Barnes & Noble announced a slew of of closures on Thursday, including Nook Video, the UK Nook Store, and what had to have been one of B&N’s greatest digital mistakes.

B&N sent out an email on Thursday which informed users that the Nook’s own branded app store was going away:

Effective March 15, 2016, NOOK will no longer offer third party applications (Apps) for sale from the NOOK Store™. All of your existing Apps previously purchased from the NOOK Store will remain in your NOOK Library™ and will continue to be accessible on compatible NOOK devices. This means that you will still be able to download and install previously purchased Apps from the NOOK Library on your device.

The Nook App Store earned itself a eulogy because it is one of the reasons that the Nook platform failed.

I don’t really have time to explain this in depth, so here’s the short version.

During the early years of the Nook platform, before B&N sold rebranded Samsung tablets, its hardware strategy was built around custom Nook Android tablets.

Starting with the release of the Nook Color in 2010 and ending with the release of the Nook HD in 2012, B&N was building its own tablets and then trying to support them with an ebookstore and an app store.

Here’s the catch: You could load ebooks on to the Nook tablets from many ebookstores, but thanks to how B&N locked down the hardware you could only get apps from B&N.

That’s not a terrible idea on the face of it, but B&N could never make it work. They never had more than a couple hundred apps in the Nook App Store during that period, virtually guaranteeing that you would not be able to find the 4 or 5 apps you absolutely needed (I wanted OverDrive and Adobe Reader, and could get neither).

That is still a workable idea, if a user’s requirements are low enough, or if the locked down device costs a lot less than another tablet which perhaps shipped with Google Play.

Unfortunately, Barnes & Noble was charging about the same price for their ereaders cum Android tablets as Samsung and other tablet makers were charging for the Android tablets that shipped with Google Play.

If we look back to 2011, we recall that the original Kindle Fire, for example, torpedoed B&N’s plans to sell the Nook Tablet for $349 in late 2011 when the KF launched with a price tag of $199. (Even though the KF lacked Google Play, you could still do more with that tablet than you could with the Nook Tablet.)

$349 was the price of a premium tablet then, and it is still a premium price. And B&N thought they could sell what would best be described as an ereader at that price and that everyone would be satisfied with an anemic app store.

I wasn’t, and most people weren’t happy about it either.

This, folks, was one of the reasons why the Nook failed. B&N underestimated consumers who were savvy enough to figure out that they could read Nook ebooks on other hardware, but they couldn’t do jack with B&N’s tablets because of the sparse app store.

And so the only people who bought B&N’s tablets were B&N loyalists, the less tech savvy, and those with fewer needs.

Everyone else bought a gadget elsewhere, leaving B&N on the hook to sell millions of devices no one wanted to buy (hence the increasing number of two-for-one sales, refurb deals, and bundle offer in 2012 and 2013).

I don’t know that the Nook would have survived if B&N had never opened the Nook App Store; B&N made so many stupid mistakes that the platform was arguably doomed.

But I do know that the Nook App Store is one of the reasons that the Nook platform is dead today.

While Apple continues to fight the court order requiring it to develop a new firmware so that the FBI can more easily hack a terrorist’s phone, another major tech company has taken a surprise step back from protecting its customers privacy through encryption.

In the latest Fire OS Bellini 5.1.1 update, Amazon has removed device encryption from the OS.

Update: And as of Friday night, Amazon promised to bring encryption back. "We will return the option for full disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring," I was told.

The change won’t impact Kindle or Fire phone owners, but it will impact millions of owners of Fire tablets running the latest version of Amazon’s OS, including the models launched last year as well as the Fire HD6 and Fire HD7. Both tablets are due to receive updates to Fire OS 5.1.1.

Device-level encryption, or full disk encryption, is the process of protecting all user data on an Android device using an encryption key. This is a core feature of Android 5.0 Lollipop, and once this option is enabled user-created data is automatically encrypted before being saved to a disk (it is disabled by default).

The change was first noticed by Rick Dillon, who wrote last week:

Even as the debate about whether the All Writs Act of 1789 can be used to compel a company to write new software that compromises the security of its own devices continues, Amazon has quietly removed all support for full disk encryption in their latest version of Fire OS, based on Android 5.0 ‘Lollipop’ (which has native encryption support). I discovered this while attempting to upgrade my 4th generation Kindle Fire, but got an error message indicating that I needed to backup all my data, do a factory reset on my device to remove encryption, and then install the update, since Fire OS 5 does not have support for encryption. Amazon did link to a page on their site explaining this, but it appears to not be indexed and I haven’t been able to find it again. Amazon’s removal of such a core privacy feature is somewhat surprising, since it represents a bit of a break from other high-tech firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter who have publicly expressed support forApple’s stance that it will not subjugate the privacy of its users to government whims.

