If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the week since I first reported on Fakespot’s system for analyzing Amazon reviews, it’s that Fakespot's algorithms completely miffed on book reviews.

Numerous authors have complained both in the comments here and over on The Passive Voice that their books were being given erroneous ratings. They’ve been responding with damning critiques like "I tested one of my books & it came back 73% fake, which is ridiculous" and "I tried it on books that I know have 100% authentic reviews, and it was wrong every time".

Clearly this system doesn’t work for book reviews, and that is something that even Fakespot will concede. I have exchanged a few emails with the Fakespot team over the past week, and they told me that they are aware of the issue with book reviews.

"Fakespot initially was not designed or intended for book reviews. Book reviews by their nature are an extremely different case when compared to other categories of products, which consist of the majority of what Fakespot users would input (electronics, groceries, etc)," the spokesperson told me by email, before adding "However, our analysis system is currently undergoing a revamp and accurate measurements of book reviews will be available."

My contact informed me that Fakespot has released a beta version of its algorithms which is intended to fix the issue with erroneous book review ratings.

And I think I can confirm that announcement. The books I am checking for the first time are showing a much lower score. The books are now being identified as books rather than products of a company, and Fakespot is identifying fewer reviews as potentially fake.

Looking for Alaska, for example, scored 0%, and so did Will Grayson Will Grayson and The Beginning of Everything.

It’s hard to say whether that is going to fix the problem, because the existing ratings aren’t being replaced. To name one example, Girl on the Train scored 28% and %50 for the Kindle edition and hardback, respectively, and with tens of thousands of reviews for each edition that is clearly inaccurate.

I’m told that authors can request a reanalysis/investigation on any of the books rated, but it won’t happen automatically. So if you’ve already checked your book in Fakespot and think it got a bum rap, contact Fakespot and ask them to fix it.

image by Ionics

Bloomberg enlightened us on Friday that Amazon’s audiobook service continues to expand beyond the book world and into audio production and distribution.

Amazon.com Inc. is ramping up its investment in podcasts and other radio-style shows to expand the types of programming it offers via Audible, the audio book company it acquired in 2008.

Audible has recruited well-known comedians, along with radio and podcast producers for the initiative, and job postings suggest a significant global push. Maria Bamford and Jonathan Katz are taping episodes of “Bedtime Stories,” a show in which comedians rewrite fairy tales, according to their manager Bruce Smith.

Entertainment plays a crucial role in Amazon’s effort to push beyond its core business of selling books, laundry detergent and televisions online.

Yep.

Our first clue that Amazon was looking into opportunities beyond audiobooks was in 2014, when Audible acquired Rooftop Media. Rooftop recorded comedians at clubs and distributes the video and audio to online retailers (like Audible).

That was Amazon’s first big step to doing more with audio than simply recording the recitation of books, and Amazon didn’t stop there. The retailer hired Eric Nuzum away from NPR in May 2015 to run Audible’s existing nascent original production platform, and he recruited a team of public radio talent to join him in the endeavor.

Together they oversee a program that produces original audio works. Where Netflix adapted Daredevil from the comic book and Hulu adapted Stephen King’s 11.22.63, Audible has works like an adaptation of the famous novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses which features the extracted letters from the book and a radio show quality production of the graphic novel Locke & Key starring award winning actors and authors.

Audible sees original production as the key to expanding its slaes. “Our original content is more like Netflix or Amazon for audio,” said Beth Anderson, the executive vice president of Audible, and its publisher. “We are hoping to expand our audience with people who might not be as interested in books, but in drama that we can capture on audio.”

Others in the industry have also noticed the new focus. "Amazon is doing to Audible what it’s done to Prime Video — investing in original programming,” said Nick Quah, an executive at the Graham Holdings Co.’s Panoply podcast network who also writes a newsletter about the industry. “Amazon is hiring a ton of really good producers and managers out of public radio to acquire podcasts and develop shows of their own.”

Time will tell whether original productions will prove successful, but it’s also worth remembering that the original works are only a fraction of the titles available. We shouldn’t overlook the fact that Audible also distributes recordings of live events, old radio productions, and interviews.

The original works may get all the buzz but odds are the other works generate the majority of Audible’s revenue. And that is the more important detail.

lead image by basykes

The arms race between ad-dependent publishers and ad blocking has a new front: The Telegraph. Earlier this month this publisher started blocking access to the site to some users of ad-blocking software.

