Amazon has gained another foothold in their bid to conquer the college retail market, and this time they’re setting up shop just down the road from a B&N College store.

On Tuesday the retailer announced a new partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. Later this year, Amazon will open a 3,600 square foot package pickup point, or unstore, on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The unstore will be located at 1920 Commons building, where it will share space with the dining hall and a Starbucks.

The facility will feature a staffed pickup and drop off location as well as "communal work spaces with interactive media pods" where students can study privately or collaborate, and it will be located about three blocks away from the B&N-operated college bookstore (shown at right).

“We’re thrilled to bring a new experience to Penn that makes it more convenient for students to get everything they need for university life,” said Ripley MacDonald, Director of Amazon Student Programs. “We look forward to bringing this experience to even more college communities soon.”

The unstore at the University of Pennsylvania is Amazon’s first location on an Ivy League campus, and it is at least the fifth such store to open in the past year. Since 2015, Amazon has opened on-campus staffed pickup locations (Amazon@Purdue, Amazon@UMass) and they’ve also opened a couple off-campus locations near the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Cincinnati (Amazon@IslaVista, Amazon@Cincinnati).

Amazon has also said in the press release that they have agreements to open two more locations in 2016 with the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley. (UC Davis, as you might recall, was Amazon’s first college retail partner.)

But never mind Amazon’s future plans; did you notice what today’s announcement implies about Amazon’s strategy?

Amazon has been pursuing the college retail market since at least 2013, and they’ve shifted their strategy twice now. Amazon’s first strategy was to launch an affiliate partnership with UC Davis, and that was followed by unstores which replaced a college’s bookstore with a staffed pickup locations (Amazon@Purdue, Amazon@UMass).

Now Amazon has moved past replacing bookstores and is instead directly competing with them. Both Amazon@IslaVista and Amazon@Cincinnati are located just off of campuses where Follett operates the college bookstore.

Correction: Follett operates the bookstore at Cinncinnati, but not Santa Barbara. That school has an independent bookstore (a Google search lead me in the wrong direction).

And now Amazon has an unstore in the works at the University of Pennsylvania which is only one block down and two blocks to the west of the college bookstore run by Barnes & Noble College.

Amazon is not the biggest player in the virtual college bookstore industry (that title would go to eCampus, with over 150 virtual bookstores) but Amazon is the boldest player. As the leading online retailer, Amazon is the main reason why so many schools are reporting a drop in bookstore revenues, and now Amazon is moving into direct competition with college bookstores.

This does not bode well for college bookstores like B&N College, many of which are struggling to cope with other pressures like high textbook prices and not enough rich students.

B&N spun off its college bookstore division last year into a separate company. Some have foreseen a rosy future for B&N College, but can this company survive fierce competition in a contracting market?

I don’t think so. Do you?

Apple has just announced all of the features it is adding to the next version of its mobile OS, and once again Apple is playing catch up,

In addition to a more Flipboard-esque "For You" section in the Apple News app, Apple is adding a new security option for the Apple Notes app, and a slew of classroom features.

But the headline would have to be the blue light filter. Apple is calling it "Night Shift", after Amazon’s Blue Shade and Google’s Night Light.

Edit: And there’s also an unannounced feature called iCloud for iBooks which apparently syncs your ebooks across devices (I’m looking for more info).

Like the feature that Amazon added to Fire tablets last month, Night Shade is a system-wide setting that should work in all apps (Apple is less than clear on this point).

Night Shift works by using your iOS device’s clock and location to determine when the sun sets in your location. It then automatically shifts the colors in your display to the red/yellow end of the spectrum, and in the morning, it returns the display to its regular settings.

As I have previously reported, there’s tons of research to show that exposure to bright light in the evening can make it harder to fall asleep. To be more exact, the wavelengths of blue light shining in your face affects your circadian rhythms, keeping you awake.

That’s why a lot of third party app developers have released blue light filter apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Last month Amazon followed suit, and now Apple is jumping on the bandwagon.

Here are the other new features (you can find more details on the update on the Apple website).

Notes

• Now you can secure the notes that contain your most personal data — such as financial details, medical info, or website logins — with a password or fingerprint. You can also sort notes by date created, date modified, or alphabetically.

News

• The articles in For You are now better tailored to your particular interests. And to help you discover new Favorites, For You suggests trending topics and Editors’ Picks. When a story contains video, you can play it right from your feed.