The change has been subsequently confirmed on Twitter and Amazon’s support forums.

While Apple fights the good fight, @Amazon removes encryption as option from FireOS 5 | @csoghoian @normative @eff pic.twitter.com/nggBdtFG7j

— David Scovetta (@davidscovetta) March 3, 2016

This is a shocking move for Amazon; the retailer has always put its customers first, so you would think that Amazon would at least give us the option of device-level encryption.

Both Apple and Google adopted device-level encryption in the wake of revelations of wide-spread illegal spying by the US government, and Apple even took the next step of making the encryption mandatory (it is still optional on Android).

And now Amazon is taking a step in the wrong direction, a move which makes no sense given that it follows only days after Amazon CTO Werner Vogels gave an impassioned speech at MWC in Barcelona where he said:

We have a very strong opinion on this. We believe that you cannot have a connected business, or an Internet-connected business and not make security and protection of your customers your number one priority.

Encryption plays a very, very important role in that. To be honest, it is one of the few really strong tools we have so customers know that only they have access to their data and nobody else.

I have reached out to Amazon for more information, and I will update this post with their response.

Update: Here’s Amazon’s response:

"In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using," Amazon said in a statement. "All Fire tablets’ communication with Amazon’s cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption."

So Amazon is saying Fire OS 5 never had device-level encryption. It’s funny how no one notices that before now, but I suppose it is possible.

DailyDot

After shutting down its international Nook Store in July 2015, B&N was left with just the Nook Stores in the US and UK. And now it appears the latter is about to go away.

There’s a belated announcement from B&N, but I learned of this story via a leak by the British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s. It posted a new webpage which welcomes Nook users:

Hello NOOK customers!

We are looking forward to welcoming you to Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand very shortly.

We are just putting the finishing touches to the process to allow us to transfer your eBooks and NOOK account to Sainsbury’s Entertainment. NOOK will send you an email with more information very soon.

In the meantime, if you have any questions read our FAQ or watch introductory video.

A quick check of the Nook.co.uk website confirms that there are "big changes ahead". The actual notice about the Nook UK closure was only just published while I was writing this post (the relevant page was blank just minutes ago), and it confirms the Sainsbury’s welcome message.

B&N tells its customers that the Nook apps will soon stop working in the UK, the ereaders will no longer have a bookstore built-in, and:

To meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award-winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to the vast majority of your purchased NOOK Books at no new cost to you. Further instructions on how to transfer your NOOK Books to a new or existing Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand account will be sent to you by email over the coming weeks. Please ensure that you look out for these emails as they will contain important information on what to do next.

B&N also links to an FAQ.

Far from being "committed to providing a great digital reading experience to our customers", as B&N claimed in its financial report this morning, the retailer is retreating from yet another digital market. (This reversal also makes me doubt the announcement that B&N has a prototype digital store opening this year).

Edit: The WSJ said that B&N plans to open four prototype stores by April 2017.

At its peak the Nook Store was available in 40 countries, including Canada, the UK, Australia, much of Europe, and the US. In the not too distant future it will only be available to readers in the US.

Would anyone care to lay odds on when the US Nook Store gets shut down?

I would put the over-under at 7 months. That may seem like a short time frame, but then again I am a realist.

After having shut down its office in Luxembourg and later abandoning its international customers, dropping support for Windows 8 users in the UK, and now pulling back from the UK entirely, it’s clear that B&N is shutting down the Nook Store one component at a time.

Edit: B&N is also shutting down Nook Video.

The only part left is the Nook Store in the US, and that is bound to be on its way out.

Your guess is as good as mine as to when, but I would keep an eye out for a sudden exodus of staffers from the Nook offices. Once they get their pink slips, it will mark the death of the division and the servers are bound to be shut off a short while later.

MobileRead

image by James Cridland

Barnes & Noble released its fiscal quarterly report today for the period ending on 30 January, and it looks like B&N’s plan to turn things around by selling pasta and tchotchkes still hasn’t worked.

Sales for the 3rd quarter decreased 1.8%, to $1.4 billion, compared to a year ago. Third quarter EBITDA was $169.0 million, up 1.6% as compared to EBITDA of $166.4 million a year ago, and consolidated third quarter net earnings from continuing operations were $80.3 million or $1.04 per share, or about double that of the third quarter 2014.