The first hint of the new policy was a tweet dated 13 January (and an AdBlock Plus support thread from a week later), but it has gone largely under the radar until I visited the site today and was blocked from reading the article:

I was not shown this pop-up when I visited the site on Android or iOS, only when visiting from Chrome on Windows.

After disabling Ad Block Plus, I was shown a page with a relatively low number of adverts (mostly Google and Amazon, surprisingly, with one large OutBrain sponsored link ad unit on the page). It was a far nicer experience than Forbes, which is engaging in a similar war on ad block users while also promising an "ad-light" experience (but actually delivering malware).

The Telegraph’s less obnoxious ads could explain why the response on Twitter has been milder than the hostile response Forbes and Yahoo got when they

https://twitter.com/ManosOnView/status/688146885048061952

https://twitter.com/spavedave/status/687269064801148928

The launch of iOS 9 with its integrated content-blocking features last year brought ad-blocking to the forefront, and publishers have been responding with various degrees of subterfuge, social engineering, and hostility. Some, like Forbes, Yahoo, and Telegraph, are fighting users by blocking anyone caught running ad block software.

Others like BookRiot are crafting ad units that get around ad block software, or are partnering with ad tech companies that promise to outwit the ad block software.

And then there are the web publishers who have either taken no action, or have adopted the mild approach of a nag screen pop-up which asks that users stop blocking ads.

The soft approach has not proven to be very successful, and that’s a shame because Forbes' hostile approach appears to be working. A few weeks back Forbes reported that about 40% of the visitors who were asked to turn off their ad blockers did so.

If other publishers have similar luck then the war between users and publishers will expand as more publishers choose to fight rather than fix the problems caused by ads like malvertising and visitors getting hit with hidden CPU and bandwidth costs.

Edit: And that fight will simply lead to another round of escalation in the arms race between ad block developers and web publishers. As readers have pointed out in the comments, are already a couple scripts that bypass the ad block blocks used by Forbes, Telegraph, and other sites.

In other words, the web publishers have lost this round, and will have to go back to the keyboard and come up with a way to block the anti-block blockers. It is no more or less an arms race, which is way I am glad I chose to sit out this war and use soft propaganda instead of getting into a fight.

image by Javier Gutierrez Acedo

Apple’s new cloud-syncing option for iBooks is one of the more highly  anticipated features in iOS 9.3, but there is a surprising lack of technical info online.

I was googling for info earlier today so I could set up the feature and use it myself, but all I found were old queries from 2012 and 2013. And so I thought a post with current info might be helpful.

It turns out it’s pretty simple to set up  iCloud for iBooks (or iBooks for iCloud) and have it sync all of your ebook library to to the iCloud server.

1. Update to iOS 9.3,
2. Enable Cloud Drive (in Settings), and
3. Update and open iBooks.

That first step is a killer, especially if your older iDevice can’t run iOS 9 (luckily you do have other options), but once you are past that point you should have no trouble at all.

Based on what I have seen, and on similar reports over at MobileRead, iCloud for iBooks is automatic. It will back up your entire iBooks ebook library to iCloud, including the ebooks you have downloaded from free ebook sites (as well as the annotations for those ebooks).

In fact, I don’t know of a way to disable the sync feature, other than disabling iCloud. Help?

Once those ebooks are backed up, they can be downloaded from other iDevices that are tied to the same Apple account, and that is a problem if you want to keep your ebooks secure. If, for example, you are reading a PDF with sensitive or proprietary info, you don’t want it getting into your iCloud account (Apple’s servers have been hacked before).

But if you have security concerns, I’m sure you thought of that issue.

P.S. If you cannot update to iOS 9.3, you might want to consider using either Google Play Books or the Kindle app. Both Amazon and Google offer similar sync features as iCloud for iBooks, only they don’t quite work the same.

Google requires that you upload ebooks before you download them to the Play Books app (here’s more info), and Amazon requires that you either email or upload your docs before downloading them to the app (but only if you want to use the Kindle cloud sync option).

image by krossbow

There’s a story going around today that Microsoft’s research division is being retasked from cutting edge research towards more product development work.

