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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Has Anyone Tried X-Ray Builder?

Launched in late 2011, the Kindle X-Ray feature is a nifty source of extraneous about the ebook you're reading (and later, the video you're watching). However, it's only officially available with ebooks in the Kindle Store (and four years later and it's still a feature which no other major ebook...

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On Trying to Read the First Chapter of Harper Lee’s “Watchman” Offline

Much attention has been paid to the fact that the first chapter from Harper Lee's new novel would be available to read online. The excerpt  was published on the WSJ and The Guardian this morning, but have you actually tried to read it? The WSJ has gilded the lily by adding all sorts of unrelated...

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Morning Coffee – 10 July 2015

Here are five posts to read this Friday morning. Half of Net Proceeds Is the Fair Royalty Rate for E-Books (The Authors Guild) How to Survive the Death of the Book (DBW, The Passive Voice) Joanne Harris highlights sexism in the publishing industry in string of tweets (Telegraph) Thanks to Amazon’s...

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Uncle

I give in. This blog is once again The Digital Reader. About 6 months ago I had the bright idea of changing the name of this blog to Ink, Bits, & Pixels. I like the name and I thought that it better described what I wanted to cover, but I can't actually get anyone to... Read More » The post...

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There’s a Surprising Number of Obscure eBook Readers Turning up on Amazon

TopJoy is one of many obscure, tiny Chinese gadget makers we sometimes see in videos from Computex but whose products we rarely see in the market in the US (under their own brand name, at least), and here's your chance to buy a device no one else has. This ereader maker set up an account on...

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Facebook is Giving Users Additional Superficial Control Over Their News Feed

Facebook rearranged the chains on their news feed algorithms today give users a little more control over what appears at the top of their news feed. Android Police, WSJ, and Mashable reported that the advert network is now enabling users to pick which friends and pages to see at the top of their...

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Blocking Adverts Cuts Network Traffic by 40%, Makes Sites Load Five Times Faster

With Apple adding content-blockers as a core iOS 9 feature and web publishers suing ad blocking companies and acting like they're in an arms race, 2015 is rapidly turning out to be the year that website visitors no longer have to bend over and grab their ankles. And that's going to be a good thing...

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Macmillan Continues to Dabble in Subscription eBook Market, Adds 1,000 Titles to Oyster

Having previously test the subscription ebook waters by distributing a limited number of SF titles to Skoobe in June of last year and sending around 1,000 titles to Oyster and Scribd earlier this year, Macmillan stuck another toe in the pool this morning. Oyster announced on Thursday that Macmillan...

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Kindle for iPad, iPhone v4.10 Adds “About this Book” Feature

Amazon has rolled out a new update for the Kindle iOS app. According to the changelog the update adds a couple minor features: About This Book: Learn more about the book before you start reading, including the typical time it takes to read it, its place in a series, and info about the author....

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Morning Coffee – 9 July 2015

Here are seven stories to read this Thursday morning. Barnes and Noble Leaves Sellers in the Lurch (eCommerceBytes) Blocking ads can cut network traffic 25% to 40%, study shows (VentureBeat) The Case Against Author Solutions (Part 4): New York Class Action Denial (The Independent Publishing...

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Round Up: Amazon Crushes Authors Careers Beneath the Boots of a New Review Policy

Over the past couple weeks Amazon has enacted a new policy for reviews posted on its site. This has resulted in a slew of older reviews getting culled and new reviews being blocked when posted, leading to screams of outrage from many quarters. Many have commented on the story,  most have framed it...

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HarperCollins Missed an Opportunity With the “Watchman” Excerpt

Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is due to hit store shelves next week. This is one of the more anticipated releases of the year. The publishers ( HarperCollins in the US and Penguin Random House in the UK) should be doing everything they can to generate as much attention as possible and to capture...

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The Beginning of the End: B&N Shutters the International Nook Store

Over the past month B&N has been making us wonder whether it was committed to ebooks. First B&N closed its office in Luxembourg, then it relaunched its website with a borked Nook area, and today B&N has removed all doubt. Barnes & Noble is sending out emails to customers in Europe,...

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Alexi Wants to Help You Find Your Next Read

The Bookseller (paywall'd) reports that Alexander Kidd, formerly of Picador and formerly a literary agent, is showing off a new book discovery app called Alexi. This iPhone app is currently in beta, but when it launches this autumn Alexi will let readers follow well-known literary authors and...

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Fire Phone is On Sale Today for $159

Amazon's first smartphone has flopped so bad that it killed any chance that we'd see a sequel in the near future. It started out at $649, but after a few months of no sales the price dropped to $199 and today it's dropped even further. Amazon is running a one-day Gold Box sale on the... Read More...