Retail accounted for most of the decline, and was down 1.2% over all, but the Nook platform’s ongoing spiral to oblivion also hurt B&N’s bottom line:

NOOK sales of $51.7 million decreased 33.3% due primarily to lower device and content sales. NOOK EBITDA losses of $11.2 million declined $17.9 million versus the prior year as the company continues to focus on cost rationalization efforts.

Barnes & Noble is no longer breaking out the content vs hardware sales anymore for the Nook division, so it is difficult to say with any certainty that the Nook Store continues to be smaller than Kindle Unlimited.

But with Nook revenues continuing to decline, and Amazon continuing to pay out more each month to publishers and authors in Kindle Unlimited ($15 million in January 2016), we have every reason to conclude that Nook is a smaller piece of the ebook pie than Kindle Unlimited.

Nevertheless, B&N is still pleased with the Nook results.

"We are pleased with our bookstore sales performance and the reduction of NOOK losses during the fiscal third quarter,” said Ron Boire, CEO of Barnes & Noble. “I am also pleased with the progress that has been made to reduce NOOK losses. We remain committed to providing a great digital reading experience to our customers, while exploring all opportunities to further reduce losses. Moving forward, our top priorities are growing bookstore and online sales, reducing Retail and NOOK expenses and growing our membership base."

Did you catch the bit about keeping the Nook? I had been wondering whether B&N would close the division, or perhaps sell it give it away, but apparently B&N is planning to keep the corpse in its parlor.

Edit: Or maybe not. The Nook UK store is closing on 15 March 2016.

Given how the Nook revenues have declined, that’s no big loss, but it is also a sign that B&N is still standing around, trying to decide what to do next with digital. We’ve been waiting three years for B&N to figure that out, and in that time revenues have declined by over 90%, and the Nook division has been reduced to a fraction of what it was once worth.

B&N almost spun off the division in 2014, before deciding to keep it and spin the B&N college stores off by themselves. Given the decline that followed, that proved to be a bad choice for B&N but potentially a good move for the remaining Nook users.

With the Nook worth so little, it would now be possible for either Kobo or Google to pick it up for chump change and fold the tech into their existing platforms.

It almost makes you wonder why Kobo hasn’t bought them yet, doesn’t it?

images by Todd Barnard,  wizardjournal

The font of all reliable tech news Digitimes reported on Friday that E-ink is currently developing a 40″ to 5-" E-ink panel, which they plan to release this year:

E Ink Holdings (EIH) has offered e-paper displays up to 32-inch and is currently developing even larger products, with some set to be released in 2016, according to company chairman Frank Ko. However, as the company pushes the envelope in terms of developing larger products, it may need to find manufacturing partners in Taiwan.

EIH only has a 2.5G factory, which has insufficient production capacity and is not suitable for economical production of large-size displays, in the 40- to 50-inch range, Ko said. Therefore, in the future EIH may partner with panel makers AU Optronics, Innolux and Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Ko indicated.

No clue who is going to use it, or why they would want to.

About 18 months ago E-ink announced a 32″ panel, one which was developed specifically for signage. That display had a screen resolution 2560 x 1440 (grayscale) or 1280 x 720 (color), but I’m not sure anyone is actually using it.

Lots of retailers are replacing their static signs with digital signage, yes, but all of the ones I have seen were either LCD or OLED, and not E-ink. Walmart, for example, has retrofitted their stores with LCD signage, and both AMC theaters and Poppy’s have replaced their signs with huge Samsung signage units (available in six sizes ranging from 32″ to 75″).

E-ink certainly had the right idea to get into signage, but from what I can tell they are being out-competed by a product that has a faster refresh, better color quality, and (probably) a lower price tag.

So while E-ink is developing a 40″ screen panel, I can’t tell you who would actually use it.

Digitimes

Determined to make orange face paint popular again, Sideshow Donald continued his campaign for the US Presidency this week with a new attack on Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the media in general.

Speaking in Texas on Thursday, Trump laid into Amazon. "I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he bought the Washington Post to have political influence. And I gotta tell you, we have a different country than we used to have. We have a different… He owns Amazon. He wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it. That’s not right. And believe me, if I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re gonna have such problems," he said.

