For the past couple years Kobo has offered a Kids Store and kids accounts which provided a filtered reading experience which promoted safety at the expense of growth and convenience, and now the ebook retailer has released an Android app to compliment the store.

Launched in mid-December, Kobo Kids for Android has a limited catalog targeted at the six- to eight-year-old age group, and very limited account management options. Kids can browse the selection, and add titles to a wishlist, but they cannot buy. That is reserved for the parent, who can only buy the ebooks which the kid has added to their wishlist (a stupid limitation). The app is tied to the parent’s Kobo account, and the buying options are protected by a four-digit code.

The new app is in beta, and it is in many ways similar to the Kobo Kids Store, but one detail worth noting is that the app does not work with the limited Kids accounts that Kobo launched with the Kobo Kids Store in 2013. If you have ebooks in those accounts you will want to avoid this app, and instead use the regular Kobo app, and log into that app with the Kids account.

And that recommendation is only strengthened by this apps' beta status. I was unable to buy any ebooks from inside this app; instead I got error messages.

You can find the app in Google Play.

The Independent has a puff piece up this week on Booktrack, the four-year-old startup that has been trying without much luck to promote the idea of ebooks with embedded soundtracks.

The rustle of paper and the musty aroma of tightly packed pages is key, for many readers, to the appeal of picking up a physical book rather than a digital one, but Brits may just have found something equally sensuous.

Soundtracked books – ebooks with sound effects – started appearing on sale four years ago, but exclusive research from the market leader, Booktrack, shows Britain is now the second-keenest nation, after the US, to wrap its eyes and ears around this revamped medium. The new study shows the total number of people in Britain using the medium has increased 13 times since July, and reveals the Booktrack app has 2.5 million users worldwide.

The piece asks essentially the same question that The Guardian asked in 2012 and The Atlantic asked in 2011: Is this the future of ebooks?

Given that we are debating the same question four years later, it’s safe to say the answer is no, or rather: not yet. Soundtracks in ebooks has gotten little attention from publishers, the major ebook platforms, or the public.

And most importantly, Amazon has not added this feature to the Kindle platform.

In the past four years Amazon has adopted fixed layout, PDFs, embedded audio and video, and Epub-like KF8 and KFX enhancements. Amazon has even gone so far as to add Whispersync for voice, which enables readers to sync an ebook with a spoken word audiobook. But they have not added soundtracks.

To be clear, I am not saying Amazon is the arbiter of the future of ebooks, although arguably they do set the standard. My point is that we won’t see widespread use until Amazon copies this idea and adds it to the Kindle platform.

Don’t forget, many of the features in the Kindle platform were first developed on other platforms before Amazon copied them.

• Embedded audio and video, for example, was first used by Vook in iPhone apps in 2009. The Kindle platform didn’t get this feature until 2010.
• Fixed layout children’s books, and audio synced with the text, were two features that we first saw in Baker & Taylor’s Blio platform in early 2010; Amazon didn’t add those features until over a year later (longer, for Whispersync for Voice).
• PDFs have been around for a couple decades, and yet Amazon only made them part of the Kindle platform in 2012.

I could go on, but the basic point is that until Amazon copies this idea, it won’t be the future of ebooks.

As the single largest ebook platform, Amazon can drive adoption of an idea, or let it suffocate simply by ignoring it. And they have so far chosen to ignore the possibilities of soundtracks in ebooks.

Amazon has turned the Kindle platform into a three-ring circus with many sideshow acts that will never be the main show, but do at least get the attention of the public. Soundtracks in ebooks, on the other hand, are still very much the freakshow act at a little-known and little-visited circus.

So no, soundtracks in ebooks are not the future.

Thoughts?

images by TORLEY,  icyFrance,  cphoffman42

The US Dept of Justice filed its brief in response to Apple’s Supreme Court appeal last week.

Arguing that the July 2013 antitrust ruling that concluded Apple was "a member of a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy was supported by overwhelming evidence", the DoJ asked the US Supreme Courts to refuse to hear Apple’s appeal.

You can find the brief attached to this post as a PDF (*).