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Draftback is a Chrome Extension That Lets You Watch How any Google Doc was Written

One key feature required to collaborate in crafting a document online is the ability to see changes made (and possibly revert back to earlier versions of the doc). WordPress can do this (for saved drafts), Dropbox has version history, and any document made with GoogleDocs after about May 2010 has...

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Morning Coffee – 8 July 2015

Must read stories for this Wednesday morning include Konrath's author guide to ebook sub services, The Verge kills comments, the true value of privacy in website registrations, a tutorial on the Send to Kindle app,and more. Blinkist and the “read less, learn more” movement (Joe Wikert's Digital...

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Canada Investigates Apple for Possible eBook Pricing Conspiracy

Here in the US the DOJ may have completed its investigation into the price-fixing activities of Apple and 5 major trade publishers and gone after the parties involved, but Canada is a different matter. My contact with the Canadian Competition Bureau informed me today that its investigation into...

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Forgotten Books Buys 500,000 ISBNs, Makes Bid for Title of World’s Largest Spam and Scam Book Publisher

Forgotten Books just gave us another example of why ISBNs can't be used to measure the number of titles released by a publisher any more than they can be used to track self-published book releases. This "publisher" sent out a press release this morning with the news that it had recently purchased...

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Infographic: Famous Fictional Schools

Here's something fun. Did you ever wonder just often a school is used as a setting in a story? It happens more than you think - just not in books. An infographic crossed me desk this morning which lists famous schools from fiction, including Hogwarts, Crunchem Hall, and Forks High. The graphic is...

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Rabbi Doesn’t Like the Books Some People are Publishing, Wants Amazon to Stop Selling Them

The LATimes reported on Monday that a rabbi is Sacramento is calling for Amazon to stop carrying books which deny the Holocaust: Rabbi Mendy Cohen, the co-founder of Chabad of Sacramento, says the online retailer should pull the books from its inventory. He told the station that he is the...

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ImcoSys Adds 8″ Android eReader, 7″ Tablet to Its Catalog

Here's an interesting bit of ereader market trivia. ImcoSys, a Swiss company which first came to our attention in late 2013 with the novel imcoV6L Android ereader, has expanded its catalog. It's just come to my attention that ImcoSys has been adding new gadget listings to its website over the past...

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Canada’s Indigo Bookstore: “Throw Pillows Are the Future – No Wait! Books! We Mean Books!”

For the past several years Indigo, the leading bookseller in out neighbor to the north, has shown a willingness to shift its focus as the market winds change direction. In the past that meant pushing for more electronics and non-book merchandise, adding Apple boutiques, and selling throw pillows,...

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Visual Editions Wants to Reinvent the eBook

It's that time again.   Every couple years some outsider comes up with the brilliant idea of reinventing ebooks. If it's not Vook, it's Atavist. If it's not Inkling, it's Colliloquy. And if it's not Byliner, it's Atavist. This time around the reinventor is London-based Visual Editions, which...

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Nielsen Says Book Sales Up Are Slightly in First Half of the Year, But Can We Trust Their Numbers?

Nielsen Bookscan released its estimates of the US ebook market last week, which they describe as flat. I on the other hand, am not so sure we can trust their numbers. From PW: Sales of print books for the first six months of 2015 were running just about even with the same period in 2014 at... Read...

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Question: Is Kindle Unlimited One of the World’s Largest eBook Services?

The ongoing furor over the changes to KDP Select payment terms continues to generate debate in all quarters. Earlier today TechCrunch weighed in on the story, and all the attention focused on Kindle Unlimited has lead to a novel discussion over on the Kboards forum. Kboards member Vevo has noticed...

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The iPhone 6 Plus is Blowing Up in Hong Kong – Literally

With nearly 100 million sold since launch, the iPhone 6 is a hot commodity, and for one iPhone owner that has taken on a literal meaning. Apple Daily reports that one iPhone 6 plus owner in Hong Kong was briefly able to cook an egg on her smartphone. The owner, surnamed Tsang, said that her...

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Morning Coffee – 6 July 2015

Here are eight stories to read this Monday morning. Amazon's Review Policy is Creepy and Bad for Authors (Gizmodo) Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world (The Guardian) Etsy and Review Extortion (TeleRead) No, Apple is not adding DRM to songs on your Mac you already own...

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DRM’s Silver Lining, or Why We Should Appreciate Kobo More

Kobo is by no means my favorite ebook retailer, but the recent troubles with the Nook Store has given me a greater appreciation. A few days ago I reported on the sad state of the B&N's ebook operation now that they've upgraded their website. The ebook pages were inaccessible (and now I can't...

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UnReview: Boyue T62 6″ Android eReader

Boyue might not be well-known outside of the hard-core ereader community, but in that sphere it is making a name for itself. Over the past several years it has released several ereaders, including (by mid-2015) several models which run Android. The T62 is the second of the two Android ereaders, and...