Citing Bloomberg, the WM Power User blog reports that Microsoft Research is busy working on secondary E-ink screens:

Instead of leaving most of research work in patents and papers, Microsoft Research’s MSR Next group is working with product teams in improving Microsoft products significantly using their research work. Microsoft Research is working on a technology to include secondary display on the inside of the Flip Covers. There are several use cases for this idea, the secondary low power display can act as a touch keyboard when you want to type something, it can display Cortana and its contextual info always-on when you open the cover and more. Microsoft Research is aware of the fact that startup like Yotaphone is exploring similar idea by including e-ink display on the back of the device, but Microsoft thinks there are usability issues when you have the display on the back.

The good news is that Microsoft Research is already in deep talks with Lumia devices team in Finland to explore the possibilities of including this technology in Lumia devices. How about a Surface Phone with TypeCover DisplayCover?

The funny thing about that story is that Bloomberg doesn’t say anything about Flip Covers or secondary E-ink screens. I also can’t find any independent corroboration of this story.

Sure, WM Power User did share this graphic, but that’s the only confirmation we have so far:

As nifty as this news may sound, I think we should hold off on the excitement until we get a statement from Microsoft Research, or until someone posts a real photo of the  covers.

Better yet, let’s wait for a video. As past E-ink smartphone cases have shown us, the software is tougher to pull off than the hardware. The Inkcase from Oaxis, for example, never lived up to its potential. And the competing Popslate only started getting good several months after it was released.

So even if Microsoft’s screens are released, chances are they will only be as good as the software running on them.

The AAP released its monthly Statshot report on Wednesday, and reported that the collected revenues of the 1,200 odd publishers in the survey group had declined 2% in the first nine months of 2015.

The adult category was up, while both religious presses and YA/kids categories were down. In terms of formats, audiobooks continued to grow at a double digit rate, and paperbacks showed a surprising resurgence while both hardback and ebook revenues declined (6.4% and 11.1%, respectively).

The AAP reports that the total trade revenues remained flat at $5 billion, which means that the fluctuations reflect a shift, and not a growth or decline.

Here’s the press release:

Publishers’ book sales for the first three quarters of the year (Jan. –  Sept. 2015) were down 2.0% at $11.9 billion compared to $12.1 billion for the first nine months in 2014. These numbers include sales for all tracked categories (Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, K-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses). Revenue for trade books was flat. Publishers net revenue is tracked monthly by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and includes sales data from more than 1,200 publishers (#AAPStats).

Some of the trends noted during the three quarters of 2015:

• While sales for trade books overall were flat, the categories within had different growth trajectories from Jan. – Sept.:  Adult Books were up 2.9%, Children/YA were down 7.4%, and Religious Presses were down 1.5%.
• Paperbacks and downloaded audiobooks within the trade category grew in double digits.
• Sales declined for Higher Educational Course Materials and PreK-12 Instructional Materials.

Trade:

Year-to-date, Trade Book revenues were flat at $5.0 billion.

• Adult Books: The largest of the categories grew to $3.5 billion through Sept. 2015 compared to 3.4 billion in the same timeframe in 2014. Within that, paperback books (16.0%) and downloaded audio (41.5%) were the formats with the greatest growth. This category has shown growth every month in 2015, with the exception of Feb.
• Children/YA: Revenue within the category declined to $1.1 billion through Sept. 2015 from $1.2 billion for the same timeframe in 2014.  eBooks (44.8%) and hardback books (14.5%) led the overall 7.4% decline in the category.  We’re still seeing the impact of tough competition against 2014 blockbuster titles, including the Divergent series.
• Religious Presses were down 1.5%, with $390.1 million in revenue to date in 2015 compared to $395.9 million in 2014.

“Adult books are leading the way so far this year for growth in the trade category. This is a stark contrast to the tremendous growth last year in Children and Young Adult books,” said Tina Jordan, Vice President at the Association of American Publishers.

Total Trade Net Revenue by Category (in millions)*

Trade Formats:

• Downloaded audio remained the fastest-growing format, with 37.7% growth compared to the same period in 2014.
• eBooks were down 11.1%, with most of the decline coming from Children/YA books (44.8%).
• Paperbacks continued their good performance this year with 13.3% growth.
• Hardback books were down 6.4%.

The chart below depicts publisher revenue for different Trade formats from Jan. – Sept. from 2011 to 2015.

The chart below depicts the growth in net sales from Downloaded Audio from Jan. – Sept. in each year. The format doubled in popularity from 2012 to 2015.