Last week’s filing is the latest stage in a legal battle dating to 2010, when state and federal investigators started inquiries into allegations that Apple and five publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) had conspired to end Amazon’s dominance and control of the rapidly growing ebook market.

The Price Fix Six collectively negotiated contracts which would give the publishers control over their  retail ebook prices. It also included a most-favored nation clause which would require each publisher to set the price in the iBookstore to the lowest price found in competing ebookstores, thus giving the publishers an incentive to force Amazon to accept the new terms (which it did in early 2010).

The US Dept of Justice, as well as several state’s Attorneys General, investigated the conspiracy and filed charges against the Price Fix Six in 2012.  The five publishers settled in late 2012 and early 2013, but Apple chose to defend itself in court.

Following a three week trial in the summer of 2013, Judge Denise Cote issued a ruling in July 2013 which stated that Apple had committed a per se violation of US antitrust law when it acted as the hub for the publishers' conspiracy.

Following numerous petty appeals, that ruling was upheld earlier this year by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and Apple filed an appeal to the US Supreme Court in October.

Apple argued in its appeal that, under the rule of reason, it had not violated antitrust law. Several of the amicus echo that argument, and expand upon it.

Several parties have filed amicus briefs in support of Apple, including the ABA, B&N, and The Authors Guild, That brief showed a resounding lack of a valid legal argument, but the briefs filed by outside parties (including economists, a couple law professors, etc) presented better arguments that Judge Cote erred in her ruling, and that the appeals court was wrong to uphold that ruling (more on this later).

And last week the DoJ disagreed, arguing that price-fixing wasn’t a legitimate way to increase competition (which makes sense, given that it prevents price competition). The DoJ’s brief faults Apple for conspiring with the publishers to "to reduce Amazon’s dominance in the ebook market, not by introducing new goods or pricing policies that consumers would find more attractive than those that Amazon had previously offered, but by increasing the price (and thus reducing the attractiveness) of Amazon’s own wares".

P.S. A special thanks to Gary Price of InfoDocket for helping me get the filing.

MediaPost

image by Håkan Dahlström

With their lower costs and quirky selection, used bookstores are finding niches in markets where big-box bookstores either throw in the towel or stop being bookstores.

Used bookstores are doing so well that there are even a couple chains, Half-Priced Books and 2nd & Charles. The last is owned by Books-a-Million, and is more of a used media store than used books (one moved into the space vacated by my local Borders store).

And now there’s a franchise chain of used bookstores. The Washington Post reports:

Sierra, 38, is a former Navy officer with an MBA and experience in government contracting. His new store, in a small strip mall on Georgia Avenue NW in Park View, is called Walls of Books, a chain started by ­Gottwals Books in Georgia. The company has opened eight locations since 2012, including one in New Orleans, and offers a training program for owners. The investment is significant: Start-up costs can approach $85,000.

Shane Gottwals, the chain’s co-founder, said some franchisees are fulfilling lifelong dreams to sell books. Others are in it solely for the money. All of them see unmet demand. “One of the first comments we hear is that the bookstore down the road closed, and there’s no place to buy books anymore,” Gottwals said. “It’s like having a museum or a theater. It’s a cultural center. It’s a place people want to go. And that’s why it’s a good investment.”

You can find more details on the franchise here.

The WaPo sees this as an unlikely comeback, but I don’t see how that could be. Used bookstores are thriving in part because they’re going where the customers are (online) and also because they have better margins than new bookstores.

The more established accounts that sell books on Amazon’s marketplace are all commercial operations (sometimes with no actual storefront). And while used books often sell for a lot less than new, the stores buy their stock at an even steeper discount. That, when combined with the lack of expectation to waste space on the latest buzzworthy release, changes the ballgame.

Speaking of the latest buzzworthy releases, one often overlooked source of used books are remaindered titles that did not sell when first released. Half or more of the print run for blockbuster titles by Patterson, Crichton, and other big-name authors are often shipped back from bookstores when sales slow down, and are either remaindered or pulped.