A quick check of news coverage failed to turn up a complete text of his remarks, so for the help of the non-native English speakers I have copied the text below, following the video:

“I’ll tell you what, I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met. They’re terrible. The New York Times, which is losing a fortune, which is a failing newspaper, which probably won’t be around that much longer, but probably somebody will buy it as a trophy, keep it going for a little longer. But I think The New York Times is one of the most dishonest media outlets I’ve ever seen in my life. The worst, the worst. The absolute worst. They have an agenda that you wouldn’t believe. And they’re run by incompetent people. They are totally incompetently run."

"Washington Post, I have to tell you, I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he bought The Washington Post to have political influence and I got to tell you, we have a different country than we used to have. We have a different — He owns Amazon. He wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it. That’s not right. And believe me, if I become president, oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems."

"And one of the things I’m going to do, and this is only going to make it tougher for me, and I’ve never said this before, but one of the things I’m going to do if I win — and I hope I do and we’re certainly leading — is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws."

"So that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected. You see, with me, they’re not protected because I’m not like other people but I’m not taking money. I’m not taking their money. So we’re going to open up those libel laws folks and we’re going to have people sue you like you never got sued before. We have many things to do. We have many, many things to do.”

(found via The Passive Voice)

O O O

It’s hard to tell whether he is serious or simply telling the crowd what they want to hear, but either way what Trump is proposing amounts to censorship by the government.

We haven’t seen the likes of Trump since McCarthy. Think back to how much damage HUAC did to our country, and then multiple it be the power of the presidency.

That’s what Trump could do, if he wins. And that should frighten everyone.

It’s common knowledge that there are companies that will help you buy your way on to the NYTimes best-seller list, and that there are smaller illicit coops with similar goals. Heck, a book doesn’t even have to exist to get on the NYTimes best-seller list, so best-seller lists are a bunch of marketing smoke and mirrors, right?

Actually, it’s worse than you think. It turns out that with a little work, the bar for making it on to one of Amazon’s best-seller lists is lower than you would think.

Writing over at Observer, Brent Underwood explains how he gamed the best-seller list. This marketing expert (that’s his day job, and not just a snark) says that he got a bogus book on to an Amazon best-seller list with only three sales

Last week, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved  “No. 1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.

How many copies did I need to sell be able to call up my mother and celebrate my newfound authorial achievements? Three. Yes, a total of three copies to become a best-selling author. And I bought two of those copies myself!

He describes his accomplishment as revealing the scam behind the best-seller list, but the short and simpler explanation is that he found a sub-sub-category on Amazon’s site which wasn’t very popular and where few books were sold on any given day.

Underwood listed his book in the category "freemasonry", arranged for a friends to buy it, and voila, he was (briefly) a best-selling author.

Shocking, isn’t it?

No, not really.

Amazon has over 500 categories for its bookstore, and some of them simply aren’t very popular with readers.

To name one example, a couple years back Mein Kampf caused a chorus of laments and hand-wringing after news broke that it was a digital best-seller in its categories:

The trend was spotted by author Chris Faraone, with 99p and 99-cent digital versions of the book riding high on both the Amazon and iTunes charts on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, Mein Kampf tops the "Political Science and Ideology" chart, as well as the "Ideologies" chart and, somewhat unsurprisingly, the "Fascism and Nazism" chart.

That story got huge press coverage, and dozens of sites covered it, but they were really making a mountain out of a molehill.

David Gaughran dug into the data, and he found that, before the news broke, this copy of Mein Kampf was selling fewer than a dozen copies a day:

This particular edition of Mein Kampf wasn’t selling at all until October 2013, when the publisher dropped the price to 99c – which is hardly surprising given the number of competing editions out there, many of which are available for free.

It then settled into a range of #7,825 to #9,995 on the Amazon rankings where it stayed until this story broke.

For those not familiar with the Amazon rankings, this equates to just 10 copies being sold a day – not a bestseller by any stretch of the imagination.

So yes, Underwood was right. You can get on an Amazon best-seller list with only a handful of sales.

But given that the best-seller lists have always been suspect, that should not come as a surprise. Underwood may rant about how it was harder to get on the list in the old days, but the fact is there have long been companies that promised to buy your way onto a best-seller list.

People have been gaming the best-seller lists for years (one, two, three, four, five, six). The earliest example I found dates back to 1969, when Paramount decided that the book which inspired their next blockbuster had to be a best-seller.

So Mr. Rehme, by his own recollection, did what any really enterprising publicity executive of the era would have done: he set out to rig the game.

Speaking by telephone this month, Mr. Rehme recalled sending members of the Paramount office staff to buy boxes of books from stores that, by his information, were being monitored by The New York Times in compiling its best-seller list. (These days, a dagger symbol next to a book on the best-seller list indicates that booksellers have noted bulk sales.)