Health

• It’s simpler than ever to find third-party apps to track your health and wellness. Categories such as Weight, Workouts, and Sleep have a new slider menu that reveals great apps you can easily add to your Health dashboard.

CarPlay

• New and For You from Apple Music — with songs, artists, and albums handpicked by experts, plus selections based on your preferences— are right at hand on your screen. And the Nearby feature in Maps lets you find gas, parking, restaurants, coffee, and more with a tap.

Education

• Shared iPads: Students can log in to any iPad in any classroom and make it their own.
• New Classroom App: Teachers can guide students through a lesson, see their progress, and keep them on track.
• Apple School Manager: Now admins have one portal where they can do everything from create Apple IDs to purchase apps to prepare devices for MDM.
• Managed Apple IDs: A new kind of ID for education, Managed Apple IDs are created and assigned by the school.

To web publishers, knowing what people are reading is almost as important knowing the latest news because it helps you focus your energy on the stories that get the most attention.

And sadly Apple is falling down on that point. The WSJ reports that Apple’s wonderful new Apple News app isn’t living up to all its promises.

Since it launched last September, Apple Inc.’s News app has attracted more than 100 publishing partners world-wide hoping to capitalize on the growing consumption of news on mobile devices.

There is one major problem: Neither media companies nor Apple know how many people are reading.

The company mistakenly has been underestimating the number of readers using the News app since its launch, and passing that inaccurate information on to publishers.

When it comes to Apple News, analytics doesn’t just tell publishers what was being read; it also tells them how many adverts were displayed next to their articles.

Apple makes web publishers use its iAds platform of they want to show adverts next to their articles. This platform launched with the Apple News app. A limited number of web publishers have the option of selling ads in Apple News (the same is true for Facebook Instant Articles), and if publishers aren’t getting accurate reports of reading activity then it raises questions as to whether the ads are being tracked correctly.

Edit: And now there are reports that Apple is stepping back from its iAds unit.

And with a reported 40 million people having used the Apple News app since it launched last fall, that could add up to a pretty penny. However, Apple isn’t saying how many people use the app on a regular basis or and how much traffic publishers are getting, so we could be making a mountain out of a molehill.

Some web publishers are still excited about the possibilities of Apple news. but it’s worth remembering that Apple previously launched a news product before letting it wither. Apple Newsstand was supposed to boost publishers' subscription and revenue, but it ultimately proved to be the purgatory where news apps went, never to be opened again.

Apple’s response was to ignore that app for years before retiring it late in 2015.

Let’s hope they don’t take that passive approach to Apple News, or at least if they do then let’s hope publishers catch on sooner.

image by desbyrnephotos

Amazon has added many new features to its in-home digital concierge in the year plus since it launched, including smart home integration, Spotify, IFTTT, and support for playing Audible audiobooks.

Now Amazon has added the one feature I’ve been asking after since the Alexa launched last year.

AFTVnews reports that you can have your Echo read Kindle ebooks to you. The new feature integrates with you existing Kindle account and uses Amazon’s text-to-speech tech to read ebooks aloud with Alexa’s regular voice. It works with most prose books sold in the Kindle Store (but probably only in English).

To read an ebook, just tell Alexa "Read my book", followed by the title. You can pause and resume the recitation, skip ahead or jump back one paragraph at a time.

Curiously, you can’t skip to the next chapter of said Kindle ebook, which is strange given that Echo does have this option for Audible audiobooks. Perhaps it will be added in a later update.

For more details, check out the relevant help page on the Amazon website.

The Amazon Echo is currently out of stock on the Amazon website, where it is listed for $180.

Earlier this week two author groups sent an open letter to publishers, begging them to increase digital royalties from the standard 25% to 50% of net.

What we ask is simple: publishers need to revise many of their standard contract terms to make them more equitable. Authors should get at least 50% of ebook revenue, not a mere 25%. Authors should not have their hands tied with contracts which cannot be terminated when a book is no longer being exploited or be subject to non-compete and option clauses that make it even more difficult for them to write and publish new books. Indemnity clauses should spread risk fairly between the publisher and the author. Royalty statements should be transparent and comprehensive. And we ask publishers not to discriminate against authors who don?t have powerful agents. When negotiating with agents publishers often start from previously negotiated forms that remove, or at least soften the blow of, some of the more draconian provisions offered to unagented authors. Why not do the right thing by all authors and eliminate those provisions for everyone?