Most of those returned/remaindered books are fully refunded to the stores, so they don’t have a materiel cost. This is an SOP across much of consumer book sales, but there are times that I wonder just how much manpower the booksellers waste on this process. It’s an operating expense that the used bookstores don’t have, giving them another advantage.

Thanks to the internet, there’s a larger supply of used books than ever before, so really the surprise here is not the resurgence of physical used bookstores but that someone turned the idea into a franchise.

Franchises are common in many industries, including retail (especially restaurants), and even bookstores. I think Waldenbooks/Borders passed through that phase, and I know of a couple franchise bookstore chains in Australia.

But a used bookstore franchise?

That’s new to me. Does anyone know of other similar franchises?

images by dweekly, Ben+Sam

Many people are using alcohol to cope with their in-laws this holiday season, and pretty soon you’re going to be able buy that alcohol at a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

Earlier this month B&N filed for a state liquor licence for their store in New Hartford, a small town located near Utica in upstate NY. The licence is part of a test by B&N to see how well customers would take to the sale of drugs in a bookstore. This particular licence is for beer and wine only.

According to Keven Danow, a New York City-based attorney who filed the licence application for B&N, it is not the first step in a plan to turn the bookstore into a bar or nightclub, or some other profitable business. "It’s not going to change the complexion of the neighborhood," Danow told the Utica Observer-Dispatch.

Barnes & Noble is likely getting the licence in order to sell alcohol at book signings or readings, Danow suggested. He also added that food menu offerings at store cafes would be tweaked to offer items better paired with beer or wine.

He could be right, but then again B&N has shown every sign that they no longer want to be a bookstore. B&N is removing bookshelves so they can stock pasta, 3d printers, dolls, and other merchandise, so this could just be another pilot to test a new product that B&N plans to add to all stores. B&N is also experimenting with print on demand machines, and has installed three of them in B&N stores in the northeast.

But if this is part of a plan to sell alcohol as a compliment to books, B&N is in good company. A number of indie booksellers have launched hybrid bookstores that combine bars (or a brewery) with a bookstore.

Books & Brews opened a bookstore themed pub in Indianapolis last March, and there’s also  The Spotty Dog Books & Ale, in Hudson, NY, or Krammer Books and Afterwords in DC.

The Quarter Barrel Brewery, opened in Oxford, Ohio in 2010, and then there’s Big Al’s, an adult bookstore in SF that closed in 2009.

So clearly there’s a niche here, but I don’t think it’s one that B&N can move into. All of the hybrid booksellers are smaller indies which can serve a niche customer base, while B&N is focused on larger big-box stores where they have to cater to general consumers.

If B&N starts selling open containers of beer in their stores then they will do so at the cost of customers who will no longer bring their kids to the store, or shop there. And so whatever B&N gains from alcohol sales could be canceled out by other losses.

image by galenwiley

In spite of every effort to simplify it and reform it, English remains one of the most complicated languages. It’s  a confusing beast, full of inconsistent usage, evolving rules, contradictory authorities, and newly borrowed or invented terms.

No matter what your field is, a good grasp of English grammar is important in order to be taken seriously in your writing and your endeavors, and the following infographic can help. It details many of the common mistakes made every day, and how to avoid them.

P.S. And to fill up your holiday break, here are several videos and an infographic on the history and crazier aspects of English.

• Proof that English is Crazy (video)
• Video: Four Fantastic Features We Don’t Have In The English Language
• The History of English in Ten Minutes (video)
• Infographic: Interesting Facts about the English Language

Urbanest

With the US Congress recently having passed the CISA surveillance bill under the guise of enacting a budget, I’m sure we’re all aware just how far the spying extends, but the national governments aren’t the only ones watching your every online and offline move.

The following infographic details just how much information Google collects on you through its various services. Google is an ad company (so is Facebook), and it uses all of that data to better target you with adverts. As you read through the infographic, you might be amazed to see how much they know.

Lone Wolf Librarian

Forbes wasn’t too happy about ad blocking after iOS9 was announced, and now backing up their words with actions.

