Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.

• Amazon and a number of publishers have filed suit against a pirate ebook site. 
• Ingram is expanding its POD capacity. 
• Students at the University of Rochester built a medieval reading wheel. 
• The NYTimes shared first-hand accounts of what it is like to be Black in Publishing 
• Mathina Calliope explores the proper way to use commas. 
• Kris Rusch reminds us that agents’ hands can get sticky in these financially-challenging times.
• Did you know the CDC has a page on preparing for the zombie apocalypse?

If you need a tech VA or help with your website, email me at Nate@the-digital-reader.com. Got a story that I should include in next week’s list? Shoot me an email.

You just finished reading Monday Coffee – 13 July 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.

Remember how everyone used to make fun of Apple because iOS had a puritanical keyboard filter that automatically corrected “fuck” to duck”?

Get ready to snicker at Amazon.

I was browsing Twitter this morning on my Kindle Fire HD 8 (2018) when I discovered that Amazon has a profanity filter built into the tablet. I was about to use a swear word in a tweet when the Kindle Fire abruptly deleted the sentence. I tried to re-enter the sentence when the same thing happened again.

For reasons beyond my understanding, Amazon has secretly built a profanity filter into the Kindle Fire.

To be more exact, the speech recognition part of the Kindle Fire’s keyboard app has a list of words that it will not accept. You can type these words on the onscreen keyboard, but if you try to _say_ them then the app will delete the entire sentence.

Yes, it is just the speech recognition, and yes, it is the keyboard app, and not Twitter. I can confirm that I saw the same behavior in the Silk web browser.

This piqued my interest, so I spent some time seeing what else was caught in Amazon’s secret profanity filter. So far I have found that Amazon blocks six of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. The list of censored words includes (but is not limited to):

• asshole
• shit
• fuck
• cunt
• cocksucker
• motherfucker
• tits

Piss and Hell make it through the filter but they are also essentially blocked in that they are autocorrected to benign words this and hello.

And what’s even funnier is that bitch, titty, and ass made it through the profanity filter, making this a particularly inept filter.

I am sure there are other words blocked by Amazon’s puritanical filter, but I have not found them yet. I was also unable to find anyway to disable or enable the filter in the Kindle Fire’s settings menu (hence why I called it a secret). And no, I do not have any kids accounts on my Kindle Fire; there is just the one account (mine).

Amazon is far from the first to censor what you can say to its apps.  Back in 2015 Google launched a speech recognition feature for Google Docs which included a mandatory profanity filter. That filter replaced the characters of a banned word with asterisks. It cannot be disabled, and in fact it’s still there (I tested it a few minutes ago).

Coincidentally, Google also has a similar spoken word profanity filter on Android. Like the filter on Google Docs, the Android profanity filter replaces the characters of a banned word with asterisks.

What is up with companies’ limiting what you can say but not what you can type?

image by yoshiffles via Flickr

You just finished reading Did You Know the Kindle Fire Has a Secret Profanity Filter That Blocks George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words? which was published on The Digital Reader.

Remember how I shared all the relevant info on the Kobo Nia about three weeks ago? Alas, that didn’t really leave me much to say about today’s launch.

Yes, the Nia is Kobo’s new budget model. It is replacing the four-year-old Aura 2, and in fact it has virtually the same specs as that older ereader. Just about the only differences are that the Nia has twice the storage (8GB vs 4GB), is a tiny bit thicker, and has the power button in a different location. (All of these changes were the result of the Nia being a Tolino Page 2 clone.)

The Nia has essentially the same internal hardware as Kobo’s other models, and runs the same software. It supports a widevariety of formats, including library ebooks distributed through OverDrive.

Retail is $99 in the US, $129 in Canada, and 99 euros in Europe.

Pre-orders will be available on 15 July, and the device will be available in stores and online as of 21 July in Canada, the US, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Specs

• CPU: 1GHz Freescale i.MX 6ULL
• RAM: 256MB
• Screen: 6” Carta E-ink, 1024 x 758 resolution (212 ppi)
• Frontlight: white
• Touchscreen: capacitive
• Dimensions: 112.4 x 159.3 x 9.2 mm
• Weight: 172 grams

You just finished reading Kobo Nia Replaces the Aura 2 as Kobo’s Entry-Level eReader which was published on The Digital Reader.

Remember how I told you a couple months ago that Kobo would launch its subscription ebook service in North America?

It’s starting to happen. Kobo launched Kobo Plus in Canada on Wednesday morning. Or rather, I just got an email from Draft2Digital with the news that D2D is now distributing to Kobo  Plus Canada:

Canada’s biggest eBook retailer is bringing its popular service home!

In May 2017, we were excited to announce that Rakuten Kobo was rolling out Kobo Plus—a new revenue-sharing model for authors distributing eBooks to the Netherlands and Belgium. Now we’re just as excited to announce that Kobo is bringing the same great opportunity to its home turf, with the launch of Kobo Plus Canada!

Not only is Canada the place Kobo calls home, it’s their strongest performing territory, where they have the most reach. So opening up the program there is a huge opportunity for authors.

Kobo Plus currently offers 270,000 ebooks and audiobooks for which can be read for $9.99 CAD per month. If you would like to sign up, you can find the relevant page on Kobo’s website here.

If you are an author who wants to put their books in Kobo Plus, you can do so via Kobo Writing Life or via D2D.

Kobo also announced the expansion on the Kobo Writing Life blog.

