Amazon Trims Its On-Site Ad Network

Amazon is best-known for selling all sort of stuff out of their cavernous warehouses, but they're not above selling space on their site to other retailers. That's why they have a marketplace for 3rd-party sellers, and it's why Amazon runs adverts on its own site (the same is true for Walmart) that...

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Facebook is Readying an Instant News Notification App

Between Paper, Messenger, Save, and other apps, Facebook is constantly spinning out its features into standalone apps. Now there's a report that Facebook is working on a notification app. Business Insider reports that FB is working on a breaking news Twitter-like app where brands will be able to...

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Slant Launches a Blogging Platform Funded by a Pay-Per-Click Model

Web publishers everywhere are grappling with how to keep the lights on, much less pay the writers. Some pay per piece, some try to avoid paying writers much if anything at all, but Slant has hit on a model that should be familiar to ebook publishers. From Digiday: Slant, a new platform-based...

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Morning Coffee – 12 August 2015

Here are nine stories to read this morning. Can You Afford to Get Published? (Maine Crime Writers, The Passive Voice) The ethics of modern web ad-blocking (Marco.org) Facebook, Email Most Effective for Crowdfunding Books on Inkshares (Publishing Perspectives) How to double your reading speed...

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Buys eBook Assets From MeeGenius

HMH continued its tech acquisitions today with the purchase of the assets of MeeGenius. Details of the deal have not been disclosed, but the press release does note that HMH has "acquired select eBook and technology assets" from MeeGenius. Launched in 2010, MeeGenius offered a subscription ebook...

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German eBook Sales up 12.8% in the First Half of 2015

The AAP may have reported a 9.3% decline in ebook sales in the first four months of 2015, but the news coming from Germany is much more positive. BuchReport.de has shared a few details from a recent market survey from Boersenverein and GfK. A grand total of 25,000 German consumers were surveyed,...

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Kindle eBooks with Improved Typography Use New KFX File Format

When Amazon first announced in May that the Kindle platform would be getting prettier ebooks, they left a lot of questions unanswered, including exactly how Amazon was pulling it off. Yesterday's update has answered some of those questions. Reports are coming in from a couple different directions...

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Sargent Promoted in Holtzbrinck Reshuffling

Macmillan CEO John Sargent is getting his justly deserved reward/punishment for his role in the 2010 ebook price fixing conspiracy: he's being promoted. The Bookseller and PW are reporting that Macmillan's parent company, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, is going through a reorganization, and Sargent...

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The Guardian: eBooks Are (Still) Making Us Stupid

If there's one thing that certain elements of the literati like more than discussing which book will be the next masterpiece, it's to lament on how the web and or ebooks are making us stupid. This lament is a variation of the centuries-old cenotechnophobia trend. It crops up every year or so, in...

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Infographic: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Fonts

Fonts make the publishing world go round, but there's more to a font than just characters on a screen. As you can see in the following infographic from Cartridge Discount, fonts used for the web differ from ones designed for print (but we already know that). This graphic also explains the...

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Morning Coffee – 11 August 2015

Here are seven stories to read this morning. Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write | Comment is free (The Guardian, The Passive Voice) How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands (WSJ) Meet the Kindlepreneurs (Telegraph)  Scared money...

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Oops! Kindle Voyage & Basic Kindle Got an Update, Too!

When I wrote about the Kindle's new software update earlier this evening, I forgot to check support pages for all the Kindle models. It turns out that both the Kindle Voyage and the basic Kindle that Amazon launched along side it were both updated today. They also got the new Bookerly font,...

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Kindle Paperwhite Update v5.6.5 Adds Support for Bookerly, New Typography

Amazon has rolled out a new update for the Kindle Paperwhite, but not everyone will be celebrating. The update adds support for the typography features Amazon announced in May as well as the Bookerly font that we first saw in February, but it's not coming to all the Kindle Paperwhite models. The...

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Toronto Public Library’s Book Vending Machines Are Like a Better Buggy Whip in the Era of Cars

Teleread tipped me to a new program from Toronto Public Library which won't be going anywhere. It seems the library is thinking about installing book vending machines in Toronto's Union Station. From the Huffington Post: Checking out books from the library is about to get easier for commuters. The...

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Audible is Sponsoring the 2015 Los Angeles Podcast Festival

When Audible hired the former VP of programming at NPR, I speculated that it was a sign that they wanted to get into distributing more original programming. Today's news may confirm that intent. Examiner.com reports that Audible has signed up to be the corporate sponsor for this year's Los Angeles...

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Report: Ad Blocking Expected to Cost Publishers $22 Billion This Year

A new report from Adobe and PageFair has given the advertising industry 22 billion reasons to clean up its act. The NYTimes has picked up a story this morning on PageFair's 2015 Ad Blocking Report. The report contains a lot of handwavium, but according to the Times: Ad-blocking will lead to almost...

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Apple Fall Launch Event Tipped for 9 September

With a refreshed iPhone 6, larger iPad, and an updated iPad Mini rumored in the works, the tech blogosphere is eagerly awaiting Apple's press event this fall. And now we can start counting down the days. John Paczkowski writes over at Buzzfeed that his sources are saying that the new hardware will...

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Morning Coffee – 10 August 2015

Here are nine stories to read this morning. 5 Common Reading Mistakes You're Making That Could Ruin Your Literary Life (Bustle) Amazon Tightens Its Grip on Digital Comics Distribution (PW) Barnes and Noble Stops Paying Marketplace Sellers (eCommerce Bytes) Clippy has come back to kill us all...

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Opera Acquires a WhiteLabel Netflix-Like App Service, Considers Selling Itself

Web tech company Opera announced on Saturday that it had missed its second-quarter revenue forecasts and was thinking of finding a buyer, but that hasn't stopped its strategic acquisitions. TechCrunch caught the press release on Friday, reporting that: Browser maker Opera today announced that it...

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Jet.com Encounters Turbulence With Customers, Retailers

For the past year marketplace startup Jet.com has been touted as a serious rival to Amazon (with cheaper prices, to boot), but the month since its public launch has shown that Jet.com is only a threat to itself. The WSJ reports that Jet.com is catching flack from other retailers for its mishandling...