Reports are coming in from Twitter, and I can confirm, that Forbes is now preventing all (most?) visitors who use an ad-block tool from viewing any articles. Instead they are shown this notice:

From what I can tell, the ban on ad blockers is only rolling out today, and it is not affecting all visitors. I have a report from a uBlock user, as well as one from the UK, which say that they got through just fine.

But there are other reports on Twitter which confirm the news. The general tone is a little more articulate and less expletive laden than the responses to Yahoo Mail’s ban on ad-blockers last month, but the sentiment is the same:

Add @forbes to the list of stupid publications pushing away readers. Will avoid linking to them whenever possible https://t.co/zyA0sLWEkK

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) December 16, 2015

@Forbes If you try to block people using an ad blocker, I’m done reading your articles. The quote interstitial was bad enough.

— Jeremy Sager (@jeremy1015) December 16, 2015

@tmdarling @gcluley @Forbes I refuse to use websites that use ads to block content.

— Lewis Morgan (@LewisMorgan_) December 16, 2015

@Forbes Not sure I want to turn off my #adblocker to visit yr site, coz u served malware b4 https://t.co/eZyxVNg4Eg pic.twitter.com/7UUclK0yFP

— Terry Darling (@tmdarling) December 16, 2015

If you can’t see that last tweet, it reminds us that the Forbes website was hacked in September and used to serve up malware to unsuspecting readers. That was the second time this year that Forbes was hacked and used as an unwitting tool to distribute malware, so I’m sure you can understand why we don’t want to turn off our ad-blocking extensions.

Some 200 million people used ad blockers last year, up 40% from the year before, resulting in an estimated $22 billion in displaced (but not lost) advertising revenue, according to a study by Adobe and PageFair, an anti ad-blocking technology company.

Naturally that has many web publishers up in arms. Some, including this blog, Teleread, and other sites, have adopted a nag screen which asks visitors to turn off their ad-blocker.

On this blog only about 1% comply with the request, while around a quarter of each day’s page views are lost to ad blockers.

The nag screen is not effective, which could be why other web publishers are taking the same reader-hostile approach as Forbes.

Yahoo, for example, is blocking access to Yahoo Mail. The Washington Post has also experimented with a similar ban, and last month City AM, a London-based newspaper, started barring ad-block users from reading its articles unless they disable their ad-blockers. ITV, the UK’s top broadcaster, has been barring ad-block users since earlier this year.

And then there’s Axel Springer. In October this German media publisher kicked ad-block users off Bild.de, and it has also filed suit against a couple developers of ad-blocking extensions. Axel Springer lost one suit earlier this year, against AdBlock Plus developer Eyeo, and it sued another developer last month.

image by Straws pulled at random, airlines470

There might not be any fireworks, parades, or even a sale to mark the occasion, but 16 December is an important day for Kobo.

Six years ago today the Canadian bookseller Indigo changed the name of its ebook platform, Shortcovers, and launched Kobo on to the international scene. Unlike Barnes & Noble’s Nook, which launched only in the US earlier that year, Kobo’s store had an explicit international focus, with local partners in the US (Borders), Canada (Indigo), New Zealand & Australia (RedGroup Retail), and Hong Kong.

Kobo lacked an ereader (that wouldn’t be announced for a couple months) but it did have apps for Android, iPhone , and a couple phones no one uses anymore (Palm Pre, Blackberry).

And as this piece from Wired shows, Kobo was widely lauded at the time:

Kobo is so far the best and most comprehensive service we have used to buy and read books, especially for non-U.S. residents. It is still flawed, and it is a royal pain that Kindle won’t support EPUB books. But with its platform-agnostic approach, huge catalog and new heavyweight partners, we expect to see Kobo grow fast.

In fact, I’m pretty certain that my next e-book reader will not be a Kindle.

With this broad base of popular support, many expected Kobo to go far, but sadly that didn’t happen. The company’s shoestring budget forced it to rely on local partners for promotion, so when two of those partners (Borders and RedGroup) went bankrupt in 2011, Kobo was left with no major presence in the still-key US market.

Kobo later added other partner retailers, including Family Christian Store and Indiebound in the US, and WHSmith in the UK, but neither the new partners nor the sale to Rakuten in late 2011 were enough to help Kobo achieve a success equal to the early hype.