Educational Materials:

Revenues for PreK-12 instructional materials were down by 5.0% in the first three quarters of the year. Higher Education course materials were down 4.4%.

Professional and Scholarly Publishing:

Sales for Professional Publishing, which includes business, medical, law, scientific and technical books and journals, are up 13.0% through Sept. 2015 compared to the same timeframe in 2014.  University Presses declined slightly at 1.8%.

* NOTE: 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.

An eagle-eyed reader over at MobileRead Forums reports that Kobo is testing a new way to show a book’s stats.

Yesterday GeoffR posted a screensnap which showed that Kobo is considering a more graphic way to show details about a book, including length, an estimated page count, and how long it will take to read.

Kobo is still quietly testing the new ebook description page in beta, so they’re not showing it to everyone. They also haven’t shared any info on when it will be rolled out to all users.

Luckily, the same cannot be said for the new reading stats email.

I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve heard a couple reports that Kobo is now sending active readers a precis of their reading stats every quarter.

According to my source at MobileRead, Kobo is only tracking data from the books they sell:

And thinking of stats, did anyone else get the reading activity email earlier in the month? I don’t remember it being mentioned. It shows the stats for my reading for the previous three months. But, it is only for "Kobo eBooks", so only books I purchased from Kobo. I like it, but as it only captures maybe half of my reading, it isn’t very accurate.

So what do you think of the new stats?

I find the new book stats more colorful and easier to scan, but not necessarily more useful. I’ve never used those details to plan my reading, have you?

Thanks, GoeffR, for the heads up!

image by andsleonardo

Amazon has taken many steps to clean up its review section, including suing sellers of fake reviews and forbidding any relationship between author and reviewer, but sometimes that’s just not enough.

Sometimes you can’t trust the mass of four and five star ratings, and that is where Fakespot comes in. This website (there’s also a Chrome extension) hoovers up the reviews for a given product, crunches some algorithms, and gives you an estimate of the number of questionable reviews.

All you have to do is copy and paste a link to learn that, for example, around one in four reviews for The Girl on the Train were suspect:

Fakespot is less than specific on what makes for a questionable review, but according to Cnet the reviews were flagged because the reviewers write only overwhelmingly positive reviews, reviewed products without purchasing them, or were determined to have written other reviews about the same company.

I’m not sure how good that criteria is when it comes to book reviews, given that the "company" for Kindle ebooks is the Kindle Store. (Fakespot is going to have to fix that.) But then again, this tool was built to find reviews in any part of Amazon, and not just the book section,

And there are Kindle ebooks with good ratings (The Martian scored 6.7%). But in any case this, Fakespot is not intended to replace your judgement; it’s up to you to decide which reviews can be trusted.

The Girl on the Train, for example, has over 27,000 reviews and it is highly unlikely that the publisher faked a quarter of the reviews.

Fakespot currently supports Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com.au.

Cnet

Thanks, Fbone, for the tip!

image by GotCredit

eBook gift cards have been tried a half-dozen times in the past ten years, including as a way to sell digital textbooks, Christian books (Zondervan), and novels (in US Target stores).

Aside from one effort in Canada and a quietly successful platform in Germany, the idea has not had much success.

And now Amazon is giving it a try.

There’s been no formal announcement from Amazon, but late last month the Seattle-area drug store chain Bartell Drugs revealed that it is carrying Kindle gift cards in its stores.

Amazon has confirmed the news on a help page on the Amazon website, writing "Kindle Cards are Amazon.com Gift Cards that depict popular Kindle books and Kindle Unlimited subscriptions in the form of a physical card, which can be gifted to friends or family members or applied to your own account. Included on each Kindle Card is a description of the Kindle book or Kindle Unlimited subscription, and instructions for redeeming the book or subscription to the desired account once the card has been activated at the store register."

Unlike regular gift cards, Kindle Cards are tied to specific titles, but Amazon isn’t going to hold you to the sale. If someone gives you a card for a book you don’t want, Amazon will let you trade it in for a regular Amazon.com credit. Similarly, if the price of the ebook drops below the price listed on the card, Amazon will give you a credit for the difference (less applicable taxes, of course).

You can find more information on Amazon.