“It worked,” maintains Mr. Rehme, who then circulated all those books to people in the news media and others, pumping up interest in a story Paramount was promoting as “a brand new brand of American frontier story.”

Really, the only thing that has changed in the past fifty years is the scale of the operation. What used to require a major budget can now be accomplished with a shoe-string budget.

This has brought true equality to publishing, making it possible for everyone to pull off the same hoax. And while I can see how that would piss off an old-school marketer like Underwood, I am less bothered because I can see that the best-seller list was and is a con.

The best-seller list has always been suspect, and no amount of ranting about the good old days is going to change that fact.

images by gisele13, Sangre-La.com

Kobo sent out an email today to KWL users, inviting them to fill out a survey and explain what features they want:

Hi,

You indicated interest in our Print-on-Demand service. We’re still in development, but we’d like to know what you want to see in a POD platform.

Please take a moment to answer this short survey. Your feedback will help us shape this service to your needs. You will also have the option to opt into our beta test to try out this new service before launch.

Click here to take the survey.

The survey asks about optional layout, design, and distribution services, and format (paperback vs hardback), before going into the nitty-gritty details about an author’s book.

This is far more than simply a query about whether authors want this service; Kobo wants to know specific technical details about the books an author is distributing via POD. Some of the options for describing your PDF file are so arcane that you’d have to be an Adobe Acrobat expert to know what they mean.

If you have any POD books, you should fill out this survey. It will give Kobo a better understanding if the market, and that should help other authors.

O O O

Today’s survey is the latest stage in Kobo’s long-running plans to expand beyond ebook retail. Around six months ago Kobo announced plans to add new services to its Kobo Writing Life publishing portal. So far they’ve added a discount on audiobook production and a (worthless) discount on ISBN purchases, and soon they could expand into POD services.

Kobo wants to turn KWL into a comprehensive services platform like eBookBaby, Fastpencil (which just launched a Fastpencil for Libraries service), BlblioCrunch, etc, but given how quiet that part of the publishing industry has been of late I am not sure there’s demand for a new competitor.

Do you think there is room, much less a need for another comprehensive portal in the ebook market?

image by welcometoalville

We’ve known since 2013 that Amazon has their eye on maybe one day letting Kindle users resell an ebook they bought, and it turns out their interest has gone international.

I’ve just learned that Amazon is also pursuing a patent in Canada on "Referring, Lending, and Reselling of Digital Items". The patent hasn’t been awarded yet, but according to the paperwork Amazon originally filed the patent way back in 2011, and has spent the intervening years filing paperwork, tussling with patent examiners, and paying additional fees.

The patent closely mirrors the US patent I wrote about in 2013. Both patents cover the sale and/or loan of used ebooks and other digital content, and they also include a method for the rights holder to be paid for that resale or loan.

It’s pretty straightforward, and essentially works like the same as a used print book sale (why it qualifies for a patent, I can’t tell you). The person selling the ebook lists it on Amazon, and when a buyer selects it the seller loses access and the license is transferred to the buyer. The seller receives a portion of the payment, Amazon gets a cut, and there’s an option for the rights holder to also get a cut.

Aside from the fact that Amazon is transferring a license, and not actually letting you sell an ebook, this is the same process as reselling a paper book.

There’s also mentions in the patent that the rights holder can be paid when an ebook is loaned by one Kindle user to another, and that the rights holder will have the option of allowing/forbidding the lending or resale of their ebooks.

This last comes as no surprise; authors have had the option to disallow loans ever since the lending feature launched in early 2011.

The patents don’t offer any hints as to when Amazon plans to put this system into place, but the fact that Amazon is still pursuing the Canadian patent suggests that they are still interested in the idea.

O O O

Coincidentally, I learned of this patent from another site which laughably proclaimed that Amazon was "secretly developing a used ebook marketplace". Given that we knew of the earlier patent, I don’t see how their interest was much of a secret. Also, Amazon revealed all the important details when they filed this patent’s description in 2012, so really the patent was only a secret because no one had found it yet.

And most importantly, I can’t see any evidence that Amazon has done more than file patents. That claim is really nothing more than clickbait, so I won’t reward the clickbaiters by linking to them.

image by Dear, max

Fresh from pulling bits of Scribd from its teeth, Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited in China on Tuesday.

According to local press reports, the service costs 12 yuan a month ($1.84) and offers access to 44,000 Chinese-language titles (including 3,500 titles translated from English). The ebooks can be read in the Kindle apps for iOS and Android, or on the Kindle.

