For some writers, stringing words together to tell a story is the easy part. The words just flow in a pattern that creates itself, leaving us as little more than stenographers taking notation in the form of a first draft as the words move through our heads.

For some of those same writers the hard part about writing is thinking up names to use in the draft or to hang on it. I am one of those writers; my blog was first called"Nate’s eBook News" and then "The Digital Reader" because I honestly couldn’t come up with a better name for it when I launched the blog in 2010.

I used to think that I just didn’t have that type of creativity in me, but lately I have realized that this is less an innate ability than a skill which one can learn and develop. I stumbled across that insight by accident, and I would like to share it with you.

One simple trick for coming up with names

The tl;dr version is that I found a way to apply the "porn star name" parlor game as a general trick for coming up with names for just about anything.

For those who haven’t heard of it before, this is a game where you invent the name you would use as a porn star by combining the name of your first pet and the street of your childhood home.

First introduced to the public in the movie Boogie Nights, the game is frivolous, silly, and fun, but when we look past the silliness it’s clear that the game follows an obvious pattern which can be applied to naming just about anything.

I identified the pattern one Saturday night when I was cracking jokes on Twitter. I was coming up with alternative versions of the porn star name game as it applied to other topics.

For example:

How to name a fictional law firm: Pick two or three of the schools you attended.

Pinckney Cannon White

— (@thDigitalReader) May 8, 2016

Those are a couple pretty funny ideas, yes, but if we look past the humor we can see a pattern in both the original game and and my alternate suggestions.

All three games boil down to a simple process: take elements from your life and string the words together to come up with names.

You can use anything, including:

• address (past and current, including both the number, street name, and location)
• pets (deceased, living)
• friends
• enemies
• schools
• food
• colors
• relatives
• teachers
• personal attributes
• current mood

You should probably take care when using a distinctive or unique name, especially if you want to stay on good terms with the source of that name, but if that source is an enemy – have fun.

Once you understand the basic premise, you can also expand the list of possible options to include:

• emotions
• random adjective and adverbs (including from foreign languages)
• winning Scrabble words
• historical events
• output from lorem ipsum generators

This trick can be used to name just about anything, including people, places, and companies in a story; the title of your great American novel; a publishing company; or even your next pet. (The law firm name trick mentioned above really does work for law firms, accounting firms, and auditors.)

Just be sure that when you use it you also carefully consider the context, connotation, subtext, and cultural references in the names you invent. Sometimes this will prevent you from using a name, but other times it will add extra layers of meaning which you can use to add to a story.

A place name might be used as a reference to a future event, making it a clue for the observant reader. It could also be a reference to an old story in a previous book in the series, or an inside joke.

And when making a name for a character, you need to consider how the name would be structured in that person’s culture. Does the family name come first? Is there a masculine or feminine patronymic? Is this an aristocrat?

For example, the name Aral Vorkosigan combines the name of the sea with the Russian word for thief and a corruption of the last name of a former Premier of the Soviet Union. The character is an aristocrat (denoted by the "Vor" syllable) in a Russian-influenced human culture, and the details built into his name add depth to the story in ways that only the most astute reader would notice. (I’ve been waiting to use that factoid for close to a decade.)

The possible complications are endlessly fascinating, but also infinitely fruitful. The only real limitation is how many times you want to generate new names, and how much work you want to put into refining a name.

So, how would you use this trick?

images by photosteve101, andrechinn,  kimubert, tarotastic

There was a time when US publishers owned their own bookstores (DoubleDay even had a chain of stores), but that ended decades ago as the stores were sold off or shuttered. Now Penguin Random House may be signalling a return to what is a common practice is Europe.

Last week the publisher officially opened a new bookstore in Carolina, a suburb of the capital of Puerto Rico. Launched in partnership with local bookseller The Bookmark, the new store has around 1,000 square feet of retail space and carries a unique selection of more than 1,000 PRH titles in both Spanish and English. There’s a children’s book section, as well as coloring books and YA titles including graphic novels.