You can find the letters (as PDFs) here and here, as well as commentary over on The Passive Voice.

The Telegraph and The Guardian have covered the story, and the latter has been dissected over at The Passive Voice.  And a post by Robert J. Sawyer just crossed my desk today which discussed this issue.

As a general rule, I support the letters, although I do wince at the Society of Authors' Histrionics and at the misleading claims made about author incomes.

The SoA claimed that "without serious contract reform the
professional author will become an endangered species", which is sorta true in a "the sky is falling" kind of way. (Even though it makes me roll my eyes, I will admit that writers earning more would be a good thing.)

But the misleading claims that authors are earning less than before don’t get the same grudging agreement.

The claims are not supported by facts. Each author group is basing their claim on recently conducted surveys into author income, and I have a couple problems with the surveys and the conclusions.

There is of course the Author Earnings reports, which show that authors are earning more from the Amazon.com Kindle Store and the UK Kindle Store (source) than ever before. Authors are significantly boosting their income by cutting out publishers, thus casting doubt on the claims that authors are earning less.

But more importantly, a careful reading of the survey reports tells us that it would be more accurate to say that the reports show that the members of the two author groups are earning less (rather than writers in general).

One often overlooked detail is that the survey groups were drawn from the membership rolls of the two organization, and so the surveys say less about writer incomes in general than they do about the incomes of writers who belong to the two groups. (And there are other issues with TAG’s survey, too, including a tiny survey group.)

BTW, you can find the SoA’s survey here (PDF), in case you should want to confirm my statement. It too is based on a small survey group.

images by @sahxic, itsmeritesh

When Pottermore was launched in early 2012, it was hailed as the first of many publisher-owned ebookstores that would lead to the vanquishment of Amazon.

Pottermore was the sole source of Harry Potter ebooks and audiobooks, and many saw that as a club that could be used against Amazon. As I predicted, that proved to be far more hype than substance, but now it turns out that Pottermore was not nearly as strong as everyone assumed.

I’ve just discovered that Amazon is selling Harry Potter ebooks in the Kindle Store. The ebooks were quietly listed in early December 2015, and have been collecting reviews since at least the 15th.

You can also find the ebooks in the Nook Store, as well as Kobo, where they are selling for $9 each.

Yes, Pottermore has completely given up on retail control of its ebooks, and I can tell you why.

The Bookseller published an article yesterday which looks at Pottermore’s company filings and offers a revealing explanation for Pottermore’s recent decisions to distribute enhanced ebooks to iBooks and to let Audible, B&N, and other retailers sell its audiobooks.

The answer, my dears, is money.

When Pottermore launched, one of its earliest partners was Sony. The electronics giant was in it for the branding, and they released Harry Potter games, a Harry Potter themed section of Playstation Home, and included a free Harry Potter ebook with the Sony Reader.

Sony was paying nicely for the privilege, but eventually that deal ran out:

The site, which gives Harry Potter fans an enhanced experience of J K Rowling’s wizarding world, along with new short stories, insights and games, relaunched in September with a new mobile-first search-friendly format. Before this, in the year ending 31st March 2015, sales dropped by £24.8m – or 352% – to £7m (from £31.8m a year earlier), while profit at Pottermore also decreased significantly, from £14.9m in 2014 to a loss of £6m in 2015.

So apparently over 70% of Pottermore’s revenue came from this one deal with Sony, and not from sales or other channels.

Ouch.

Now I think we understand Pottermore’s decision to give up control of its content. It is putting its ebooks in other ebookstores because it is going to where the customers are, rather than making the customers come to it.

As DBW has previously reported, the vast majority of readers buy ebooks from a single retailer, so if Pottermore wants their money then Pottermore will have to go to them.

That is a detail everyone should bear in mind as they talk about the latest Amazon killer du jour, crowd-sourced retailing.

If even Pottermore, with its highly desirable Harry Potter ebooks, can’t draw customers away from Amazon then what chance does everone else have?

With Christmas come and gone, there’s an excess of Kindles in many households and Amazon is ready to help clean house.

The retailer has launched a new trade-in program where Amazon will pay you between five and fifty-five dollars for your old Kindle, working or not. That credit is yours to spend at Amazon however you like, and if you take Amazon up on its offer before 31 March you can also get a $20 credit toward your next Kindle.