Nevertheless, Kobo has still managed to become one of the top five global ebookstores. That’s a whole lot more than can be said for many of Kobo’s late competitors, including Sony, txtr, Cool-ER, Blinkbox, and Zola.

Happy Birthday, Kobo!

image by Digital Magic Photography

November marks the first month where Amazon paid Kindle Unlimited authors and publishers a different rate per page based on the country or market where each book was borrowed.

Amazon has divided Kindle Unlimited into at least 6 5 regions based on currency (US, UK, Germany, France, Europe, India, and Canada). After taking conversion rates into account, the US and UK rates were about the same ($.0049 per page, or £.0033). That’s a slight improvement from October 2015 ($.0048 per page).

• In Canada, the rate was $.0061, or about $.0044 USD.
• The rate in Germany Europe also dipped to €.0043, or $.0046 USD.
• In France, the rate rose to €.0046 per page, an increase from october’s rate of  €0.0045.
• And the rate in India dropped the most, to .11 INR, or $.0016 USD.

With Kindle Unlimited only costing a few dollars in India, it’s easy to see why Amazon adjusted the right.

The total pool that Amazon has arbitrarily decided to pay authors for November 2015 was $12.7 million, compared to $12.4 million for October 2015. Here’s the running tally of monthly funding pools:

• May 2014: $1.2 million
• June 2014: $1.2 million
• July: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August: $4.7 million
• September: $5 million
• October: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million

Thanks, Morris, for the tip!

Edit: The stats for France came from Chris McMullen.

image by Horia Varlan

Joe Wikert has just inadvertently proven that the book publishing industry drowned most of its innovators at birth.

Earlier today Wikert published a post titled Whatever happened to innovation in the publishing industry?, and proceeded to unintentionally answer his question by example. At the beginning of his post, he cites the Kindle as the last major innovation in digital publishing:

Remember the excitement surrounding the launch of Amazon’s Kindle eight years ago? It was a clunky device, even by 2007 standards, but it was revolutionary. One of the original Kindle’s breakthrough features was the ability to download books via cellular network. The eInk display and extremely long battery life also led to its popularity despite the device’s hefty $399 price tag.

That was eight years ago and it’s hard to name even two or three other innovations that have had as significant an impact as the first-gen Kindle. Sure, the iPad was noteworthy but it didn’t exactly reinvent reading. And while today’s devices are faster and cheaper than yesterday’s they feature incremental improvements, not groundbreaking innovations.

The same can be said for all aspects of the digital publishing ecosystem, not just devices. The most interesting development over the past few years is probably the all-you-can-read subscription model. But any momentum there has been halted as Oyster is about to disappear and Amazon’s offering has no Big Five content. FWIW, I still believe in all-you-can-read models but only if they’re focused around a topic/genre and they avoid the unsustainable business model that crushed Oyster.

The Kindle was a disruptive innovation, that is true. It wasn’t the first ereader but it was the first truly successful one and it changed everything.

But there is a problem with citing the Kindle when talking about innovation in publishing, and that is the fact that the Kindle was developed by a retailer, and not by anyone in publishing.

And let’s not forget this industry is dominated by five major players whose last great idea was to conspire with Apple to try to strangle Amazon’s ebook innovation.

And to make matters worse, Wikert’s other example of innovation, the all-you-can-read subscription model, was developed by a retailer (Amazon), a document hosting company (Scribd), and Oyster. So even that innovation came from outside the industry.

While Wikert wants to know what happened to innovation in the publishing industry, his examples show that by his standards there haven’t been any major innovation in a long, long time.

But are his standards correct?

Andrew Rhomberg, founder of the ebook startup JellyBooks, has a different take. "Publishers will tell you that they are innovating like hell – but on their terms," he told me by email. "And there is some innovation through tech start-ups focused on publishing (as opposed to publishing start-ups using a bit of new tech), but a lot of oxygen has gone out of the room."

Rhomberg is referring to the general level of arch-conservatism that infests book publishing, an industry that never met a new idea that it didn’t try to smother at birth.