“For us, this is an excellent initiative to continue our growth. In addition, we will increase the supply of books in the Puerto Rican market, which still has a healthy demand for a community of readers since the closing of the Borders stores,” said Juan Peña, VP of sales and marketing, JR Blue Label Management, parent company of The Bookmark.

JR Blue Label is a book wholesaler based in Puerto Rico.

The store will be run by The Bookmark, and during the first three months it will be heavily promoted by PRH through a pr campaign, an aggressive author event calendar and "innovative technology designed to help readers discover new books and authors".

Over the next few months the store will also host events featuring Penguin Random House authors, including high-profile writers Claudia Gray and Lauren Kate, as well as story time appearances by children’s characters like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.

“This is the first time we are working so robustly on a store like this, in a mall setting or any other setting at retail,” said PRH SVP, Director of International Sales and Marketing Cyrus Kheradi. “This is really a first for us.”

Well, no, it really isn’t. PRH owns DoubleDay, which used to have a chain of 39 bookstores before selling them to B&N in 1990. But even so, that slip just goes to show how distant and disconnected PRH has grown from retailing; it doesn’t even remember when one of its imprints used to own bookstores.

Publishers in other countries would not make that mistake. Sweden’s Bonnier, for example, owns the PocketShop chain of airport bookstores. Germany’s Weltbild is both a book publisher and media retailer in Germany, and Italian publishers Mondadori and Giunti Editore each own a chain of bookstores.

The practice is not unknown in Japan, Brazil, and other countries; it’s only in the US that a publisher owning a bookstore chain is the exception (Deseret Book) and not the rule.

So do you think this Penguin Random House news is the beginning of a trend?

I would like to think so (I’m feeling optimistic today). What the major publishers don’t know about retail could fill a book, and one of the better ways for publishers to correct that oversight would be to run their own bookstores.

And hey, it’s rarely a bad idea to copy Amazon.  That online retailer launched its first bookstore last fall just so it could learn more about how consumers browse for books in physical bookstores. That type of behavior would be useful to publishers, and not just Amazon.

image, story via News is my Business

For the past couple months Amazon has enabled authors and publishers to give away ebooks as contest prizes via Amazon.com – so long as the ebooks were paid for. Now Amazon is offering authors a better option.

On Tuesday Goodreads announced a new Kindle ebook giveaway program.

The author or publisher of a book – whoever controls the digital distribution rights to the book – can now offer up to 100 copies of the Kindle ebook in a giveaway. The author or publisher chooses how long the giveaway will run, and Goodreads does the rest. At the end of the giveaway, Goodreads randomly chooses winners and automatically sends the Kindle ebooks to their preferred devices and Cloud accounts. Winners receive real Kindle ebooks, complete with all the great features and security that Amazon’s Kindle platform provides.

Authors can choose to run a contest before a book is published (it just has to be uploaded into the Kindle Store), and they can limit the number of copies in the contest (I see contests with only 50 copies available).

Giving away those (up to) 100 ebook copies costs a flat $119 per contest. And while we’re on the topic, listing a print book for a free giveaway, however, will continue to be free – but you still have to mail the print book yourself.

The program is launching in beta with 8 titles, all of which are published by Amazon, and it is currently limited to only Goodreads members in the US (this restriction apparently applies to both the contest entrants and the authors running the contest).

All in all, this program has many positive attributes, but not all are pleased:

"The $119 fee is ridiculous and is punishing people (indie authors, particularly) for not having hard copy books," writes one author. "Amazon allows you to do free giveaways which is why so many people use it. I was excited to see that this service would be available, but saw in the end that you intended to exploit indie authors the way everyone does (including Amazon). But thanks for saving us the "cost and hassle." Between the high prices for Goodread ads and this new 'service,' how is any independent writer supposed to get ahead in the world? Thanks…but no thanks."

Do you think he has a point?

Considering that this program merely adds another option without depriving authors of the chance to give away their ebooks in the Kindle Store or elsewhere, I don’t see the problem.

What do you think of this program?

When Simon & Schuster revived the Star Trek: Strange New World Writing Contest last October, I was dismayed to learn that S&S was letting its vanity press business partner, Author Solutions, run the contest.