That credit has to be used before 31 May 2016, and it’s only good for Kindle ereaders (and not Fire tablets), so it won’t be of much use to those who already got a Kindle upgrade for Christmas.

But if you have a spare Kindle and want to gamble that Amazon will launch the next model this spring, then this deal could be worth it – if the price is right.

Some of the trade-in values simply aren’t worth it, not if you have a perfectly functional device. The Kindle DX, for example, will only get you five dollars whether it is working or not (heck, I’d pay more than that for a working white KDX).

With some of the offers, you would be better off selling on eBay, but if you have a heavily-used and beat up old Kindle Keyboard, to name one example, you might not get more on Ebay than the $30 plus $20 offered by Amazon.

Do you see a good value?

image by michael pollak

GQ magazine is joining the group of web publishers who would rather fight with their readers than do something about the terrible adverts that so many of its visitors don’t want to see.

Digiday reports (but I cannot confirm) that this Conde Nast magazine is now showing visitors who block ads this popup in place of its articles:

I haven’t encountered the pop up myself, but I did find confirmation elsewhere.  “Please Disable Your Ad Blocker” the notice says. “Turn off your ad blocker or purchase instant access to this article, so we can continue to pay for photoshoots like this one,” it concludes, pointing to an image of Amy Schumer dancing with stormtroopers (she was on the cover of GQ’s August 2015 issue).

The magazine is giving readers the option of either making micropayments for each article they read, or subjecting themselves to auto-playing video adverts that slow down your PC.

GQ is reportedly asking for fifty cents per article, which strikes me as a high price to pay for content which is all too likely to be another advert disguised as an article.

This is a classic example of a web publisher who would rather fight with its users than address the real problem of their ads being so terrible that users want to block them (or have to block them, for some visitors). Ad blocking isn’t the scourge of the advertising industry; instead ad tech like that used by GQ is the worst thing that the ad industry could do to itself. Between the punitive autoplay videos and the malware enabled by the wild west nature of the industry, this self-inflicted wound is hurting everyone.

And with more web publishers fighting the wrong problem, there’s no solution in sight.

Conde Naste joins the ranks of Washington Post, Axel Springer, Yahoo, Forbes, all of which are now blocking ad-block users and demanding that the users either pay or disable the ad blocking extensions.

While that demand might sound reasonable to the web publishers, let’s not forget that in objecting to ad blocking extensions they are also demanding that we lower our security and invite hackers into our computers. Forbes, for example, has been hacked twice in the past year so that its visitors could be attacked, and that is only one example of malvertising.

Is it any wonder that more people than ever before are blocking ads while browsing online?

image by Aunti Juli

Ask any of its hardcore users and they will tell you that Twitter is defined by its limits. The hard limit of 140 characters forces users to convey their argument as concisely as possible.

But according to re/code, that is going to change:

Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and the company is targeting a launch date toward the end of Q1, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Twitter is currently considering a 10,000 character limit, according to these sources. That’s the same character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product, so it isn’t a complete surprise.

There is no official launch date set in stone, these sources say. It’s also possible the character limit could fluctuate before it rolls out the final product, which people inside Twitter refer to as “Beyond 140.” Re/code first reported that Twitter was building a product like this back in September. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

I know that the idea of a ten thousand character tweet sounds terrible; as TechCrunch showed, it’s longer than the average blog post.

But before we get into the yelling and vowing to flee to Facebook, let’s take a look at what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had to say. After the news broke yesterday, Dorsey tweeted a screensnap which explained why the change is a good idea. This screensnap is also an example of the problem Twitter is trying to fix, and it gives us clues about Twitter’s goals:

Tell me, did you have trouble reading the screensnap, perhaps because the text is too small or not in your language?

That is a problem I frequently have when reading screensnaps on Twitter, and I think it is the problem that Twitter is trying to solve with the 10k character limit.

If you don’t see the connection, then let’s consider the possibility that re/code got the story only half right, and that Twitter is not planning to switch to a 10k character limit on tweets.

What if Twitter is instead considering giving you the option of tweeting a 140-char tweet with a long text note attached, say 10,000 characters?

That would make more sense for Twitter, it would fix the screensnap issue, and it would also explain Twitter’s participation in Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project (hat tip to Wolfgang Blau for giving me the idea).

Google launched the project with the goal of delivering web articles faster on mobile, but what if Twitter’s interest stemmed from an interest in delivering a 10k-char attachment quickly?