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There’s an Audible Group of Authors Who Are Unhappy About the Audiobook Market

There's been a lot of talk in the mainstream press over the past few months about the blue sky opportunities for audiobooks, but reports on the ground are forecasting much stormier weather. A few days ago the editor of The Passive Voice blog posted a note concerning Audible. It seems that his wife...

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Kindle Unlimited Reaches New Milestone: One Million Titles

It looks like the recent brouhaha over Amazon changing the payment terms in Kindle Unlimited isn't having much of an impact. News broke on Thursday that the German branch of Kindle Unlimited now offered a catalog of a million titles which subscribers can read for 10 euros per month. I checked, and...

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Buck Rogers, Sherlock Holmes, and How Trademark Can Trump Copyright

A recent story over at Ars Technica has reminded me that there can be more to a copyright lawsuit than just copyright. Ars reports that a movie studio has filed suit to get Armageddon 2419 A.D, the original Buck Rogers story, declared as public domain. The studio wants to make a movie based on the...

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Mirimax Pays Off Conan Doyle Estate to Settle Suit Over Sherlock Holmes Movie

While some copyright lawsuits go to court, often times the defendant finds it cheaper to settle rather than fight. Here we have another example. In May of this year the Conan Doyle estate sued Miramax, Penguin Random House over the movie Mr Holmes. The movie is based on a ten-year-old novel...

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There Are Now Over 24,000 Distinct Android Devices In Use From 1,300 Brands

It is universally acknowledged that the Android market is significantly more fragmented than iOS, but I doubt anyone thought that the market is quite this messy. OpenSignal is a company that collates cell network reception data and posts it online. This company gets the data from users who install...

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Morning Coffee – 7 August 2015

Here are five  stories to read this morning. An Accomplished Writer Takes a ‘MasterClass’ From a Gargantuan Selling Writer (Observer) Business Musings: Price Wars and Victims (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) LinkedIn now gets 45 percent of its ad revenue from native ads (Digiday) Looks Like Facebook Is...

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28% of Brits Own eReaders, But Far More Own Tablets and Smartphones

According to a new survey from Ofcom, reports of the death of the ereader have been greatly exaggerated. The UK's equivalent of the FCC has published its annual Communications Market Report this week, and that report shows that 28% of British hoiseholds now own ereaders. That figure continues to...

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Simon & Schuster Reported Profits Up, Sales Down in Second Quarter

Simon & Schuster released its second quarter financial report today, and the news was both bad and good. The publisher reported its fourth straight quarterly decline in revenues even as their profits grew. Sales were down $12 million, to $199 million, while profits were up $3 million, to $27...

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Privacy Badger Blocks the Sneakiest Kinds of Online Tracking

If you value your online privacy the chances are you use Adblock Plus, Ghostery (or one of its competitors), and the Keyboard Privacy Chrome extension. Here's another extension to install. On Thursday the Electronic Freedom Foundation announced the release of Privacy Badger 1.0. While there are...

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AAP Reports eBook Sales Down 9.3% in First Third of 2015

The AAP's latest monthly report lends credence to the premise that the major publishers are feeling the sting of high ebook prices. The Association of American Publishers draws its data from 1,200 publishers. They no longer offer much in the way of specifics most months, but this month they did...

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Kobo for iPad, iPhone v7.8 Adds New Sign-in Option

Kobo released a new version of its iOS app, but I'm not sure what has changed. According to the changelog the new app adds a way to group ebooks by series. It also reportedly adds an option to log in with your Google+ account. While the former feature is going to be useful, the latter feature...

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Kris Rusch: Amazon is in a Price War With Publishers

Amazon surprised many pundits over the past year as they signed deal after deal that gave publishers control over ebook prices, but now I think we know why. While Amazon was publicly fighting with Hachette last summer and fall, it also quietly negotiated a new "agency lite" contract with Simon...

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BQ Cervantes Open Source eReader is Back in Stock

When I introduced you to the Cervantes ereader from the Spanish device maker bq a couple months ago, my joy at finding an ereader that runs open source software was tempered by the fact that it was out of stock. Today I have some good news for you: the Cervantes is back in stock on the bq... Read...

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Morning Coffee – 6 August 2015

Here are eight stories to read this morning. Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name (Jezebel) iTunes is Illegal Under UK Copyright Law (TorrentFreak) In the publishing industry, Ursula K. Le Guin wants less profiteering, more freedom (TeleRead) NYC Schools Passing...

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Why College Libraries Are Going Bookless

We've all read the news stories about this college or that college removing books from their libraries. Stanford was one of the first to go bookless back in 2010, and many more colleges have followed suit. This includes Florida Polytechnic University, which opened a bookless library last fall, and...

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NYPL and Library Simplified

New York is a place known for risk taking, for innovation, for not being satisfied with the status quo. Nowhere is that as evident in the library world as with the New York Public Library, and their current projects to reshape the eBooks in libraries landscape. If you’ve ever tried to borrow ebooks...

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LibreOffice 5.0 Now Available

Libre Office is an open-source office suite available on many platforms (even Android) and capable of editing word files, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. Libre Office has been maintained by The Document Foundation ever since it was spun off of Open Office five years ago, and a new version is...

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PRH Opens South African eBookstore Focused on Local Titles

Penguin Random House might have no interest in staying in the Australian retail market, but South Africa is a different matter. Memeburn reported on Friday that Penguin Random House's South African subsidiary had partnered with Snapplify to launch a niche ebookstore which focused on locally...

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ALA Releases New Digital Privacy Guidelines

The American Library Association announced on Tuesday that it has published a new set of privacy guidelines. Spurred on by last fall's revelations that Adobe was spying on readers, the ALA has come up with new set of best practices for vendors and librarians to follow so they can better respect the...

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eCampus Confirms My Report That They Have a Virtual Bookstore Contract With UWM

Two days ago I broke the news that the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee had awarded a virtual bookstore contract to textbook retailer eCampus, and today eCampus has confirmed my report. eCampus put out a press release on Wednesday morning that confirms every detail I reported on Monday. eCampus...

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Kindle Plus Raspberry Pi Equals Fridge Magnet

We've seen ereaders repurposed as weather stations, a netbook, and even a project status board, and now one has made its way to your refrigerator. Last week a hacker by the name of Peter Vojtek published the details of his latest project. He took a Kindle 4 and a Raspberry Pi and turned them into...