This gave the impression that S&S was less interested in recruiting new authors to publish than in finding new victims for Author Solutions' high-pressure sales tactics, and that impression was reinforced last month by the form email sent to contest participants.

Everyone who signed up for the contest received the following email:

Thank you for your recent submission in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Writing Contest. We were honored to consider your short story. We received many imaginative tales that took us on different journeys through the Star Trek universe. After diligently considering each and every entry, we have selected the winners. Unfortunately, your submission was not included in the final group of stories.

If you enjoy writing, Archway Publishing can still help you share your personal or other sci-fi stories as a published book. And because you participated in this contest, you can save 20% on select packages.*

Authors would be wise not to take Archway up on its offer; they will regret it.

While Archway might look like a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster, it is actually a front company for Author Solutions (ASI), a disreputable vanity press.

Far from being "committed to helping authors self-publish their stories with ease", ASI is out to exploit authors rather than help them sell books.

It may boast 200,000 authors to date on its website, but neutral data sources show that ASI authors collectively sell around 600 copies a day (both print and digital) on the world’s biggest bookstore, Amazon.com, and generate retail sales worth around $8,000 per day.

So where does the money come from, you ask?

ASI gets most of its revenue from charging authors ridiculously expensive marketing fees and overcharging for publishing services (which are then filled by low bid contract recruited via Craigslist). It uses high-pressure sales tactics to sell authors worthless marketing services.

Many of ASI’s authors report experiences like this:

It seemed that Authorhouse would have been so helpful in helping me to get my book of the ground, that I accepted their offer. The manuscript has been prepared for printing by a USA company. Now I discovered that towards the end of every month Authorhouse phone me with an offer that I can not refuse. All these offers have made me 16,000 British pounds poorer, since I have been dealing with them and I have still not seen a statement of sales. Nor have I seen my own book so far. Someone has uploaded a photo on my facebook with my book in their hands. In January 2016 I have paid for my personal copies to the UK branch, which would have been sent to Spain. On the 21 of April I received a notification from the Spanish custom and excise office that duty is due on that delivery because it comes from the USA.

The book was displayed by them on the London book fair. I can’t modify my own web site which was set up by them. In desperation I tried changing company and came across LULU. Now I see that LULU is no better than Authorhouse is.

ASI operates under many imprints, including AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Archway, Nook Press, Partridge, MeGustaEscribir, Book Country, Westbow, Trafford, XLibris, and Balboa Press.

Like Archway, some of those imprints appear to be owned by an independent companies, but they are actually front companies for ASI and are run by that vanity press. ASI partners include Barnes & Noble, Lulu, Penguin Random House Spain, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hay House, Penguin India, Penguin Singapore, and Penguin Africa.

Author Solutions is a scam from beginning to end, and authors would be wise to avoid it. There are cheaper ways to get published, and there are many honest and trustworthy companies in this industry who can help get an author’s book published without taking the author for everything they got.

image by frankieleon

Guangzhou OED got its start in developing a knockoff epaper screen tech which rivaled E-ink, but now this Chinese company says they have developed a new graphene backplane which (if the marketing materials are to be believed) promises to be lighter and stronger than E-ink’s existing glass-based screens.

Unfortunately, the tech is arriving far too late for it to show up in ereaders.

From Xinhua:

The new material has been heralded as "the world’s first graphene electronic paper," by Chen Yu, general manager of Guangzhou OED Technologies, which developed it in partnership with a company in Chongqing.

Graphene is the world’s strongest and lightest known material; a single layer of graphene is only 0.335 nanometers thick, and it can conduct heat and electricity. The material can be used to create hard or flexible graphene displays, used in electronic products such as e-readers and wearable smart devices.

Compared with traditional e-papers, graphene e-paper is more pliable and has more intensity and its high-light transmittance means optical displays will be much brighter.

In addition, graphene is derived from carbon, meaning production costs will be much lower than for traditional e-papers, which use the rare, expensive metal indium. E-papers have been produced on a commercial scale since 2014. Compared with liquid crystal displays, e-papers are thinner, bendable and energy efficient, meaning products are more portable.