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No, the Yotaphone Isn’t Switching From Android to Jolla

There's a story going around today that the dual-screen Yota Phone will be dropping Android in favor of the Sailfish OS. A number of sites are picking up the wire report published by AFP yesterday, and on Saturday the story started getting picked up by tech blogs, including PocketNow, 9to5Google,...

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Does Anyone Know Why Reagent Press is Filing a Class Action Suit Against Amazon?

This afternoon's news about the latest stage in the ongoing suit against Author Solutions reminded me of another potential lawsuit I have been following. A couple months ago a reader tipped me to the news* that Reagent Press, a small publisher based in the state of Washington, is "seeking...

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Judge Cote Denies Class Action Cert in Lawsuit Against Penguin Random House, Author Solutions

The first class action lawsuit filed by authors against the infamous vanity press Author Solutions has suffered a blow this week. US District Court Judge Denise Cote has handed down a ruling that denied class action status. This lawsuit was originally filed in 2013 by the law firm Giskan Solotaroff...

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Sony’s New Crowd-funding Site Has Its First Successful Campaign – An E-ink Remote

Earlier this week Sony launched its own crowd funding platform. First Flight is intended to feature only internal Sony projects and give (Japanese) consumers a chance to back projects that Sony's management doesn't find worthwhile, and it's already had its' first success. The Huis is a programmable...

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PSA: Have You Canceled Your Account at Scribd? You Might Want to Double Check That

With the news coming out earlier this week that Scribd was cutting back its romance catalog (including titles from Harlequin), I'm sure some Scribd subscribers are thinking about cancelling their subscription (or have already done so). And so I wanted to pass along a friendly warning about Scribd's...

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Barnes & Noble Hires Acting Head of Sears Canada as New CEO

Barnes & Noble's senior management went through a short round of seat shuffling today as the retailer named its next CEO. PW reports: Barnes & Noble has appointed a retail veteran as the new head of its retail bookstore group. Ron Boire will also take over as CEO of Barnes & Noble, Inc....

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Round Up: Kindle Unlimited Has Ended Western Civilization

We're now on day two of Amazon changing the rules for KDP Select, and judging by the response from some parts of social media the world has come to an end. Before I go out and enjoy the skies raining with blood, I thought I would take a few minutes and round up several of the... Read More » The...

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B&N’s New Website Could Be the Kiss of Death For the Nook

After nearly two years of development, Barnes & Noble launched a new site that has some asking whether this will be the digital solution to B&N's ecommerce woes. I, however, am wondering how much damage the new site will do to B&N's Nook sales. The new site went live on Tuesday, and it...

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Scribd is Putting Harlequin Titles on the Same Chopping Block as Indie Titles

When news broke on Tuesday that Scribd was cutting romance titles from its catalog, all the stories focused on indie published titles from either Smashwords or Draft2Digital but the activity was not limited to just those two distributors. At least one other ebook distributor was impacted, and...

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No, Flipkart is Not the World’s Second Biggest Bookseller (Not Yet, Anyway)

There's going to be a story going around in the next few days that Flipkart, one of the largest online retailers in India, has been hailed as the world's second largest bookseller (after Amazon, of course). I don't think that's true - not today, anyway. The Times of India reported the startling...

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Morning Coffee – 2 July 2015

Here are seven stories to read this morning. And The Second Biggest Bookseller In The World After Amazon Is… (Ebook Bargains UK Blog) Cory Doctorow Talks About Fighting the DMCA (2 Videos) (Slashdot) Craziest Part Of Apple's Price Fixing Ruling: Publishers Knew They Were Encouraging Piracy, Didn't...

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UK Publishers Association Busts Copyright Myths in Defense of Their Pocketbook, Privileges

European regulators, legislators, and lobbyists are slowly working their way towards the creation of a single EU-wide digital market which will enable creators to release their content under a single license, let retailers sell that content across the EU, and let consumers access that content no...

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KDP Select’s New Royalty is Estimated to be Around Half a Cent Per Page

July marks the start of the new payment terms for KDP Select. Where Amazon used to pay participating authors based on the number of times an ebook was loaned in Kindle Owner's Lending Library or KDP Select, under the new terms Amazon will pay each author based on the number of pages that have...

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Next iPhone Leaks, Looks Pretty Much Like Current iPhone

As the summer approaches its peak, the tech blogosphere has turned its attention to pondering what Apple will release this fall. Yesterday Apple's supply chain obligingly satisfied our curiosity. 9to5Mac has a posted a gallery of photos showing what is very likely the next iPhone. They're calling...

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iBooks Author Updated With iPhone Templates

Apple got a lot of attention for yesterday's iOS 8.4 update, but that wasn't the only release to come down the pipe. The company also released a new version of iBooks Author which finally gave that OSX app the ability to make ebooks designed to fit the iPhone's screen. Authors and publishers can...

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