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Morning Coffee – 5 August 2015

Here are six stories to read this morning. ALA Releases “Library Privacy Guidelines for E-book Lending and Digital Content Vendors” (INFOdocket) Can You Rob a Little Free Library? (BookRiot) Contributor: Is No Ads Enough? (LinkedIn Pulse) Matchstick, The More Open Chromecast, Destroyed By DRM,...

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Feedly Announces Publisher Kit w\ Better Branding, Discovery, and 100% Ad Revenues

Feedly has announced its response to Apple News and FB Instant Articles, and much to my surprise it looks like almost only no one has noticed. In a blog post dated Friday, Feedly posted a list of nine steps that web publishers can take to better format their RSS feed so that Feedly's tens of...

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Bookmate Partners with Tigo Mobile in Paraguay and Guatemala

Bookmate's long promised expansion into Latin America has commenced. The social reading service announced on Tuesday that it had partnered with a telecom, Millicom, to launch Bookmate's service in Paraguay and Guatemala. The service is being handled by Tigo Mobile, the largest telecom in those two...

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Infographic: Book Plus Dessert Pairing Guide

Whether it is turkish delight (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), butter beer, (Harry Potter) , or chocolate (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) some deserts have become closely identified with classic books. The following infographic pairs popular books with a desert mentioned in the book. In...

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Penguin Random House Launches LitFlash, a BookBub Competitor

There are approximately eleventy bajillion websites that help you find cheap reads, and if that's not enough then you might be interested the latest project from Penguin Random House. Yesterday a reader tipped me to the launch of LitFlash, a new service from PRH which, from what I can see from the...

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Japanese Readers Spend the Most on eBooks, And Other Unsubstantiated Clickbait

So yesterday Business Insider posted a nifty-looking chart that claimed Japanese readers would be spending the most on ebooks this year, followed closely by Brits. As you can in the chart at right, the Japanese will spend an average of $86.50 on ebooks. eBook users in the UK are expected to spend...

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Morning Coffee – 4 August

Here are five stories to read this morning. Barnes & Noble Education to Consider Digital Takeovers (Bloomberg Business) Daily Dot Latest To 'Keep Conversation Moving Forward' By Not Letting Site Visitors Comment At All (Techdirt) Franklin integrated ‘Peanuts’ 47 years ago today. Here’s how a...

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Aldiko Plans to Release Reading App for iPad, iPhone.

One of the best ebook apps for Android will shortly be coming to the iPad and iPhone. Details are still scarce, but on Thursday the official Aldiko account tweeted: Aldiko for iOS is coming soon! Want to be the 1st to be notified when it's available, sign up Aldiko.com — Aldiko (@Aldiko) July 30,...

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College Textbook Prices Have Increased Over 1,000 Percent Since 1977

While reporting on eCampus's new virtual store earlier today I told you that college students had cut their textbook spending in college bookstores by as much as 23% over the past few years. In perfect serendipity, NBC has published an article that explains part of the reason why: According to...

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eCampus Beats Out Amazon for a Five-Year Contract to Run UW-Milwaukee’s Virtual Bookstore

Amazon has been getting a lot of press attention over the past 6 months for the virtual bookstores it runs at Purdue University and several other US universities, but it is not the only player in that market. Nor is it largest, so today's news should not be as surprising as it is going to... Read...

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Penguin Random House Sells Its Australian Online Bookstore to Larger Rival

The prevailing wisdom may be that publishers need to have more and better connections to consumers, but apparently that doesn't apply in Australia. Smart Company, Sydney Morning Herald, and other sources reporting that  PRH Australia has sold its online bookstore Bookworld to Booktopia. The terms...

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Penguin to Let Londoners Read eBooks for Free on the Underground

Publishing is going through a "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks" phase, and one idea that has stuck is letting people read ebooks for free in public places. The Drum reports that Random Penguin UK  has partnered with the London Underground and its contractor, Virgin Wifi, to let...

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Amazon is Hiring Audible Managers in India

Fresh from the successful launch of Audible Unlimited in Japan, Amazon has turned its attention to the burgeoning audiobook market in India. A couple new job listings have come across my desk this morning which have tipped me to the news that Amazon is planning to expand its audiobook empire into...

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Morning Coffee – 3 August 2015

Here are six stories to read this morning. Barry and Joe and More Authors Guild Nonsense (A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, The Passive Voice) Bitdefender Blocks Anti-Piracy Website as Malware (TorrentFreak) Intellectual property ABCs: Read this fun guide and take the quizzes. Can the Wicked Witch...

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Hachette Book Group Reported Revenues Down 7.8% in the First Half

Following a first quarter report of a 12.3% decline in revenue, Hachette Book Group announced on Thursday that its revenues in the first half of 2015 were down by 7.8%. Hachette's parent company Lagardère released its first-half of the year results last week. Company revenues were down 1.8%, to 3.3...

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Flexenable Has Moved On From Flexible eReaders to Wearables (Video)

The wearables market may have decided in favor of high quality screens over flexible and durable screens but that hasn't stopped companies like Flexenable from bucking the trend. This Plastic Logic spin off was at the IDTechEx at Printed Electronics Europe in May, where it showed off the latest...

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Spain’s Google Tax is Proving Immensely Successful in Its Goal of Suppressing Debate and Free Speech

When Spain passed its Google Tax in October 2014, the obvious flaws in forcing websites to pay for the privilege of linking to content made me wonder whether the Spanish government or someone had an ulterior motive in getting the law passed. Over the past week it has become clear why the Spanish...

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Yotaphone Won’t be Coming to the US – Except It Will

Word is getting around today that Yota Devices, makers of the dual-screen smartphone the Yotaphone, will not be launching it in the US. Having failed to secure a retail or telecom partner in the US, Yota Devices had announced earlier this year that they would launch the US version of the phone on...

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Adobe Digital Editions Now Coming With Free Bonus Bloatware

Adobe isn't making much money off of its Epub-reading apps, but they've found a new way to cash in. A reader has tipped me to the news that Adobe is now bundling Norton Security Scan with the Adobe Digital Editions 4 installer file. Unsuspecting users who only want to read an ebook are now prompted...

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LinkedIn Wants to Build a Syndicated Content Network

For the past couple years LinkedIn has been using tech developed by its Pulse subsidiary to help its members publish articles both on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and now they're looking to formalize that "elsewhere" component. Re/code reports that LinkedIn wants to set up syndication network which...