You can go ahead and ignore that last paragraph about costs; it is at best only half true and is highly misleading.

And you should also discount the optimistic bubbling on Gizmodo, Teleread, and other sites about this tech showing up in ereaders; that is highly unlikely.

The simple fact is the ereader market has reach the saturation point. Everyone who wants an ereader already has one, which is why the market has declined from its peak in 2012.

The first production run is always the most expensive, and there simply aren’t enough ereader sales each year to justify the capital investment required to develop a new screen tech into a commercial ereader product. (The market is down so much that no one is putting the plastic-backed Mobius E-ink screens in 6″ ereaders, either.)

Also, Amazon has driven the price of an ereader low enough that margins are too thin to support the development costs of a new screen, so if this tech does reach the market it will be a different market – signage, probably.

Remember, E-ink bought Sipix in 2012 and then used that company’s tech to develop 3-color shelf labels. That tech never made its way into ereader screens, and Guangzhou OED’s new graphene epaper will likely follow the same path.

image by UCL

It may surprise you, but many authors have chosen to publish under a pen name.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, JK Rowling publishes her mystery novels as Robert Galbraith, Isaac Asimov wrote several books as Paul French, and John le Carre was born David John Moore Cornwell.

For some, using a pen name is a way to escape the hype and expectations that come with using their own name, while for others writing under their own name wasn’t an option due to the perceived gender roles or professional etiquette. James Alfred Wright, for example, wrote about being a veterinarian under the pen name Jame Herriot, and Michael Crichton used several aliases to keep his medical profession apart from his early writing career.

The following infographic by Jonkers Rare Books lists a couple dozen authors and their pseudonyms.

Do you see one that should be included? Let me know in the comments.

image by JefferyTurner

The recent news about Amazon’s new Ember font has sparked a renewed interest in fonts for E-ink screens.

Last weekend I posted instructions on how to install fonts on a Kobo ereader, and at the request of a reader I have now pulled together a collection of fonts which users can install in their Kobo ereader, embed in an ebook, or install in a reading app.

Fonts can be found and downloaded from any number of websites (some of which are even legal). But those fonts won’t all work well on E-ink.

You can find modified fonts over at MobileRead, including pirated fonts which are being shared in violation of commercial license agreements (user beware).

If you would prefer to stick with legal downloads, then I have just the thing.

The following ZIP file contains nine font families. Seven of the font families have been customized for E-ink screens by the owner of an ereader. The other two fonts, Exo and Open Dyslexic, have not been modified but I am including them on the recommendation of readers.

All of the fonts in this bundle except for the Amazon fonts were released under an open license. (I checked.) The Amazon fonts are included with Amazon’s indifference (I asked, and they won’t say yes or no).

Font bundle.zip

Of the 9 fonts, I prefer Bookerly. This serif font just looks the nicest, but if I wanted a bold option I would probably go with Linux Libertine. It too is a serif, and very strong.

And here’s what those fonts look like.

The following screenshots were taken on a Kobo Aura HD. I did not change the settings between fonts; some of the fonts are stronger than others because that is how they were made or modified.

Which one do you like?

Amazon Ember

Amazon Bookerly

Google Roboto

Charis SIL

Andika Ink

Isidore

Linux Libertine

Open Dyslexic Alta

Exo

image by jm3

Over the past few years Macmillan, Amazon, and other publishers have experimented with letting readers pick which titles should be published, and now a startup has convinced Macmillan to let a computer program pick the next book it should publish.

Flavorwire reports that Tor-Forge Books has signed a deal to ebook startup Inkitt to publish the second book in Erin Swan’s Sky Riders fantasy series:

The novel chosen by Inkitt’s “artificially intelligent” algorithm is Erin Swan’s Bright Star, a young adult fiction submitted to the publisher through a writing contest called “Hidden Gems.” Part of a multi-book “Sky Rider” series, it tells the story of the “fantasyland” Paerolia, “where war and conflict has created strong divides,” and where a a rebel leader named Kael helps a slave named Andra “discover the strength that has always been within her” and “fight to win back what Fate kept beyond her reach” — namely a dragon “that should have been her own.” Bright Star is expected to be released in 2017.

