get to tell you why that worked, why being Canadian mattered, and why sometimes the best revolutions don’t look like revolutions at all.

Seven years after Kobo launched and Amazon owns the market for trade ebooks, while Kobo is in a distant fourth or fifth place behind Kindle, iBooks, Kindle Unlimited, and (possibly) Play Books.

Yes, Kobo lost to Amazon not once but twice. Congrats.

Kobo was born to disrupt.

Kobo didn’t disrupt shit. Amazon disrupted the ebook market, and Kobo came along for the ride.

Even Kobo’s one major accomplishment, being the leading ebook retailer in Canada, only came about because Kobo was launched by Canada’s largest bookstore chain, Indigo, and took advantage of Canada’s protectionist economic policies. That makes Kobo the corporate equivalent of a trust fund baby, not a disruptor.

And –

Sorry, but I can’t take any more of that crap. I would like to fisk the piece, but it exceeds my tolerances. (I’ll forward it to Konrath, and see if he wants to have a go.)

Folks, Kobo’s sole great accomplishment is that they outlasted a lot of the also-rans in the ebook market, including Sony Reader, txtr, Samsung, Oyster, Nook, Bebook, and a UK-based company whose name I cannot recall.

And I’m sorry, but I just don’t see "we survived" as deserving a medal.

Do you?

image by N1NJ4