Update: Amazon told me that the pilot is running in 61 Bartell Drug stores, and includes 20 Kindle titles and 4 Kindle Unlimited card designs. Bartell informed me that the pilot started in October 2015, and that Amazon selected the twenty titles in the pilot based on their best-selling titles for gifting.

Update: Working from my tip, Geekwire found the display in a store:

From Geekwire:

The top row of the kiosk features cards for three- and six-month Kindle Unlimited memberships, for $29.99 and $49.99 each. Below those are cards featuring the covers of 20 individual ebooks, best-sellers across both fiction and nonfiction, ranging from “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” to Dan Brown’s “Inferno” and “The Martian” by Andy Weir.

On the back of each ebook card is a quote from an Amazon customer review and a summary of the book, along with an area for writing a message to the recipient and instructions for redeeming the book by scratching off the claim code and going to a dedicated Amazon url to enter it.

Purchasing the card at the Bartell Drugs register automatically activates it for use, as with a standard gift card.

I also know considerably more about the competition.

Livrada, for example, launched a similar pilot in Target stores in 2012. That effort included only a half-dozen titles, and went nowhere.

But up in Canada, Enthrill is having more luck. This Calgary-based startup launched a similar product in Canadian Safeway stores in 2012, and over the past three years they have expanded ebook gift cards into over 3000 locations in Canada, including Sears, Toys R Us, Safeway, Shoppers Drug Mart, Giant Tiger, Home Outfitters, Home Hardware, and Longos.

Enthrill is also the vendor which supplies the Walmart-brand ebook gift cards in Canada and runs Walmart’s ebookstore. That program launched in November 2014.

I have no info on when Enthrill or Walmart plan to expand their programs into the US, but now that Amazon is interested I can guarantee that publishers and retailers will be taking notice.

An old story cropped up yesterday as "new" news when it may be anything but. According to one of my competitors:

Starting February 3, 2016 Amazon will begin showing customers a warning message on the Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. The warning message will be removed as soon as Amazon received an updated file from self-published authors or publishing companies.

Amazon has two stages of the warning system that will go live within a few short weeks. If an e-book only contains a few spelling mistakes, but is still readable, a simple warning message will appear on the details page of that specific title. It will make the average book buyer aware that there are some issues. If the book has bad formatting issues, and basically renders it unreadable Amazon will suppress it and the book listing will be removed.

At least half of this story is old news, and I am still waiting on confirmation of the other half.

Amazon has been pulling ebooks for egregious errors for over four years now, and replacing the listings with warning messages like the following:

I reported on this story in October 2012, and cited a discussion from 2011, so it’s not exactly a new story in 2016. In fact, it wasn’t exactly news in 2012; I had heard reports going back as early as 2010 that Amazon would pull ebooks for serious errors.

Amazon has continued to pull ebooks in response to reader complaints since then, so the only possible new news today is that Amazon might be adding a second error message.

But I am still waiting for confirmation.

I want that confirmation because because I don’t see it as very likely that Amazon would post a notice  over "a few spelling mistakes" when those mistakes could just as easily be valid alternate spellings or words which aren’t listed in the dictionary used by Amazon’s bot.

False positives are even more likely now that the Kindle Store stocks ebooks in several dozen languages, but it is still possible that Amazon will warn readers about minor issues.

Have you seen one of those warning messages? What did it say?

Update: And now I have confirmation. Over on KBoards an author has posted the email he received from Amazon:

Our shared goal is to provide the best digital reading experience for customers on Kindle. When customers contact us with quality issues in a book you published, we validate the issues and send them immediately to you to fix.

Starting February 3, 2016 we will begin showing customers a warning message on the Amazon.com Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. We will remove this message for a book as soon as we receive the fixed file from you and verify the corrections — typically within 2 business days.

We understand that even with the best quality controls, defects sometimes make it through. That’s why we’ve limited this messaging to books with several issues. Books with more serious quality issues will continue to be suppressed from sale.

So the new two-tier warning system is real.

image by JuditK

Glose has updated both its Android app and its app for iPad and iPhone today. The changelog for the Android app only mentions bug fixes, but according to the changelog in iTunes the iOS update is a major one.

Glose is all about sharing the reading experience socially, but for their 2.0 release Glose has decided to focus on improving the user’s experience and giving each user more options. The new app has more stats options, better library management, and additional formatting options for when they’re reading an ebook.