You can find the press release announcement over at DBW (which is down right now), and you can read more about the company on Writers Beware and the MobyLives blog.

Bright Star is only Inkitt’s second title published; the first was also by Erin Swan and was  "published" by Inkitt itself (and for some reason it’s not available other than on the Inkitt website).

For a startup publisher that announced its first anniversary in February, that’s a surprisingly small catalog, and that’s not the only odd detail about the company.

Inkitt was founded on the principle that there is no such thing as an expert opinion:

Who are we or any editor in the world to judge whether your book is worth publishing? We don’t think that we or any so-called “expert” is in a position to judge your work. You write your book for your readers, and the most important factor is whether your readers like it or not. That is what we measure at Inkitt.

Given that the crowd-source programs mentioned above, and indie publishing in general, are predicated on the idea of letting the market decide, one could conclude there’s a certain amount of truth to Ikitt’s argument that there is no such thing as an expert.

But what is strange about Inkitt is that after  poo-pooing human experts, the publisher proceeds to use an expert algorithm, one which was written by people, to choose which books to publish:

This is why we built artificially intelligent algorithms that have the ability to analyze reading pattern data and engagement levels. This allows us to make objective and data-driven decisions regarding a story’s potential to become a bestseller.

Does anyone else see the logical inconsistency there?

Inkitt is simply replacing one expert with another, and using smoke and mirrors to distract you from that fact. That expert algorithm will be biased by the opinions of its creators and will be no more objective than your average human editor (and possibly less so, given that the human editor has more experience in choosing books than the programmer who wrote the algorithm).

In short, Inkitt is just another gatekeeper, and as Writers Beware points out Inkitt is taking 15% of an a title’s net revenue for the privilege of acting as a gatekeeper.

They have set themselves up to be a middleman while at the same time proclaiming that:

We have built a platform that is cutting out the middleman in the publishing industry: the acquisitions editor. There is a long list of books whose authors faced rejection at the hands of publishers. That list includes everything from Moby Dick to Harry Potter. Why? Because individual editors and literary agents make decisions that are subjective – often based on their gut instinct – and this means they sometimes get it wrong.

What makes this last quote so utterly ridiculous is that Inkitt’s whole business model is based on signing authors and then pitching those same acquisition editors.

If nothing else, you have to admire Inkitt for their chutzpah, don’t you?

• Writers Beware
• MobyLives blog

When the first Kindle Oasis leaks and the FCC paperwork which showed that the $290 Oasis had Bluetooth, many hoped that was a sign that it would support audio through a BT speaker.

Now Amazon has just raised that from a hope to a strong probability. SelfPublisherBibel.de reports this morning that they found a folder on their Kindle Oasis which was named "Voice". Inside that folder they found a text-to-speech voice called "Salli".

For those who don’t have a Fire tablet at hand, Salli is the default TTS voice for Amazon’s tablets in the US market. It’s the one that Amazon updated about a month back, and its presence on the Oasis is a strong indicator that it will support audio in the near future.

Coincidentally, the Oasis already has its first firmware update (see Amazon’s website for more details).

And in related news, the Kindle Oasis owner’s thread over on MobileRead has confirmed that Ember is a font option. It replaced the Open Dyslexic font. Also, contrary to earlier reports there is no USB port on the case.

If the TTS option does come to pass then the Oasis will be the first new Kindle with text-to-speech since the Kindle Touch,which was released in 2011. Some have been agitating ever since then for Amazon to add TTS to the Kindle, and now they could be getting their wish.

Speaking of which, how do you suppose Amazon will support audio on the Oasis?

Unlike the first four generations of Kindles it has no speaker or headphone jack, so Amazon is either going to have to enable Bluetooth, or release a case with an integrated speaker.

The latter option is less likely given the cost of the case, but it is not impossible.

Len Riggio is going to be stepping away this year from the book retail empire he built and acquired.