Web publishers could use it to share an entire article (as Mathew Ingram points out at Fortune), but Twitterati could also use it to share the text they currently put into a screensnap (they also use Twitlonger, but screensnaps are more common).

That would be an improvement over screensnaps in terms of accessibility, search, and just about any other metric.

It would also improve discussions on Twitter. As Ben Thompson reminded us this morning, people don’t click links. So embedding a supporting argument as an attachment means that it is more likely to be read.

Edit: Also, this would no longer be a problem:

https://twitter.com/elliotpage/status/685060432059609089

Then again, Twitter has yet to officially confirm the news (not even to the WSJ), so all this is pure speculation.

And so I will leave you with a factoid.  Twitter’s proposed new limit is not nearly as long as Facebook’s 63,206 character limit on updates, and yet the average tweet is about as long as the average update (68 characters vs 65 characters).

So even when people have the option of posting longer updates, they’re generally not using it.

image by Johan Larsson,  tashmahal

We’ve probably all encountered those bogus "Windows Support" phone calls, and I’m sure most know that the calls are a scam.

Dell customers, on the other hand, aren’t so lucky.

News is breaking this week that Dell’s customer service database is in the hands of scammers. There are numerous reports of Dell customers receiving phone calls from "support techs" that knew everything about a customer, including the customer’s name, email, account info, and everything down to the support tag and device serial number.

Those cold-callers ultimately proved to be scammers out to con Dell’s customers out of fake service fees, but that is not the scary part. No, the scary part is that these scam phone calls have been going on since at least May 2015, and Dell doesn’t seem to be able to stop it.

10 Zen Monkeys broke the story yesterday when they reported:

Scammers pretending to be from Dell computers phoned me in November — but these scammers knew things about me. They identified the model number for both my Dell computers, and knew every problem that I’d ever called Dell about. None of this information was ever posted online, so it’s not available anywhere except Dell’s own customer service records. (Even my e-mail account is secured with "two-step verification"…)

I called the (real) Dell, and spoke to a customer support representative named Mark, who tried to explain how the scammers knew my account history.

"Dell has detected hackers," he said. "They’re hacking our web site."

The story is only just breaking in the tech blogosphere, but the earliest reports are eight months old, and there have been over a dozen similar reports in June, July, September, October, and November.

The reports are frighteningly consistent. Many read like this:

I just got a call on my cell phone from someone with a foreign accent who knew my name and said he was from Dell, and that over the last few weeks they have been getting reports from my Dell computer that there is a problem.  Was Dell hacked and customer information stolen??  There is no other way the person would have my name, cell phone # and know I had a Dell computer if it didn’t come from your company.

It’s not clear whether Dell’s database has been hacked or whether the out-sourced tech support is making some extra money on the side, but we do know from the many reports that this is a widespread problem.

And to make matters worse, the scammers are using security flaws in Dell’s support software to take control of a victim’s computer:

They called my parents house from number 800-425-0090 they knew his model, his name, and account from Dell. They scared him into thinking his computer has viruses at which point they used Dell’s assistant program to take control of the PC. They also knew how to do this. When my father realized they were trying to scare him, he asked for them to leave a notepad message saying what was wrong with the PC. They left a notepad text file saying viruses, hacking. This is definitely a scam and furthermore they have information only Dell would have and used Dell’s program to gain access.

Dell keeps telling everyone that they are going to fix the problem; meanwhile the reports keep rolling in.

Clearly Dell’s customers are going to have to protect themselves, so here are five rules for handling a scam phone call:

One, get the caller’s name and extension number and call them back, but be sure to place the call to the toll-free support number listed on the Dell website. The goal is to verify the caller’s identity and relationship with Dell, so DO NOT call the number provided.

Two, if you  get a first and last name, try to look the caller up on LinkedIn. See if he has a profile which says he currently works at Dell. Not all valid support techs will, but if you find a profile then you can use it to judge the caller’s trustworthyness.

Three, make a note of the number they are calling you from and Google it to see if there are other reports of scammers. (And yes, you can make them wait while you Google the phone number. A scammer deserves it, and a real support tech will understand your caution.)

Four, treat every call as if it is a scam by asking probing questions that may or may not be true so you can gauge their response. You can also try to try to trick the potential scammer into making a mistake by providing false information.