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B&N Nook v4.1.0 for iPad, iPhone Adds Account Management

Barnes & Noble continued to keep us guessing about the fate of the Nook platform this week when it released an update to its iOS app. The new version of the app features improved  book listing pages, new settings options, and new ways to manage your ebook library. But most importantly, readers...

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What The Authors Guild’s Mary Rasenberger Isn’t Saying About Amazon

No one at The Authors Guild or the American Bookseller's Association was able to find an hour in their busy schedules to publicly debate their recent calls for an antitrust investigation into Amazon's business practices, but they did find time this week to conduct a lengthy interview of The Authors...

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Infographic: Famous Authors and Their Weird Jobs

All famous writers were born writing geniuses, but many still required day jobs while they found their way from obscurity to success. Kurt Vonnegut sold Saab cars, and Harper Lee was a reservation clerk for Eastern Air Lines. J.D. Salinger worked as an entertainment director on a Swedish cruise...

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Morning Coffee – 31 July 2015

Here are eight stories to read this morning. 10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them) (io9) Advice for Authors from a Bookseller’s Perspective (WriterUnboxed) Australian Librarians Start 'Cooking For Copyright' Campaign To Change Law For Unpublished Works (Techdirt)...

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RIAA and Other Groups Make Not-So-Empty Threats Over Cnet’s Download Site

When it comes to trade groups making public attacks on their Lillian du jour, there's Authors United and its small cabal of Amazon-haters with a noisy but ultimately meaningless letter to the DoJ, and then there is the RIAA and its much quieter threat to Viacom over one of its subsidiaries'...

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Comcast to Invest in Buzzfeed, The Verge?

Verizon owns AOL and its blog properties. Viacom/Paramount owns S&S/CBS and its online news sites. And Newscorp owns the WSJ, HarperCollins, etc. And now Comcast wants a piece of Buzzfeed and Vox Media - or so Re/code reports. NBCUniversal is close to a deal to invest $250 million in BuzzFeed,...

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Audible Onebook Lets You Share, Recommend Audiobooks With Your Friends

With the Audio Publishers Association estimating that the audiobook market was worth $1.47 billion last year (and growing fast, according to independent reports), more people are using audiobooks than ever. And between the new program launched today and the recently launched Audible Unlimited...

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The Adblocking Revolution Is Not Months Away – It’s Happening Right Now

Apple's announcement that iOS 9 would include ad-blocking and tracker-blocking as a system level feature is widely expected to shake up the mobile advertising industry when iOS 9 ships later this year, but few seem to realize that the new blocking features are already having an impact. I was...

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Amazon Has Run Afoul of Germany’s Fixed Price Book Laws – Again

Last week BuchReport.de broke the news that Bundesgerichtshof, the German Federal High Court, has ruled that Amazon had violated Germany's fixed price book laws when it gave a 5 euro credit to customers who traded in books. That credit could be used to buy anything on Amazon.de, including books,...

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IDC Says Consumers Aren’t Buying Tablets, But We Can’t Trust Their Numbers

IDC has a new report out this week which shows that global tablet shipments dipped by 7% last quarter, but you're going to have to take that number with a kilo of salt. According to the report, 44.7 million tablets were shipped in the second quarter of 2015. Apple continued to lead the pack with...

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Amazon to be Awarded $65 Million Contract to Supply eBooks to NYC Schools

Amazon is about to expand its school bookstore empire beyond running unstores for several US universities. Capital New York reports that the NYC Board of Education is about to award Amazon a five-year, $64.5 million contract for the retailer to run an ebook marketplace where public schools would...

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Minion Ipsum is a Fun Alternative to the Usual Filler Text

Got nothing to say but still need to fill up space? Then you might want to check out Minion Ipsum. Inspired by the little yellow henchmen from Despicable Me, Minion Ipsum is the filler text of choice for discerning villains everywhere. Rather than the usual gibberish Latin, Minion Ipsum offers a...

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Scribd Updates Its App for iPad & iPhone, Still Doesn’t Know What It’s Going to Do With Librify

Scribd is catching up with the technical requirements of streaming multiple kinds of content from a single app, but they're still stumbling over how to run their business. Scribd rolled out a new update today for its iOS app which improves the reading and listening experience. The new app has more...

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Morning Coffee – 29 July 2015

Here are nine stories to read this morning. Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy (Remains of the Day) Another wake-up call from Amazon as they serve author interests better than publishers have (The Shatzkin Files) Forget "Lorem Ipsum", go for "Minions Ipsum" (minionsipsum.com ) How...

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The Authors Guild: Diamonds Are Forever, But Publishing Contracts Should Not Be

The Authors Guild continued its false flag operation today with a new post on termination clauses in author contracts. For the past couple months The Authors Guild has been running a series of blog posts on the author-unfriendly parts of boilerplate publishing contracts. They call it their Fair...

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Chrome Extension Keeps Sites From Identifying You By Your Typing Habits

If you value your privacy online then chances are you use a tracker-blocking plugin like Ghostery as well as and ad-blocker. Here's another Chrome extension that you should add to your browser. Developed by Paul Moore, Keyboard Privacy picks up where Ghostery leaves off. This extension is designed...

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Kobo Signs New Retail Partner in Mexico

Hot on the heels of the news that Kobo was continuing a relationship with indie US booksellers comes the news that Kobo has a couple new partners in Mexico. Kobo announced on Tuesday that it has signed the media retailer chain Librerias Gandhi and the publisher/retailer Libreria Porrúa as retail...

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Kobo, ABA Renew Partnership For Another Year Even Though Indie Booksellers Don’t Sell Many eBooks

If you were surprised in late May when Kobo revived its defunct affiliate partnership with US indie booksellers then this next piece of news will knock your socks off. Late last month the American Bookseller Association announced that its contract with Kobo was being extended for another year....

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Audible’s Technical Issues Aren’t a Curse of Amazon’s Monopoly, But an Opportunity

While it's customary to gripe about the terrible service offered by a monopoly, some forget that a monopoly, especially a digital monopoly, is not nearly the sinecure that they assume. Dr Joshua Kim has been blogging over at Inside Higher Ed, where he's been using his podium to rail against Amazon....