From the WSJ:

Book retailer Leonard Riggio said in an interview Tuesday that he will step down as executive chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc., following the company’s annual meeting scheduled for September.

“I’m no longer going to be in charge,” Mr. Riggio said. “I’m done with that. I’m done with being top banana.”

Mr. Riggio, who built Barnes & Noble into the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said he played an active role last fall in the hiring of the company’s current chief executive,Ronald Boire.

..

Mr. Riggio is the company’s largest individual shareholder with a 17.5% stake. He says he has no plans to sell or add to his stockholdings. Mr. Riggio, who resigned as the company’s CEO in 2002, will remain on the board after stepping down as executive chairman.

Len Riggio got his start in college bookselling in 1965, and built a small company in that market. He then acquired the NYC bookstore B&N in 1971 and proceeded to built a national chain using the name. B&N had just a single store at the time, and you can see it in the lead photo.

Riggio was one of the people who disrupted bookselling a generation before Jeff Bezos. He saw the same opportunities Bezos did, and ruthlessly disrupted the stale and inefficient indie bookstores with chain (and later, big box) stores that offered a huge selection and good service.

And then thirty years later Jeff Bezos came along and pulled the exact same stunt on Riggio that Riggio had pulled on indie bookstores: offering an even larger selection with the best service.

Of course, Riggio wasn’t the only person to see that opportunity; Waldenbooks predated Riggio by a generation, and he also had contemporary competition like Crown Books (imploded) Books a Million (which is still around) and Target’s B. Dalton (Wikipedia). That bookstore chain was the largest in the US when B&N acquired it in 1987 (it had more stores than B&N, yes, but it did not have a committed ownership).

Really, Riggio is less the sole book retail genius of his generation, an impression you might get from the stories circulating today, than he is the survivor of a Hunger Games type of book retailing that spanned fifty years.

And that is a feat which I find even more impressive once we understand the context.

image via Wikimedia Commons

As The Guardian and other parts of the mainstream media begin to notice the month and a half old story on the Kindle Unlimited page count scam, it’s time that we consider just who is being harmed.

In early March David Gaughran discovered, and Amazon confirmed, that scammers were taking advantage of a loophole in how Amazon tracks reading behavior in Kindle Unlimited.

Starting in July 2015, Amazon paid publishers and authors who have books in Kindle Unlimited based on the number of pages read. The changeover was a response to authors who were gaming the system by releasing short works and were being paid at the same rate as Amazon was paying for novels.

This system worked great right up until scammers figured out that Amazon cannot track the actual pages being read. Instead, Amazon tracks a reader’s location in an ebook as a distance from the beginning of the ebook.

Scammers are taking advantage of that limitation by padding their titles out with filler text like multiple machine translations and random gibberish, and then tricking readers into clicking through to the end of the ebook.

Amazon records that jump to the end of the ebook as the ebook having been read, and pays the scammer (up to approximately $14, based on the page count cap and the current payout rate).

No one knows the scale of the problem, but many have concluded that authors and publishers are being harmed by the scam. From The Guardian:

All the authors who choose to make their books available on Kindle Unlimited are paid, not a flat rate for each page read, but a portion of funding pool that Amazon provides. The size of the pool fluctuates, from $11m last summer to $15m last month, but it’s set by Amazon. No matter how successful the scammers are, Amazon doesn’t lose any more or less than the $15m it sets aside to pay Kindle Unlimited authors.

But other authors do lose out. The same pool goes to pay more “pages read”, reducing the fee for each individual page read.

That’s one way to look at it, but can you really prove that is the case?

In retrospect, there is evidence that Amazon has known about this problem since January, and has been changing the rules and adjusting the Kindle Unlimited pool to compensate for the scams.

Amazon demonstrated that they were aware of this scam in January, and we can see that in the changes Amazon made to the Kindle Unlimited rules on 1 February.

The retailer adjusted how they measured a page size, and they also set a hard limit on the number of pages paid for a given title. That cap of 3,000 pages was ridiculously large (most novels run to 300 to 400 pages in Amazon’s system) and was likely intended as a response to the scammers.