That’s a far smaller catalog than the million-plus titles offered in the US, Canada, and Europe, and the paucity is likely due to newly imposed Chinese gov’t regulations that prevent foreign media (publishers and authors in the US, for example) from publishing online in mainland China.

The larger Kindle Store appears to be under the same restriction. It launched over three years ago, and yet a quick check today showed that it only stocked around 300,000 titles, and not the millions found in other branches of the Kindle Store.

There’s no word on how many Kindle customers Amazon has in China, although there is one report that Amazon "saw the number of active paid readers per month shoot up about 37 times by the end of 2015" (but 37 times what, now that is what we want to know).

That growth comes something of a surprise give the reports that the Chinese don’t read very many books:

According to a survey result published by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication in April, Chinese people read 4.39 books per capita in the past year, a figure that trails far behind major developed countries; for example, the average American read 7, the average French and Japanese person 8.4, and the average South Korean 11. And, on average, Chinese people allocated just over 15 minutes a day to reading, compared to almost 100 to watching television and over 45 for using the Internet. While parents duly chant the old Chinese adage "a book holds a house of gold" to their children, the financial value Chinese consumers place on books doesn’t reflect the same conviction; according to the survey, the average price a Chinese person is willing to pay for a 200-page paperback is 13.67 RMB, just slightly over two dollars. That is half the price of a cup of an iced latte at Starbucks, or one-third the average price of a movie ticket.

This could explain why Chinese book publishers see book sales as merely a stepping stones. Zou Jihua, the director of digital media at China South Booky Culture Media Co, sees distributing to the Kindle Store more as a way of marketing books so he can sell the ancillary rights rather than as a way of making big money by selling ebooks.

"As long as the books gets well-known in China, you can make money in different ways, such as making movies or TV dramas," he told China Daily.

That is born out by the polling stats, although of course there’s no way for us to tell whether the stats are accurate.

China Email, Shanghai Daily

image by ginnerobot

A new startup is currently developing a new platform where users will be able to read for free in exchange for viewing adverts.

Dubbed Eleven, the service will be launching into beta later this year, starting with Android. It’s going to feature ads inserted at chapter breaks, and will use the funds to pay authors.

Edit: this service is now called Inara, and it is going to launch in September 2017.

According to Eleven co-founder and CEO Glenn A McCreedy, Eleven’s "Story Driven Advertising system uses proprietary algorithms to contextually match the ads to the ebook story and the reader profile" while still preserving the reading experience. He told me by email that Eleven is "ramping up for a crowdfunding campaign to start in the March/April timeframe", and in the mean time authors and readers are invited to sign up to be notified of the launch.

You can see one of the ad concepts at right.

Many details are still up in the air at this time, but I can add that rather than a completely free service, Eleven will offer three service tiers: Free, Gold, and Writer.

The Free tier will be ad-subsidized (and the writer tier is aimed at authors), but at the Gold tier "users pay a small monthly subscription fee to have access to an even larger library of books, with fewer ads AND the private buyers club where they can buy the newest titles with no ads available for a lower price than anywhere else online".

It sounds like Eleven is hedging its bets, and given the history of ads in books they would be wise to do so. Ads in books are not a new idea; they’re not even a new idea when it comes to ebooks, and their checkered casts a dark shadow over Eleven’s future.

The ad-subsidized ebook model has been tried several times over the past decade, and so far none of the efforts can be called a roaring success.

There’s Readfy, a German startup which is letting users read for free from a catalog of some 50,000 (German-language) titles in exchange for viewing adverts. It’s too early to call Readfy a success, but it is at least making enough progress to merit a new funding round last month.

Bookboon is a publisher that started with a model similar to Readfy. You could download one of their ebooks as a PDF for free, so long as you did not mind the advert on every other page.

The publisher touted some success with this model (55 million downloads in 2013), but ads alone apparently weren’t enough to sustain the company. It later expanded into selling the ebooks outright and charging $4 a month for access to its catalog (Bookboon Premium).

And then there is Wowio, a startup which tried the ad-subsidized ebook idea twice. The first time around it offered Bookboon-like free downloads, and then in 2014 when it announced plans for Readfy-like free access to a catalog of ebooks.

It’s hard to say whether either model worked out for Wowio, although it did boast of paying half a million dollars in royalties in the 4th quarter of 2007. In fact, it’s hard to say anything about the company given that it vanished into the ether some time last year, but I think it’s worth noting that its biggest success was a time before ebook sales had really taken off. Consumers may have lost interest once the Kindle Store became popular.