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HarperCollins UK Signs Deal With Amazon

No one is willing to cop to the specifics, but The Bookseller reported this morning that the UK sub for NewsCorp's book publishing arm has inked a new contract with Amazon: HarperCollins UK has concluded what its chief executive Charlie Redmayne described as “tough negotiations” with Amazon over...

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Google: 69% of Website Visitors Will Leave a Site When Prompted to Install a Mobile App

If you've ever browsed a site from a mobile device and been annoyed when pestered to install the site's app, you're not alone. Last Thursday Google released a new report that shows that if there's one thing that mobile web users hate more than a website bloated with adverts, it's getting harassed...

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Infographic: The Waterstones Best-Seller Formula

Do you know how there's a formula for choosing the title of your great American novel? Now there's a similar formula for how to write a best-seller. Waterstones has crunched the numbers on the ten best-selling titles for each of the past ten years, and they say they've identified all the...

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Morning Coffee – 27 July 2015

Here are seven stories to read this morning. 3 Typography Tips For A More Comfortable Read (Medium) AlphaSmart: A History of One of Ed-Tech's Favorite (Drop-Kickable) Writing Tools (HackEducation) Anatomy of a Copyright Coup: Jamaica's Public Domain Plundered (Electronic Frontier Foundation) The...

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Today in Non-News: Twitter is Deleting Stolen Jokes on Copyright Grounds

The Verge has discovered today that Twitter will actually remove a tweet in response to a DMCA take down notice. Much to their surprise, they wrote: It now appears Twitter is using its legal authority to crack down on these tweet-stealers. A number of tweets have been deleted on copyright grounds...

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Google Brings Its 360-Degree Story-Telling App to the iPhone and iPad(*)

Google has just brought the next great stillborn idea in story-telling to Apple's mobile platform. Launched last year on Motorola devices, Google Spotlight Stories is a platform which enables creators to tell stories which put the viewer in the center of the action. Not quite a movie (TechCrunch),...

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Amazon Launches an Audible Unlimited Service in Japan

The two-month-old reports that Amazon is going to launch an unlimited audiobook service in Germany are still nothing more than rumors, but the service which launched in Japan earlier this month is considerably more real. Last week Amazon launched an unlimited audiobook service in Japan which (for...

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Infographic: Summer Reading Habits

With summer almost gone (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) there's not much time left to meet our summer reading goals. And as you can see from the following infographic, some Goodreads members have set high goals. A few weeks back Goodreads conducted a poll to learn more about its members’...

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TopJoy Reminds Us Why Some eReaders Never See the Light of Day

When I first reported a couple weeks ago about a Chinese OEM selling off-brand ereaders on Amazon, I wondered why I had never heard of many of the devices from companies like teXet, Inves, Dfrance, Yarvik, etc. Now that I've owned one for a few days, I rather wish I had remained ignorant and saved...

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Wappwolf Automator Lets You Email eBooks to Your Kindle From Box, Google Drive, Dropbox

Late last month Teleread introduced us to BookDrop, a nifty tool that let you automatically convert ebooks in your Dropbox account and send them to your Kindle account simply by putting the files in a certain folder. It is a nifty tool, but it only works with Dropbox. If you have another could...

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Calibre v2.33 Adds Support for Sony’s 13″ ePaper Writing Slate (DPT-S1)

The ebook library management tool calibre is updated weekly, so I usually don't remark on what has changed from one release to the next. But when the latest changelog showed up in my feed reader this morning, I decided to make an exception. The latest update to calibre add a bunch of bug fixes, a...

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Why Play Half-Life on Your Smartwatch When You Can Play Doom?

There's a story going around today about a new hack for Android Wear smartwatches, but it has me less than impressed. Kotaku reported earlier today that an industrious hacker had gotten Half-life, that venerable almost-twenty-year-old game, to run on the LG G Watch. It's not very playable, but it...

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Fun Fact: Amazon May be “Bigger” Than Walmart, But Its Growth is Slowing

Amazon shocked everyone  last night when they announced that they had (perhaps accidentally) turned a profit last quarter. This drove Amazon's stock price up in after-hours trading, leading some to report on the story with the clickbait title that Amazon is bigger than Walmart. Given that Walmart...

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TeXet TB-578 8″ in Russia

With price tags around $250, the Pocketbook InkPad and the Onyx Boox i86 are two very expensive options should you want an ereader with a plus-sized screen, but they're not the only options on the market. The Russian gadget maker Alkotel has unveiled the teXet TB-578 in Russia. This 8" ereader only...

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Morning Coffee – 24 July 2015

Here are six stories to read this morning. APA reports continued strong audio sales (Library Journal) Aussie Study: Infringers Spend More On Content Than Non-Infringers (Techdirt) Diversion Adds Print Program for Self-Pubbed Authors (PW) Ebook Library Services For Authors. An Alliance of...

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Amazon Now Promising Credits for Apple’s Antitrust Settlement

If you bought an agency priced ebook from Amazon in 2010, 2011, or 2012 then you're in for a payday. A reader has tipped me to the news (and several people on Twitter have confirmed) that Amazon is now sending out emails to its Kindle customers. I don't have one yet, but I'm told the... Read More...

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New Survey Shows eBook Buyers in the UK Outnumber Pirates By Fourteen to one

The aggressive/hoarder ebook pirate is often held up as the boogeyman of authors and publishers but that individual is rarer than you might think. A new report (PDF) released this month by the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) showed that ebooks were the one type media least likely to be...

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Flipboard Raises $50 Million, Releases Updated App for iPad, iPhone

Some would quake at the thought of having both Facebook and Apple as competitors, but not Flipboard. The news aggregator told VentureBeat Wednesday that it had raised $50 million in a new capital funding round. "I can confirm that we closed a $50 million round with a new institutional investor," a...

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Yuzu v2.0 for iPad Adds Many Basic Features the App Should Have Had At Launch

Barnes & Noble's digital textbook app of last resort got an update this week which may have fixed some of problems plaguing the platform since it launched last spring. According to the changelog, Wednesday's Yuzu update added a number of basic features like cross-device syncing, editable notes,...

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Morning Coffee – 23 July 2015

Here are six stories to read this morning. Chain, Chest, Curse: Combating Book Theft in Medieval Times (medievalbooks) Could defenders of Amazon actaually be the saner ones? (TeleRead) Reactions to John Havel's article in The Hustle (Book Thingo) Reading comics on cell phones changes the way the...