That conservatism is why the Kindle was invented by a retailer, and it’s also why Rhomberg says that "the start-ups that are thriving, like Wattpad, Lost My Name and others, do not depend publisher assets, content, or IP". Rhomberg’s startup is a case in point. JellyBooks doesn’t depend on publisher IP; instead it’s focused on selling publishers reader analytics as a service.

All in all, it’s rather pointless to ask what happened to innovation in book publishing when anyone who has attended a publishing conference can tell you what happened.

The book publishing industry is what happened to innovation in the book publishing industry. It is that simple, and rather than try to push this industry to be less conservative (what Wikert is trying to do), I think that our energies are better spent on looking for innovators changing the industry from the outside.

P.S. Here’s one example, and here’s another.

image by mrbill

Following a French regulator’s ruling that unlimited ebook services technically violate France’s fixed price book laws, Amazon has renamed Kindle Unlimited and changed how French publishers and authors are going to be paid.

In France, Kindle Unlimited is now known as Subscription Kindle. As far as consumers are concerned, the service will continue to function almost exactly as it did before, with the exception that Amazon is no longer promising unlimited access to more than a million ebooks and audiobooks.

Instead, subscribers are described as pooling their payments, which is used to pay publishers based on the number of pages read. According to the Subscription Kindle FAQ, the publishers get to set the per-page price for their books, a necessary step in order to comply with the Lang Law, France’s fixed price book law.

And yes, that new level of control does extend to authors and publishers who submit their titles to Kindle Unlimited through KDP Select (the French ones, at least).

Coincidentally, today’s news explains why Amazon announced in (very) late October that KDP Select payments would change to reflect specific markets. France’s unique legal framework means that Amazon cannot run Subscription Kindle under the same model as Kindle Unlimited, any more than Amazon could afford to pay the same per-page rate in India as paid elsewhere (a KU subscription in India costs under a couple dollars per month).

The digital single market cannot come soon enough, IMO.

I’m still checking to see if anyone outside of France has been informed of the change, but I do know that last week Amazon sent French authors and publishers with titles in KDP Select an email which informed them that they can set the price per page they wish to be paid charged to subscribers.

That email can be found over at KBoards, and it includes a link to a KDP help page where Amazon explains the change in detail. According to Amazon, "authors and publishers established in France have to set a price per reading unit (on KDP, per page read) for their ebook included in Abonnement Kindle."

Any author and publisher not in France is not required to set the per page fee, although the help page is framed in such a way to suggest they have the option.

Edit: They have the option, but I don’t know that they will want to bother. It has been pointed out to me that the per-page price set by authors is not what the author will be paid, but only what the reader will be charged. According to Amazon, the payment terms will not change. "KDP authors and publishers established in France are paid a share of the KDP Select Global Fund, as are all KDP authors and publishers."

In short, the change to Subscription Kindle in France is more of an accounting change than a contract change.

Actualitte, IDBoox

Smashwords announced a trio of distribution deals on Friday. Starting in the  first quarter of 2016, authors and publishers who distribute books through Smashwords will be able to get their ebooks into Tolino (ebook retailer), Odilo (library ebook service), and Yuzu (B&N Education’s failed digital textbook platform).

Tolino is a consortium ebook platform with apps, ereaders, and tablets. It powers the ebookstores of several of Germany’s lesser ebook retailers, including Thalia, Welbild, Hugendubel, Buch.de, Bücher.de, and eBook.de, as well as ebookstores in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. Collectively Tolino has around the same market share in Germany as the Kindle Store, and a smaller share in other countries.

Odilo supplies ebooks to over 2,100 public libraries in 43 countries across Europe, NA, and Latin America. They also have pilots in Australia and New Zealand, and recently announced expansion into the Philippines.  About 40% of Odilo’s ebook sales are books in English, 40% Spanish, 15% French and 5% German.