(Attempts to contact Wowio and its founder failed.)

All in all, perhaps the only successful example of ad-subsidized ebooks would be Amazon, which is using adverts to subsidize the cost of Kindle ereaders and Fire tablets.

That’s not a ringing endorsement for the practice of subsiding the price of the  content, however, and the history of adverts in print books raises similar doubts.

Any discussion of ads in ebooks will inevitably lead to mentions of the historical presence of ads in print books. Examples date back as far as the 1850s, but the practice reached its peak  in the US in the 1960s and 1970s when book publishers realized there was an opprotunity:

The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.

The ads were popular with everyone but authors, who didn’t appreciate being used to pitch tobacco products:

Publishers, on the other hand, were more than happy to take blood money from tobacco companies and put their ads in books taught in schools. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, for example, sported adverts from Lorillard Tobacco Company.

Another notable example was Dr Benjamin Spock, who sued S&S in 1973 for putting ads in his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. According to the NYTimes, Spock lost his suit, and the practice continued until The Authors Guild reportedly banned unauthorized ads in its model contract.

Ads in print books has been tried at least once since then, but for all intents and purposes the practice has been relegated to the scrap heap.

However, that detail is less important to today’s news than the fact that ads in print books did not result in free print books. Sure, the publisher gained additional revenue, but the books weren’t free to the consumer because, according to my sources, the ads just didn’t generate that much revenue for the publisher.

And that brings us to a fundamental problem with any platform funded by adverts. Digital ads pay far less than print ads, so if the revenues from ads in print books were disappointing then the ads in ebooks will generate anemic revenues – at best.

Will Eleven succeed where others failed, do you think?

image by Andrew Mason

Your book’s cover is the very first thing potential readers see, and as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That is why hiring a professional designer is usually the top recommendation.

However, some authors have the DIY skills to pull it off, while others simply want to learn the ropes to collaborate better with pros later on. Whatever your reason, we’ve curated a list of fourteen sites, services, and apps to help you create a stunning book cover.

A quick tip: Before diving into these tools, take some time to read up on the fundamentals of good design.

Have we missed a tool that you love? Let us know in the comments!

The Toolkit:

CreateSpace

Canva

Poster My Wall

3D Box Shot Maker

Quick 3d Cover

MyeCoverMaker.com

Adazing

PiktoChart

Fotor

CoverFactory.com

eCover

MyCoverMaker.com

Boxshot

Book Cover Creator

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a 2013 judgment against Apple for violating antitrust laws. In a 2-1 decision, the court affirmed that Apple conspired with publishers to fix ebook prices.

The Majority: Judge Livingston ruled that Apple organized the conspiracy to facilitate the opening of the iBookstore and raise market prices.

The Dissent: Judge Jacobs argued that Apple’s entry into the market was pro-competitive as it challenged an existing 90% monopoly, and that the company was justified in avoiding a business model that assured losses.

An appeal to the Supreme Court is expected.

Bonnier is now inviting readers in Sweden to sign up for its ebook subscription service, Bookbeat.

Announced in October 2015, Bookbeat offers Swedish readers access to a catalog of ebooks and audiobooks for 169 krona (about $20 USD) per month, with the first month free. The catalog is drawn primarily  (entirely?) from Bonnier’s catalog, but also includes international best-sellers such as a translated  version of Stephen King’s The Shining.

The ebooks and audiobooks can be consumed in Bookbeat’s app for iPad and iPhone.

Edit: Or the Android app (this did not show up in my initial search, but Niclas Sandin pointed me to it. Thanks, Niclas!)

According to Bookbeat’s job listings, they’re also planning an Android app but it is still under development. And for that matter, the iPad app is also a work in progress. As you can see from the following screenshot, it has an orientation problem:

And yes, the app is in Swedish, but that was to be expected from the price, the pitch email I received, and the official announcement from October, which said that the ebooks would mostly be in Swedish.

Today’s launch comes in the wake of Scribd’s announcement that it was scaling back its "unlimited" ebook service, and limiting its subscribers to only three ebooks and one audiobook per month. Some might think that the smarter move would be to shut down Bookbeat, but Bonnier sees things differently.

Bookbeat CEO Niclas Sandin thinks there’s room for expansion in the Swedish ebook market. "Bonnier has seen how the market for digital books has grown," he said. "Our primary target group are those who haven’t yet read an e-book or listened to an audiobook, or that they don’t have the time to read."