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Amazon Detractors Invited to Debate Its Monopolistic Bookselling on Twitter, But None Show Up

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come, as the line from the poem goes, and that almost sums up what we saw on Twitter today. Earlier today LitChat held a TwitterChat on the #LitChat tag, and invited Authors United and its allies (ABA, The Authors Guild, the AAR) to discuss Au's recent...

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Amazon Sponsors Memoir Writing Contest in Germany

If you're old enough to remember WWII and write well in German, then Amazon would like to talk to you. Self-Publisher Bibel reports that Amazon has partnered with the National Geographic channel in Germany to sponsor a writing contest titled "Untold Stories: Memoirs of the Second World War". As you...

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On Germans Preferring Print, Or the Wrong Way to Report on Survey Data

Publishing Perspectives has a new article up this week in a recent consumer survey in Germany on reading and book buying habits. It's part two of two, and if you read the article then i strongly urge you to read both at the same time. You see, PP made a mistake when they reported on... Read More...

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Streaming eBook Service Skoobe Gains Support for the Illumina eReader

For the longest time Amazon's Kindle Unlimited has had one unique advantage over its competition: it was the only streaming(*) ebook service that worked on an ereader with an E-ink screen. That changed this week. The Dutch ereader maker Icarus has released a new version of its Illumina ereader. The...

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Signs Some Kind of Agency Deal With Amazon, Apple, Google

When I broke the news on Monday that US publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt might have signed an agency deal with Amazon, I said that I didn't think it had happened _yet_, and I advised that this story was worth watching. It looks like I was right on both accounts. Publisher's Lunch caught the...

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Morning Coffee – 22 July 2015

Here are six stories to read this morning. Diversity in Romance: Not just buying, but reading diverse books (Dear Author) In Which I Rant About How Writers Do Not Respect Their Readers (Shantnu Tiwari) OMG, stop (Nocturnal Lives) RANT: John Havel of The Hustle plagiarises a romance author in the...

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Google Release Drive Plugin For Microsoft Office

There's a crazy amount of cooperation breaking out in the online office market. First Dropbox ties its cloud storage service into MS Office in April, and now Google does the same with Google Drive. Google launched a new MS Office plugin today that lets Office for Windows users open any Word, Excel,...

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Google Play Books v2.5 for iPad, iPhone Adds Literata Font, Google Drive Integration

Google is playing catch up today. They've released a new version of their ebook app for iOS today which adds many of the features that the Play Books Android app has been getting over the past few months. According to the change log, this update adds the Literata font Google announced back in May...

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Booktrack Raises Another $5 Million, Still Can’t Explain Why Consumers Would Want a Sound Track in an eBook

Here's a bit of news that has me scratching my head. PW reports that Booktrack has raised another $5 million in a capital funding round led by investments from COENT Venture Partners and Sparkbox Ventures.  Counting the $3 million raised last April and in earlier rounds, that brings Booktrack's...

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Confessions of a Kindle Store Content Farmer, Pt Two: It’s Harder Than It Looks

When The Hustle published an editorial by a Kindle Store content farmer last Friday, they promised to follow up that post with one that details just how easy it is to game the Kindle Store. That follow up was published yesterday, and I'm not sure it's worth reading. While the first (and possibly...

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Infographic: eBooks Made Up 5.5% of Dutch Book Sales in Q2 2015

CB Logistics, the leading ebook distributor in the Netherlands, has just published their latest report on the sate of the Dutch ebook market. The company formerly known as Centraal Boekhuis has been releasing its quarterly stats reports as infographics for the past couple years. The latest 'graphic...

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Morning Coffee – 21 July 2015

With much of the internet apparently taking this week off, the reading list is short and sweet this morning. 20 Home Pages, 500 Trackers Loaded: Media Succumbs to Monitoring Frenzy (Monday Note) Delivering Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ to Readers World-Wide (WSJ) Don’t Believe the Hyperbole,...

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Amazon Follow Lets Authors Connect With Fans

Whether it's through an email list or social media following, one of the best ways for an author to pitch their next book is through direct promotion to their fans. And now Amazon has provided another way to do just that. The retailer has quietly launched a new way for readers follow their...

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Did HMH Sign an Agency eBook Contract With Amazon? (No)

For as long as we've had agency ebook pricing, we've always talked about the same six publishers having control over their ebook prices: Hachette, Macmillan, S&S, HarperCollins, Penguin, and Random House. Even after the PRH merger, it was still the same six names: Hachette, Macmillan, S&S,...

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What Are the Best SpellCheck and Grammar Check Browser Extensions?

We're still quite a ways away from IBM's Watson Tone Analyzer growing into a developmental editor bot, but luckily for us simpler tools are very common. Gizmodo has a post up today that reminded me that there are readily available tools that could improve our online writing, ones which we should be...

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Entitle Books to Close Tomorrow, But It Will have Little Impact On the Subscription eBook Market

There's been no formal announcement email from the startup, but Entitle Books has a notice on its website that it will be shutting down tomorrow, 21 July. I'm still waiting for Entitle to respond to my press query with info on what's going to happen next, so at this time I can only suggest that......

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Macmillan Parent Company Holtzbrinck Abandons DRM in Germany

The end of DRM is nigh. Buch Report and Lesen.net are reporting on Monday morning that the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is dropping encryption DRM from the ebooks it publishes in Germany. Holtzbrinck is the parent company of Macmillan (which operates in the US, UK, and Australia), and in...

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B&N Names Frederic Argir As Head of E-Commerce, Nook

Barnes & Noble has decided to get serious and do something about the bungled relaunch of its website. The retailer has appointed Frederic Argir as chief digital officer. According to his LinkedIn profile, Argir has spent the past three odd years at Toys-r-Us as first the VP of e-commerce and...

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Google Play Books v3.5 Lets You Sync Your Notes and Bookmarks to Google Drive

Google rolled out a new update to its Android ebook app on Thursday which delivered on new features that Google has been hinting about for the past couple months. Google Play Books v3.5 has a whole new interface, a new book discovery page, tweaks to how your library is displayed, and more. To...