Five, don’t hesitate to listen to your gut and simply hang up on the caller. If that proves to be a mistake, you can always pursue this through a secure channel like the Dell website.

found via Daring Fireball

images by MShades,

hypotekyfidler.cz,

Alexandre Dulaunoy

For several years now Amazon has offered the ability to embed Kindle ebooks in third-party sites, and now they’re taking it to the next level.

Geekwire reports that Amazon has launched a new embedding option called Kindle Instant Book Previews. Like the previous embedding option, this new feature lets web publishers embed a Kindle samples on their site just like they embed a video, image, or audio clips, thus giving a website’s visitors the option of browsing an excerpt from books without leaving the publisher’s site.

“We were inspired by other media types on the web and within applications that were giving people immediate access to content, and we wanted to do the same thing with books,” Mike Torres, director of product management for Amazon’s Kindle Reader, told Geekwire this week. “We think that by doing so, people will discover more to read, and they’ll be exposed more to reading.”

When this feature is finally rolled out the embed links will be found on the ebook listing pages in the Kindle Store (I don’t see them at this time). Web publishers will be able to embed an ebook, set the height and width of the window, and insert their Amazon affiliate ID.

The embedded ebooks will look like this:

The code, in case you are interested, is a lot cleaner than the old embedding option. But it is also more of a mess than Youtube or Twitter embeds, which in WordPress only requires a link and no code.

The feature is rolling out now, and Amazon says it will be available on the vast majority of Kindle ebooks. That’s great news; the older embed feature was never widely used because it never worked very well, and it’s good that Amazon updated it.

Penguin Random House announced on Tuesday that it had sold its vanity press operation to Najafi Companies for an unknown sum.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, and in fact the deal has not been publicly announced, either. Instead it was announced in an internal email which then leaked to the press.

In the email, PRH CEO Markus Dohle wrote: "We thank the entire Author Solutions team for their hard work and dedication during their time as part of Penguin Random House, and we wish them all the best and much success under the new ownership. With this sale, we reaffirm our focus on consumer book publishing through our 250 imprints worldwide, and our commitment to connecting our authors and their works to readers everywhere."

Penguin bought Author Solutions (ASI) in the summer of 2012 from Bertram Capital, and paid around $116 million for the company. This was about three months before Random House and Penguin announced plans to merge, and long before that merger became a reality.

Following the sale, Penguin/PRH proceeded to integrate Author Solutions with several of its divisions, including launching vanity press operations in Spain and India, as well as forging a partnership between ASI and a for-profit university owned by PRH parent company Bertelsmann.

I have no info at this time on whether the deals will remain in place, but it is likely that they will continue. ASI also has similar deals with other publishers, as well as Barnes & Noble, Lulu, and other companies.

Styling itself a self-pub service, ASI has a colorful reputation. It gets most of its revenues from selling services to authors, and has been repeatedly accused of using high-pressure sales tactics to sell worthless marketing services. This has lead to several class action lawsuits, all of which have (so far) been either settled or dismissed.

And not only has ASI been the subject of much bad publicity over the past few years, it’s also doing less business than in past years. Writers Beware pointed out that  a report by Bowker showed a marked drop in ISBN usage in 2014 across all AS imprints, suggesting that ASI was processing fewer books than before (we do not yet have data from 2015). ASI also lost deals with The Authors Guild and with Harlequin, which closed its ASI front company in early 2015.

That decline could explain the sale, although it is too early to say for sure.

Speaking of which, the buyer is not  quietly known as a past investor in other parts of the book industry. Najafi Companies has in the past bought other Bertelsmann assets, including the book club operator Direct Brands which it bought in 2008 and later sold in 2013.

Najafi has not yet released a statement on the deal, or its plans for ASI.

PW, Bookseller

image by Jeffrey

I hope German consumers got their iPad last year, because Apple raised the prices in Germany for its iDevices on Friday.

The gadget maker told the AP today that it had increased the prices to cover the cost of newly assessed private copyright levy. According to Bitkom, the new levy, or more correctly the new tax, adds between five and six euros to the price of smartphones sold in Germany, and between seven and nine euros to the price of a tablet like the iPad.

The private copyright levy is a tax charged to consumers when they buy media and electronics capable of making copies. The idea was pioneered in Germany in 1965, and has since spread to most of Europe, Canada, and other parts of the world. It originally applied to cassette tapes, but has since been expanded to include external hard disks, storage media like flash drives, CD-Rs, computers (in Germany, at least), and now mobile devices.