Like its spiritual predecessor Readmill, Glose is a social reading app, but it also is connected to an ebookstore with 500,000 titles. This should help Glose avoid the revenue trap Readmill fell into.

You can find the app in iTunes and in Google Play. Here’s the changelog for the iOS app:

What’s New in Version 2.0.1
Faster. Better. Stronger (Again ?!)

Glose 2.0 is here, with some big new features and enhancements

• For new users we made our onboarding process easier. In fact we removed our onboarding. You can now read any books (10 first %) without even creating an account! Download the app, boom, open any books you want to read or discover. Your progress and opened books will be transferred to your account once you’ll have created it.
• Stats: Ever wondered how much time you spent glued at your screen, reading, on Glose? Well, now you can. Swipe your profile picture and discover your stats! We also display a beautiful graph with your current week reading time! And we have a lot more to come on this part.
• Faster, Better, Stronger: Offline support? Better. Speed ? Faster. We’ve made some tweaks so everything loads a lot faster. Our bookstore, booklists, profile and so on.
• Edit your books: If you go in the “My Books” section, there is now an edit button in the top bar. It was one of our most requested features. You can now hide and delete books from your library. You want to read Fifty Shade of Gray but doesn’t want to let your friends now about it ? Just hide it, it’ll be visible only to you. You can also purely and simply delete any book you opened.
• Safari/App auto login: If you’re logged on Glose for iOS it’ll automatically log you on our website. If you visit https://glose.com on Safari after this update, you’ll be automatically logged in! And for our web mobile user, we also do it the other way. If you download the application and you are logged on Safari mobile you’ll automatically be logged within our Glose for iOS.
• More options in our reader: It was a part of our previous update, but our reader now features different font styles and sizes. An all new sepia theme. And you can also choose whether you prefer to scroll your books vertically or horizontally.
• We’ve made a ton of UI enhancements, from loading indicator to animations. We hope you’ll enjoy this enhanced and better experience.

Amazon is getting its spring cleaning started early this year. The retailer has quietly informed members of Shelfari that the social network is going to be shut down in March.

Acquired in 2008, Shelfari was Amazon’s first book-focused social network (Amazon bought ABEbooks and gained a 40% share in LibraryThing the same year). Shelfari has long since been eclipsed by Goodreads, but Amazon kept the smaller network around because its unique structure made it useful for building a certain Kindle feature (more on this later in the post).

According to the notice, Shelfari is going to be merged into Goodreads, the social network Amazon acquired in 2013. Amazon is framing this as a good thing, but not all users agree.

Writing over at The Reader’s Room blog, the blogger who scooped the news story last week said that she was pissed off and felt like she was losing a friend. The two sites were very different both in character and in membership rolls:

"I’m a member of both it and Goodreads, and they each offer different things that I like and use. What makes Shelfari special is its passionate and supportive community of serious readers. Goodreads is great but ,when it comes to book recommendations, I always turn to my Shelfari friends. Why? Because my Goodreads friend list is populated primarily by Facebook friends — many of whom read relatively little or and have vastly different tastes."

"Shelfari is superior to Goodreads when it comes to discussions. The Shelfari site had the ability to “nest” replies within discussion threads, thus allowing for more in-depth and active discussions. It has been my experience that Shelfari members are much more serious about their reading (on average) and also are more courteous and respectful. There’s a lot of shaming that occurs on Goodreads that doesn’t happen on Shelfari. For example, check out this article from Book Riot that came out last year."

She’s not wrong about the differences between the two sites, and in fact all Kindle users have benefited from Shelfari’s unique nature.

In addition to cataloging your book collection, Shelfari also let users fill out detailed listings for each book and write descriptions for the characters, places, references, and other parts of a book. Amazon used those listings to build the Kindle X-Ray feature which it launched in 2011 (Amazon also created a bot to write listings, but that is another story).

But Amazon hasn’t done much else with Shelfari in the past four years, and now it is being shut down.

Spain is giving its writers a painful and expensive lesson in estate management.

In 2013 Spain amended its pension laws, and among the changes they made were new restrictions and penalties on income. Any senior citizen who earned more than the minimum wage (around 9,000 euros) from their creative work could see their pension docked and get hit with fines.

Writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists are being penalized for works created long ago which are still selling, while others are being forced to choose between creating new works or receiving a pension.