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Morning Coffee – 20 July 2015

Here are ten stories to read this Monday morning. Are commenters really loyal 'readers' and does it matter? (Talking New Media) An exercise for the reader in integration and modularity (Baldur Bjarnason) How Libraries Can Compete With Google And Amazon and Serve Low-Income Americans (CityLab) Joe's...

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PocketRocket Clears Out Your Pocket Backlog By Emailing You One Saved Article a Day

If you've been overwhelmed by a deluge of articles saved in Pocket then I have the solution. PocketRocket is a new service that is designed to make you work your way through your backlog of saved articles. It ties into Pocket to pull and email you a single article every day, after which it archives...

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Google Contributor Lets You “Directly Support” Sites, and Other Misleading Statements

When Google launched Google Contributor last November they promoted the service with the pitch that users would be able to directly support the websites they visited most. The idea most commonly expressed in the media coverage at the time was that users would subscribe and pay anywhere from $1 to...

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Comparison Review: Onyx Boox i86ML and Pocketbook Inkpad

Everyone and their life coach has released a 6" ereader, but 8" models are still the rarer than hen's teeth. I have two different large screen ereaders sitting on my desk right now, and while they have the same screen size and share certain design elements, they could not be more different. The...

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IBM Watson Tone Analyzer

Writers have all sorts of automated tools at their disposal, including spellcheck, grammar check, word macros, Draftback, and (one day, hopefully) bots, and IBM wants to add another tool to our toolbox. On Thursday the IBM Watson team announced a new spin off from IBM's ongoing bid to invent...

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Confessions of a Kindle Store Content Farmer

The internet has been blamed for killing off any number of categories of how to categories, but it doesn't seem to be bothering "authors" like the following. The Hustle has a piece up today that offers a behind the scenes look at one author's ghost-writing operation. This unnamed author started out...

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The Asymmetrica Browser Extension Boosts Your Reading Speed – by Adding Whitespace?

As anyone who makes or reads ebooks can tell you, kerning (the spacing between words on a page/screen) can have a keen impact on readability. Wide irregular spaces between words (like what is currently inflicted upon Kindle owners) can make for a more difficult to read text than if the spacing is...

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The Authors Guild Shows That Piracy is Not a Major Issue, Still Wants to Break the Internet

Last week The Authors Guild sent an open letter to Congress, asking that the DMCA be changed so that ISPs shouldered the responsibility for keeping pirated content off the web (rather than copyright holders, where it belongs). When I covered the story, I addressed the point that the proposal was...

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Infographic: 50 Inspirational Quotes from Literature

Books aren't just a pretty way to decorate your walls; did you know they can also be a source of inspiration? It's true! Here are 50 inspirational quotes from books both famous and obscure. The quotes on knowledge are particularly edifying, although I do wish that the 1984 quote had been included...

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Amazon’s New Fire TV Stick (?) Leaks

Amazon may have launched this year's new Kindle with little buildup but they're back to their usual pattern with the new Fire TV Stick (leaks, rumors, more leaks, and a launch). We haven't had any rumors of a new Fire TV Stick but we do have the first leak. A device labeled the "Amazon AFTS" has...

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Morning Coffee – 17 July 2015

Here are 6 stories to read this morning. An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media (The Message — Medium) Business Musings: Fighting the Wrong War (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) CanLit’s 0,000 controversy: Canadian writers and publishers react (The Passive Voice) Escaping the new media...

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AAP Reports eBook Sales Down 7.5% in the First Quarter of 2015

The Association of American Publishers confirmed today that the major publishers are feeling the first stings of the mad rush back to agency pricing. Trade sales (for the 1,200 odd publishers participating in the monthly report) were down 2.2% from the same quarter in 2014, to $1.49 billion. The...

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No Surprise Here: Japanese eBook Readers Also Like Paper Books

Survey after survey has shown that here in the US ebook readers are the most voracious readers, so it should come as little surprise that the same is true in Japan. New research from the Mobile Marketing Data Lab shows that Japanese readers who liked ebooks (so much so that they had bought a...

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Pocket for iPad, iPhone v5.6.7 Lets You Listen to Your Articles

If you save articles  for later but don't have time to read then Pocket has a solution. This save for later service rolled out a new update today for its iOS app which added a new TTS feature. Users can now have the Pocket app read their articles aloud. To listen to any of your articles,... Read...

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Presidential Hopeful Ted Cruz’s Memoir Lands on the NYT Best-Seller List – Finally

Senator Ted Cruz's recently-released biography will be landing on The New York Times' best-seller list this week, after its initial omission saw a week of accusations, recriminations, disputations, and refutations. The list is not due out until tomorrow, but The Hill reports that A Time for Truth...

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Digital Archival Site LongAcess Shuts Down, You’ll Need to Find a New Way to Gift Your eBook Collection to Your Heirs

When it comes to archives, paper still wins out over digital. Paper doesn't require a power supply, the tech doesn't go obsolete, it can be stored in a Western Union office for delivery 70 years later, and, as LongAccess just showed us, with paper you don't have to worry about the archival service...

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Facebook Wants a Cut of eBook Sales on Its Network

Authors and publishers have been selling books on Facebook for over six years now by setting up shops with 3rd-party services, and now Facebook wants to get into the act. Buzzfeed reports that Facebook has finally woken up to the idea that commerce is possible any place where people congregate: The...

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Morning Coffee – 16 July 2015

I have ten stories for you this Thursday morning, including two fiskings from Konrath, a semantic analysis that shows that Harper Lee's new novel Watchman really is the first draft of Mockingbird, a discussion on what would make you buy the next Kindle Voyage, and more. Apple News is seriously good...

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If You’re on a Social Network, Chances Are You’re Finding News There

As the saying goes, more Americans get their news from *blank* than any other source, but it's certainly true of social media. The Pew Research Center has a new report out today on Americans getting their news from the two social networks *. Pew polled around two thousand Americans back in March...

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The Fire HD 7, Kindle Unlimited, and the Basic Kindle Are All On Sale Today

Amazon's holding a sale today in honor of its 20th anniversary. Most of the deals stink, but there are a few good deals (the 55-gallon drum of lubrticant, for example) including a sale on Amazon's own hardware. Amazon is offering the basic Kindle today for $69 to Prime members (you can knock the...