And ever since January, the per-page rate has held steady, suggesting that Amazon may be increasing the funding to compensate for the scammers.

Note: The monthly funding pools were announced after the fact.

• In January 2016, the funding pool totaled $15 million and the per-page rate $0.00411.
• In February 2016, the funding pool dipped to $14 million while the per-page rate rose to $0.00479.
• In March 2016, the funding pool rose again to $14.9 million as the per-page rate dipped to $0.00478.

The per-page rate has not fallen through the floor like The Guardian assumed would happen as the scammers cheated their way to higher revenues.

So unless you are going to argue that the rate would be higher in the absence of the scammers, we have to consider whether Amazon is aware of this problem, and is keeping authors from being harmed.

What do you think?

image by seanmfreese

Amazon has yet to come out and explicitly confirm that some of its tablets have been spontaneously developing amnesia, but on Saturday Amazon did tacitly admit that this was a widespread problem.

eBook Evangelist noticed that Amazon had posted the following message in its official support forums:

If you’re having trouble finding your photos, apps, or other content on your Kindle Fire HD 8.9”, please check your current registration status by swiping down from the top of the screen, selecting More, and then selecting My Account. If your device is not registered, tap the Register button and then enter your Amazon account information. After you register your device, you may need to download your content again. To learn more, go to http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201730090.

That’s great, but it doesn’t exactly help those who have already suffered from Amazon’s snafu.

As we’ve been hearing for the past week, many Fire tablet owners are reporting that their tablet has spontaneously deregistered itself, wiping its memory in the process.

Anything not backed up has been sent to the great Recycle Bin in the sky.

Speaking of which, Amazon does offer a backup option for its Fire Tablets, one which ill save your "device settings, network settings, bookmarks, installed apps, and more" to Amazon’s servers.

This option was enabled by default in my $50 Fire tablet, but it was not enabled in my Fire HD 7 (2014). That tablet was upgraded to Fire OS 5.1 Bellini earlier this year.

I don’t know when Amazon added the feature, so I can’t say with any certainty which generations of the Fire tablets have it, but if your tablet has a backup option you’ll be able to find it in settings menu > device options > backup & restore.

Depending on the model year, some Fire tablet might not have this feature, so it would be a really huge help if we could crowd-source a list of tablets which do and do not have a backup option.

Does your Fire tablet have this option?

{list to be added here}

image by Open Grid Scheduler

Thursday’s news about Amazon’s new font, Ember, inspired me to go find instructions on how to install it on an ereader.

While you can’t install custom fonts on a Kindle or a Fire tablet without hacking them, it’s relatively easy to  install fonts on Kobo ereaders.

Sidenote: Did you know you can embed a font in a Kindle KF8 file? The short version is that you need to make an Epub file with the embedded font, and then use Kindle Previewer to convert that Epub file to a Kindle ebook.

The above Epub trick also works to get a font on to a Kobo device, if you like. But embedding a font in an ebook is a hassle, and fortunately we don’t have to bother with that step to load a font on to a Kobo ereader.

The process could not be simpler.

• Simply plug your Kobo device into your computer over USB, and then use your computer to create a new folder called fonts in the root folder of the device.
• Note that the folder must be named fonts, with an "s", or the device won’t see it.
• Copy all the font files into that folder. A font family usually comes in sets of four, and they all have to have similar names otherwise they won’t all be found by the device.

If you’re looking for fonts, I have posted a copy of the Bookerly and Ember fonts (with Amazon’s indifference, if not outright permission). You can also find additional fonts over at MobileRead (where I found the instructions).

Once you have installed the fonts, you should be able to select them from the font (Aa) menu from inside an ebook.

Here are a few screenshots of fonts I tested this evening:

Amazon Bookerly

Amazon Ember

Kobo Nickel

Google Roboto

Of the four, I think I like Bookerly the most. The Kobo Nickel font wastes too much space, and I am ambivalent to Ember and Roboto.

Which font do you like?

image by p_a_h

Only a tiny fraction of the visually impaired population reads Braille, and that is in part due to the fact that Braille printers can cost anywhere from $1800 to $80,000.