Yuzu is the digital textbook platform that B&N launched early last year. It was spun off with B&N Education this summer, and it is promoted in the 743 college bookstores that B&N Ed operates. Sadly, it is still only half functional, making this a platform you should avoid if at all possible unless you want to cause more grief for students.

image by blogefl

The NYTimes has discovered the promise of ebook apps (enhancements, embedded multimedia content, etc), but unfortunately they have yet to grasp the pitfalls.

Writing for this august publication, Alexander Alter profiled a new ebook app publisher last week. Metabook is a developer along the lines of Byook or Vook (in its original form), and the NYTimes lauds Metabook for, well, existing.

Landing a new work from Mr. Lamb is a major coup for Metabook, which was founded last year and specializes in multimedia, interactive storytelling. With an original novel by Mr. Lamb, author of best sellers like “I Know This Much Is True” and “We Are Water,” Metabook is establishing itself as a serious player in the growing marketplace for book apps.

Metabook has yet to publish a single title, but they feel they have a blockbuster in Wally Lamb’s I’ll Take You There, which will be published next year exclusively as an app on iOS.

Yes, the novel will not be released as either a print book or as a more traditional ebook; anyone who wants to read it will have to fork over their money and buy an iDevice before buying the app.

The NYTimes sees this as a bold move rather than a foolhardy one, and they also make the mistake of misjudging how long the idea of enhanced ebooks and ebook apps has been kicking about:

Mr. Lamb is the latest fiction writer to venture into the realm of interactive, multimedia book apps, an area that is still relatively new terrain for novelists. When the first wave of enhanced e-books arrived a few years ago, most stuck to areas like nonfiction, science, history and current affairs, where add-ons like interactive graphics, audio and video clips and enlargeable maps and photographs could help deepen readers’ understanding of the topic. Interactive children’s books have become another booming genre, with everything from Dr. Seuss to an app based on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians series. But when it came to adult fiction, interactive bells and whistles often seemed like noisy distractions that pulled users out of the immersive experience of reading a story.

The NYTimes isn’t the first to gush over the unfulfilled possibilities of  enhanced ebooks, and they’re also not the first to miss the fact that this field has a twenty year history of partial successes, fizzled experiments, and one-off successes.

There’s much to dislike about this piece, and it would be easy to write it off as a puff piece lacking in context and perspective. But it also includes a couple details which quietly predict limited success for Lamb’s novel, if its predecessors are anything to go by:

A few months ago, the British novelist Iain Pears released his genre-bending novel “Arcadia” as an experimental app that allows readers to toggle through 10 different characters’ story lines. It has been downloaded more than 20,000 times, outselling the hardcover edition of the novel.

Eli Horowitz, a former editor and publisher at McSweeney’s, has also found an avid audience for his interactive digital novels. His serialized app “The Silent History,” which he co-created, has been bought and downloaded more than 30,000 times.

Just so you know, Arcadia is a free ebook app which was widely profiled this summer, including in The Guardian, and The Silent History got even more attention when it was published in 2012.

And yet in spite of all the publicity, these two apps only sold about as many copies as a respectable mid-list novel (source, source) published in the US. And to make matters worse, one of the apps is free while the other costs $2 and earns most of its revenue from in-app purchases.

Edit: a reader reminded me of Touchpress, a leading app developer that recently decided to get out of selling apps. After five years and millions of apps sold, Touchpress is pivoting its business model to brand sponsorship.

So what does that tell you about the market for ebook apps?

It tells me there isn’t one, or at least there isn’t a market large enough to justify the six-digit advances that Metabook is paying authors.

This publisher plans to produce a dozen titles a year, and currently employs fifteen people, but something tells me that Metabook is going to have about as much success as Vook, a startup which launched in 2009 with the same general idea. Enhanced ebooks didn’t work for Vook, and four pivots later Vook is now Pronoun, a services company.

To be fair, Metabook could succeed where Vook failed.

But even if the time has come for ebook apps, they’re still being released in a market where few developers are making any money through app sales. Consumers have become conditioned to not buying apps, so much so that many developers have turned to either adverts or in-app purchases (see The Silent History) to make a living.

For better or worse, that is the market that Metabooks is getting in to.

How much success do you think they’ll have?

images by weefae, campbelj45ca