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Apple Refreshes iPod Touch Line With Faster CPUs, But Not larger Screens

It's been close to three years since Apple last updated the iPod Touch, and I don't think the new devices were worth the wait. Apple quietly updated its website today with a new lineup of the nano, shuffle, and touch. The new devices come in new colors and have a few upgrades under the hood, but......

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How Google’s Blunder Was Apple’s and Facebook’s Opportunity (Google Reader)

Most of the coverage of Facebook's Instant Articles has focused on the assumption that people want to get their news through their social networks. As a recently released report from the Pew Research Center shows, that is true to some degree but it's not the only theory going nor does it explain...

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Head of Random Penguin Canada Horrifies Publishing Industry, Says He Only Wants to Publish Books That Make Money

Here's a mountain being made out of a mole hill. Yesterday Chris Meadows of Teleread picked up a story about Brad Martin, the president and CEO of Penguin Random House Canada. Martin gave an interview several weeks back to The Globe and Mail’s Mark Medley, talking about how the newly merged company...

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Morning Coffee – 15 July 2015

Must read stories this Wednesday morning include an explanation for the different portrayals of Atticus Finch, a rogue's gallery of ad formats, a look at WWN on Google Books, and more. The Courthouse Ring (The New Yorker) E-books click with more library users in Singapore, Tech News & Top...

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Google Drive Now Lets You Set a Read-Only Flag on Shared Files

For a little over a year now Dropbox has enabled its paying users to restrict how  others could access their shared files, but now Google is going one better: they're offering the same features, for free. Earlier today Google Drive users gained the ability to disable downloading, printing and...

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CyanogenMod Frees Your Fire Phone From Amazon’s Chains

With a price tag under $200, decent specs, an excess of cameras, and a 4.7" screen, the Fire Phone has almost everything you could want (even Google Play).  But it's still tied to Amazon and runs a proprietary version of Android. For those of us who don't like what Amazon has done to the...

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Round Up: Whatever Authors United is Smoking, I Wish They’d Share

When the cabal announced their joint plea yesterday for the US Dept of Justice to investigate Amazon for being a big meanie, I was careful to link to all of the supporting statements from Authors United, the ABA, AU spokesperson David Streitfeld, The Authors Guild,and so on (but not the AAP, which...

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Feedly to Release Publisher SDK to Better Compete With Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles

With the announcement of Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles earlier this year, RSS is going through a revival the likes of which we haven't seen since the death of Google Reader in 2013. And Feedly is poised to take advantage. I've just learned that Feedly is currently beta testing a...

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Morning Coffee – 14 July 2015

Here are five stories to read this morning. 10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals (DWT) Give me file hierarchies, or give me chaos. (Jeffrey Zeldman) It’s 2015, and I still use RSS (and sometimes even bookmarks) (Rob Pegoraro) Some Slimy Clickbait Dickhead Stole My Identity to Blog for Elite...

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Amazon, HarperCollins Refute Claims of Bulk Purchase Shenanigans of Ted Cruz’s Bio

When the New York Times left Texas Senator Ted Cruz's memoir off the NYT Best-Seller List last week, they justified the move with the claim that there were signs that someone was trying to game the list by strategically making bulk purchases. It wouldn't be the first time that someone pulled this...

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Book Industry Hates Its Biggest Customer, Collectively Calls on DoJ to Investigate Amazon

Judging by the media circus that just came to town, something huge is about to happen in the book world. The book industry has kicked off a massive coordinated media campaign today. The target? Amazon. Lead by Authors United spokesperson David Streitfeld, multiple groups in the book industry have...

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This Font Will let You Know That the NSA Thinks You’re a Terrorist

Google, Amazon, OverDrive, and other companies may choose fonts based on how good they are for reading, but not every font is made for that purpose. We've seen fonts designed to foil OCR apps and to show what it was like to read if you have dyslexia, and now a designer has developed a font which...

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New iPad Pro Rumors Circulate – Do You Think They’re Any More Likely to Be True Than the Last Ones?

What with the iWatch a known quantity and iOS 9 no longer the source of huge surprises, the tech blogosphere has turned to obsessing over Apple's next product, the rumored iPad Pro. There's a story going around today from the tea leaf readers at Digitimes. Their "sources" say that Apple is placing...

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Google’s “Temporary” Shut Down of Its eBook Publisher Portal Approaches the Two-Month Mark

Does anyone know what is going on behind the scenes at Google Play Books? About two months ago Google surprised us all when they abruptly stopped letting authors and book publishers sign up to sell ebooks in Google Play Books. They offered no real explanation as to why they were declining new...

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Morning Coffee – 13 July 2015

Here are eight stories to read this morning. The Complete List of Creative Distractions and Defenses Against Them (Writers Unboxed, The Passive Voice) Down the Rabbit Hole (the scottbot irregular) The NSA Of Fonts Censors You In Real-Time (http://Co.Design) The rules of the game have changed for...

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Amazon Wants to Make Sure You’re Eating Your Vegetables -Er- Reading Enough

For a company that readily admits to knowing everything about their customers, including both authors and readers, Amazon has shown itself to be remarkably tone deaf of late. A reader has told me that Amazon has been nagging him about his reading habits. You can see a screenshot of Amazon's nag...

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The Rice Trick Does Work to Rescue Drowned Devices – Eventually

Along with small children, falls, and impact damage, water damage is one of the leading ways to kill mobile devices. But unlike those other causes of death, water damage is the one event which can sometimes be reversed. One popular home remedy to dry out a drowned device is rice, but have you ever...

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How to Remove the DRM From Your Kindle, Kobo, and Nook eBooks And Rescue Them

This week's news about B&N retreating from the international ebook market inspired me to make sure that all my Nook purchases are backed up in DRM-free form. This takes very little effort, and I would recommend that you do the same. The process is more tedious than technically challenging, and...

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r Petitions Congress for Unworkable “Notice and Stay Down” Provision

The Authors Guild has just shown us that while they may have grown more author savvy under the new administration they certainly haven't become any more tech savvy than they were before. On Friday The Authors Guild published an open letter (a text-free PDF, no less) that calls upon Congress to...

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One Week With Dasung’s 13.3″ E-ink USB Monitor (video)

E-ink screens are the holy grail for those who get migraines from staring at LCD screens, but when it comes to monitor alternatives there are few available options. I had the good fortune to get in on the limited production run of the Dasung Paperlike when it went up for pre-order back in April....

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