As a wholly owned subsidiary of Sweden’s largest publisher, Bookbeat does have an advantage over Scribd.Its parent company has no interest in bleeding it dry. On the other hand, there’s also no guarantee that Bonnier will keep Bookbeat operational if it proves to hurt Bonnier’s other operations.

We’ve seen a similar situation with Hulu, and the tv networks and cable companies that own it. That service never lived up to its potential because its owners wouldn’t let it disrupt their existing business.

Will Bonnier make the same decision?

I don’t know, but it is worth watching.

Bookbeat

When I reported on Scribd reining in the unlimited aspect of its ebook subscription service yesterday, I suggested that Amazon’s next focus would be on education.

While that may conjure thoughts of Amazon subsidiary TenMarks, Kindle Textbook Creator, or Whispercast (Amazon’s platform for managing content/hardware in schools), I had something else in mind.

Earlier this week EdWeek reported on a new website from Amazon which will let educators share curricula with other teachers:

Amazon Education is working on a new platform that will allow schools to upload, manage, share, and discover open education resources from a home page that in some ways resembles the one shoppers are accustomed to accessing on the massive online retailer’s website.

School administrators learned about the site, to be called Amazon Inspire, during a “Transitioning to OER” session Friday as part of the National Conference on Education of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, held here.

The new platform is in beta testing now, and is scheduled to be released publicly within the next two to three months, according to Andrew Joseph, vice president of strategic relations for Amazon Education.

…

Asked by one superintendent about the company’s financial interest in the effort, Joseph said, “Amazon is a big commercial entity and we have to make this sustainable over time. This piece we have committed to making absolutely free forever. We’re not going to lock the content up. We promised we won’t put a pay wall in front of it.”

While Joseph said the company has not decided exactly how it will achieve financial sustainability for Amazon Inspire, he said it could be in connecting users to books they might want to buy to go with a unit on Shakespeare, for instance, or in using Amazon’s capabilities in self-publishing books. “We don’t know exactly what it looks like … but we believe we have all these other paths down the road,” he said.

Most news coverage of digital textbooks is focused on publishers and tech companies, so it is easy to forget that a lot of curricula is developed by teachers for their own use. Ranging from worksheets to lecture notes to study guides, this content is rarely shared more broadly than on the department level (or, in rare cases, across a school district).

Amazon wants to change that.

We don’t know how this site will integrate with Kindle Textbook Creator, Amazon’s textbook-making tool.

Edit: Audrey Watters has posted a longer list of what we don’t know, and it’s worth repeating:

The platform’s in beta, and we know its name – Amazon Inspire – but little more. We don’t know what the business model will be. (Neither does Amazon, by EdWeek’s account, although Amazon Education’s vice president of strategic relations Andrew Joseph promises it’ll always be free. Mmmhmmm.) We don’t know what the interface will look like or how usable it will actually be (and I think those who’ve used Amazon Fire will concur: the company does not excel at UX. It’s also failed repeatedly when it comes to accessibility issues). We don’t know what format the OER will be available in (for composing, publishing, or remixing). We don’t know if content will be interoperable – that is, usable beyond the Amazon (Kindle) ecosystem – or if there’ll be integration with other software systems. We don’t know what data Amazon will glean from the resources posted there – it does say that materials will be tagged with Learning Registry metadata – and we don’t know what Amazon will do with that data. We don’t know how the licensing will work.

All we know is that EdWeek Amazon Inspire will let educators self-publish material they have developed, curate open resources, add ratings and reviews, and receive recommendations based on their previous selections.

Ideally this will save teachers both time and money. They won’t have to develop curricula on their own, and they won’t have to buy so much from educational companies.

This is not the first site to act as a repository for OER; California has a state-wide repository, and OERCommons.org is very similar in concept to Amazon Inspire. (And a lot of universities have their own institutional repositories, although those are considerably less open than Amazon Inspire.)

But one librarian I spoke to told me that Amazon Inspire seemed broader in scope than sharing sites she had seen, and that’s not the only difference.

Since Amazon Inspire is owned by Amazon, it is going to get a lot of press coverage when it launches. More attention equals more users, and that will result in more curricula being shared between educators and more money being saved for other uses.

Frankly, this is what Apple should have launched alongside iBooks Author. Amazon Inspire is going to be the disruptive innovation that Apple could have used as a way to save schools money on textbooks (which could then be spent on iPads – what Apple really wanted).

But hey, better four years late than never.

image by blair_25