La Vangaurdia and other sites report that Spain is now extracting punitive fines from senior citizens who are making too much money from writing. And far from simply being a solution to Spain’s budget woes, the fines are truly punitive in scope.

There is a report of an author who lost his 30,000 euro pension and received a 100,000 euro fine because he had earned 15,000 euros for his writing. Some authors have filed suit, while others have quietly paid the penalty. According to one report, novelist Eduardo Mendoza paid a fine equivalent to four years of his pension.

Starting in November, the new measures have been roundly denounced by writers associations and creator’s rights groups in Spain, including la Asociación Colegial de Escritores. Some have called the measures "absurd, unjust, and destructive of culture", which is absolutely true.

The groups are pressuring Spain’s labor ministry, the Ministeri d' Ocupació i Seguretat Social, to immediately cease its campaign, but the past two months of public criticism has not deterred the bureaucrats from damaging Spanish culture or from their efforts to turn Spain’s senior citizens into paupers.

As a result, some creators are forced to retire rather than risk the fines. This includes poet Antonio Gamoneda, winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2006, who called the rules nonsense and said that "I have to stop writing, because with what I earn with my writing, I can not live."

images by shordzi, Kasia, Silvia Viñuales

Earlier this year Deloitte surveyed 1,600 Russians over the age of 16 and found a marked shift away from physical media consumption and to digital over the past three years.

The survey found that consumption of offline media, including books, tv shows, and listening to the radio fell by 17%, while ebook and online media consumption rose.

An equal percentage of the survey group (44%) read ebooks as read print books. This reflects a 9% decline in print book consumption and a 31% increase in ebook consumption over the past three years, and it is in part influenced by ebook users aging in to the survey group.

eBook users tended to be younger, with 88% of the respondents between 16- and 19-years-old having tried ebooks. This last detail os born out by a 2013 survey showed that 48% of Russian teens read ebooks.

TV and radio use also dropped in Russia since 2012 (5% and 7%, respectively), although the two were still the most used media formats (94% and 61%, respectively). The drop in tv consumption mirrored the increase ebook consumption, with respondents in the 16- to 24-year-old age group showing the steepest decline. The survey also showed that 100% of respondents used the internet, but given that this was an online survey that detail is redundant (and with internet penetration around 60% in Russia, it is also a sign of a probable bias in the survey group).

There’s no available data on when or how many ebooks are being read, but we do know most respondents still got their news via tv more often than the internet. They watched a news story on the tv an average of 4.7 times per week, compared to reading a news story online an average of 4.3 times per week or reading a print magazine or newspaper (3.5 times per week).

If this data is accurate then it means that Russians are adopting, or at least trying, ebooks at a rate higher than Italy, Germany, or even the US.

Alas, the high adoption does not necessarily equate to a large or active ebook market. There have been several past reports that ebook piracy is rampant in Russia. On the other hand, those same reports came from a source which also claimed that 70% of Russians had adopted ebooks, so I’m not sure the numbers are valid so much as they are a reflection of the perceptions of that market.

kommersant.ru via digital-books.ru

image by archer10

Johannes Gutenberg is widely credited with making books easier to produce and thus changing society by making ideas easier to share, but as you will learn from the following videos Gutenberg merely industrialized one part of the complex and intricate process of making a book.

Over the past few months the good folks over at How to Make Everything have posted a series of videos that show how you can use modern tech to make each of the historical parts of a book.

Starting with pounding papyrus into a sheet, the videos show us how to make paper, hemp, cotton, and wood pulp; how to make a pencil, brush, quill pen, and ink; how to tan and cut a hide for the cover, and finally how to bind the book.

The result looks like this:

You can watch a montage of the steps involved in the first video (found via Sploid), but you should also watch all the other videos. They’ll give you insight into the historical aspects of writing and book making.

For example, the selection of writing implements available to scribes drove the development of written language in ways which aren’t obvious until you see the implements being made and used. Also, the segments on papermaking helped me understand why we’ve standardized on wood pulp as the source for paper, and the videos have given me an appreciation for just how much time is saved when a modern book binder/printer uses prepared materials rather than making it all from scratch (industrialization is a wonderful thing).

Montage

Intro

Papermaking: Papyrus, Parchment, and Wood Pulp

Papermaking: Hemp and Cotton

Pencil and Brush

Quill Pen

Printing Press

Bookbinding & Conclusion