Now researchers at J. Walter Thompson (Bangkok) in Thailand have found what could prove to be a cheaper option. They’ve developed a new type of ink which can be printed from regular inkjet printers on paper to create 3d effects like Braille.

Dubbed Touchable Ink, rests on the surface of the paper rather than being absorbed. “This results in an embossed effect that makes the printed areas highly perceptible to the sense of touch. This innovative ink can therefore enable braille printing on normal paper through normal printers to substitute a dedicated braille embosser that is far more expensive,” explained Satit Jantawiwat, chief creative officer at J. Walter Thompson Bangkok.

“It also allows embossed printing of non-braille characters and other shapes and patterns. This will open up a new world to people with visual impairment and revolutionize their knowledge accessibility,” Satit adds

Touchable Ink is still more of a research project than a commercial product, but if it does reach the market it could be used, for example, to print out a map with the key details raised above the surface so that they can be found by touch rather than sight.

And if the ink binds well enough to let you deposit multiple layers, this might even offer a new alternative for 3d printing, but it’s still too early to say.

The ink is currently being test-printed by the Thailand Association of the Blind. There’s no mention of a commercial partner which could get it into mass production, but one could step forward if they knew there was a wider market for the ink.

It’s cool that it can be used to print Braille, but that’s a tiny market. In order to get the price down, the manufacturer will have to find other uses for the ink.

How would you like to see this ink used?

TechinAsia

About six months back I broke the news that a number of smaller publishers had followed indie authors into signing up for Kindle Unlimited, and were being paid by the page. Now it seems Amazon is looking to grow that number.

The Bookseller has a piece up this morning which makes the bold claim that Amazon is on a charm offensive. The retailer is trying to recruit book publishers into Kindle Unlimited:

Representatives from Amazon’s US and UK Kindle teams held meetings with three major agency publishers and a group of prominent agents last week in a bid to encourage them to sign their authors’ titles up to Kindle Unlimited (KU).

The Bookseller understands David Naggar, vice-president of Kindle Content for Amazon.com, along with other Amazon representatives from its US and European operations— including Alessio Santarelli, Kindle’s director, EU Content Store, and Amy Worth, director, Kindle Content, UK—gave presentations at Penguin Random House (PRH), HarperCollins (HC) and Hachette, and to a group of Independent Alliance publishers.

The sessions, described by Amazon as an “all hands” meeting, concluded on Friday with a presentation to around 25 literary agents.

The meetings were attended by around 100 people at each major publisher from sales, editorial and marketing departments, including sernior executives.

While the talks covered the success of a range of Amazon’s e-book promotions, such as its Daily Deals, according to multiple sources the whole presentation was a pitch for KU, Amazon’s e-book subscription service.

It’s not clear what terms Amazon is offering to the publishers, but The Bookseller said that "Amazon is willing to be flexible on terms for publishers if they sign up to the service".

But given that the piece also said that "the royalties authors earn if their book is downloaded from KU are the same as if it were a direct sale through the Kindle store", I’m not sure we can trust that the specific details are accurate.

If Amazon were going to pay the publishers at the same rate as for the retail part of the Kindle Store then there would be no need to "recruit" them. Amazon would simply use its existing contracts to add the titles to Kindle unlimited, and then pay based on those contracts.

A select few publishers have been getting the favorable terms since before Kindle Unlimited launched, at Amazon’s discretion, while most have submitted their titles and accepted the same terms as offered to indie authors (exclusivity, a per-page payout, and a split of the limited monthly funding pool).

If Amazon is actively recruiting publishers then the retailer is trying to get them to accept the same terms as indie authors.

I wish Amazon luck with that. Given the current problems with scammers cheating the funding pool, publishers would be advised to stay away until after Amazon has fixed the problem.

In fact, that would have been my number one question in those meetings. Kindle Unlimited has a fundamental flaw in its security, and Amazon needs to fix it.

It’s a shame we don’t know if anyone asked Amazon, or how it responded. Now that would be newsworthy.

image by ToGa Wanderings