The amount collected, and the devices affected, vary from one country to the next. Spain, for example, repealed its private copying levy in 2012, only to decide to pay the tax out of its own coffers. Finland followed suit this year, and the UK does not collect a levy. The French private copying levy, on the other hand, raised €208 million in 2013, and represents almost 60% of the total collected in the European Union.

Also known as the "you must be a pirate" tax, in many countries the private copyright levy is paid to collection societies with the ostensible goal of compensating creators for the piracy copying that is assumed to be going on.

However, due to the archaic nature of the tax, in many places it is still intended to compensate music and film creators, and not book authors (probably because books were so late to go digital). Also, since the fees are sent to collection societies like Gema, there’s serious question as to whether creators actually benefit from the tax.

The many inconsistencies, as well as the dubious benefits, has emboldened some to push for the European Union to junk the private copying levy, or at least harmonize it across the EU.

That is still a work in progress, however.

Macrumors, AP

image by avaragado,  juanpol

Over the past week the author blogosphere has been taken over with a debate on getting paid. Kristen Lamb sparked the discussion on  Tuesday when she wrote a post arguing that authors who want to make a living should only promote channels that get them paid, and that sparked a long debate on The Passive Voice as well as commentary on Teleread.

I had been sitting out the debate and simply linking to the coverage because I just wasn’t interested in arguing with someone who was haranguing me on the acceptable ways to support writers (and yes, Lamb does lecture readers after first "excusing" them). And that goes double when the post comes from someone who defines this issue solely in monetary terms.

But late on Saturday I came across a post that Neil Gaiman published on Tumblr. The post actually predates this discussion but it is also quite relevant.

Gaiman reposted a quote from some time back. His post was a graphic with text, but I went and found the text of the quote for you. Needless to say, Gaiman takes a very different view from Lamb on the topic of getting paid:

Don’t ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that’s what they’re there for. Use your library). Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend’s copy. What’s important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read.

Where Lamb is lecturing readers about the care and feeding of authors, Gaiman values fans (both current and potential) more as readers than as customers.

His position is similar to other authors who have said that obscurity, and not revenue, is the greater threat to authors. Tim O’Reilly was one of the first to put forward this argument in 2002 when he wrote that piracy was less of a problem than obscurity.

More than 100,000 books are published each year, with several million books in print, yet fewer than 10,000 of those new books have any significant sales, and only a hundred thousand or so of all the books in print are carried in even the largest stores. Most books have a few months on the shelves of the major chains, and then wait in the darkness of warehouses from which they will move only to the recycling bin. Authors think that getting a publisher will be the realization of their dreams, but for so many, it’s just the start of a long disappointment.

Sites like Amazon that create a virtual storefront for all the books in print cast a ray of light into the gloom of those warehouses, and so books that would otherwise have no outlet at all can be discovered and bought. Authors who are fortunate enough to get the rights to their book back from the publisher often put them up freely online, in hopes of finding readers. The web has been a boon for readers, since it makes it easier to spread book recommendations and to purchase the books once you hear about them. But even then, few books survive their first year or two in print. Empty the warehouses and you couldn’t give many of them away.

Many works linger in deserved obscurity, but so many more suffer simply from the vast differential between supply and demand.

With the rise of ebooks, self-publishing, and the re-release of so many backlists, his point is even more true today than it was thirteen years ago.

And this, folks, is the fundamental oversight that many of us seen in Lamb’s original post (this includes Lamb’s comment section). She devotes a lot of energy to, and gets very angry about, getting paid, in contrast to other authors who care more worried about getting noticed.

To be clear, I am not saying Lamb is wrong so much as her focus is too narrow. In that post Lamb focuses on money as the sole way for readers to support authors, when in reality the non-financial support could be worth so much more.

The used bookstore that Lamb rails against might not be generating any revenue for Lamb, but if it has her books then it is giving readers the chance to discover her work. Similarly, a tweet about a book, or a book shared between readers might not be a sale, but they too are a chance for a new reader to discover Lamb’s books.

My point is that getting noticed is the first step towards getting paid, and any author who discounts that step does so at the risk of their own peril.

images by nSeika,  linmtheu, steve greer

Reading expands the mind, can reduce stress, and it can also get the blood flowing (especially if you read while walking).

The following infographic details some of the other benefits from reading, including a better vocabulary, improved memory, and an improved memory.

The Metamorphosis Journal