You just finished reading Kobo Plus Launches in Canada which was published on The Digital Reader.

I was just reading on a mailing list for editors, Copyediting-L, that Google has updated the Ngram Viewer. Here’s the original announcement from Twitter:

The Google Books Ngram Viewer has now been updated with fresh data through 2019. Previously, data stopped at 2012. The viewer allows tracking the occurrence of words & phrases in books over time. Learn more about the viewer here: https://t.co/KjNIeYRhIH pic.twitter.com/hEUJCpJE7o

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) July 13, 2020

Google Books may have been controversial in the book publishing industry, but it did have its fringe benefits. Ngram Viewer, for example, lets you search the breadth of Google Books and find out when a word or phrase first showed up in a book, how often it appeared, etc. It would even give you a handy chronological graph showing the frequency of use.

For example, “bee’s knees” only really started showing up in books during WWI:

Now the Ngram Viewer is even better.

As an occasional user of the Ngram Viewer, I think this is great news. I have used this tool to see when a term was first used in a book and when it fell out of favor, and I’ve always been frustrated by how the data stopped in 2012.

This update will let me track how words are used as recently as last year.

For example, blockchain was still relatively uncommon as late as 2012, but it has been growing in popularity ever since.

You just finished reading Google Books Ngram Viewer Updated – Now Includes Books Published as Late as 2019 which was published on The Digital Reader.

Given that B&N has opened a smaller format store in Fredericksburg, a restaurant bookstore in Asuburn, and a small-footprint store in Fairfax, as well as many other small bookstores across the country, one might conclude that Barnes & Noble had given up on the mega-bookstores of the past.

And you would be mistaken. I was just reading on the Rockville Nights blog that B&N is opening a bookstore in Rockville, MD. It’s located in the Congressional Plaza shopping center, across the street from the Hilton where the Capclave SF con is held most years.

Edit: According to local stories from  2019, B&N is actually moving its Rockville store to a new location in the Congressional Plaza shopping center. (Everything in the bookstore is brand new, though.)

I briefly stopped by today to check out the store, and I can report that this is a full-sized bookstore comparable to the several older B&N stores I am familiar with (you can’t really tell this until you approach the storefront).

Right now the staff is stocking the shelves, and setting up the cafe. I happened to arrive at just the right time for the afternoon sun to shine in the windows and ruin my photographs, but Robert Dyer was more fortunate.

He got several good shots of the cafe in the store, and posted them on his Rockville Nights blog:

He also got a shot of the interior that showed the store is decorated in a style I have not seen before.

According to the banners in the windows, the store will open on 5 August.

You just finished reading Barnes & Noble to Open Full-Sized Bookstore in Rockville, Maryland which was published on The Digital Reader.

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.

• JK Rowling’s book sales fell in mid-June. 
• Emily Temple wonders why some people care so much about how other people arrange their bookshelves. 
• The NYTimes rates the Kindle Paperwhite as the best ereader. 
• Mike Shatzkin looks at two ways the publishing industry has changed during the pandemic. 
• Barnes & Noble used the shutdown to shake up the company. 
• She may be 170 years dead, but literary “critics” are still denying that Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights. 
• Little Fee Libraries are now stocking canned goods, and other necessities. 

If you need a tech VA or help with your website, email me at Nate@the-digital-reader.com. Got a story that I should include in next week’s list? Shoot me an email.

You just finished reading Monday Morning Coffee – 20 July 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.

Amazon is having another sale on its ereaders and Android tablets this week. If you act fast you will be able to get the basic Kindle or the Kindle Paperwhite for $20 off.

You can also find Kindle Fire tablets on sale for $15 to $50 off.

• Kindle – $69 ($20 off)
• Kindle Paperwhite – $99 ($30 off)
• Kindle Fire 7 – $34.99 ($15 off)
• Kindle Fire HD 8 – $59 ($30 off)
• Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus – $69 ($30 off)
• Kindle Fire 10 – $99 ($50 off)

You just finished reading Kindles and Kindle Fires Are On Sale which was published on The Digital Reader.

I know everyone is upset that Mark Dawson has publicly admitted to buying his way on to a best-seller list, but I for one was surprised to learn that the bar was so low.

From The Guardian:

Take the case of Mark Dawson, a British writer who just over a week ago hit No 8 on the Sunday Times hardback list with his thriller The Cleaner, released by the independent publisher Welbeck at the end of June. This is a great achievement for any author or small publishing house, but Dawson had done something remarkable: he bought 400 copies of his own book, at a cost of £3,600, to push his sales high enough to make the top 10.

On the latest episode of his Self Publishing Show podcast, Dawson explained why he did it. When Nielsen released its midweek chart, Dawson had realised that The Cleaner was sitting at No 13, having sold around 1,300 copies that week – just outside the coveted top 10. He hit on the idea of buying the book himself in the UK, to sell to readers overseas. “We’d like to get to the top 10 … we’ve been trying to think of ways we can do that that would count those sales as sales for the chart,” he said.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t get past the fact that the book in the #8 spot on the Sunday Times best-seller list sold fewer than 2,000 copies in a week. That is a very low bar for making the list.

If that is really all it takes to make the list then the list is not actually a sign of popularity or quality. The best-seller list doesn’t mean anything, and if the list doesn’t mean anything then buying your way on to it doesn’t mean anything, either.

The reaosn why this is possible is that The Times’s has several lists, including separate lists for hardback and paperback. As we see in the photo Mark posted, almost the entirety of the paperback list outsold the hardback list:

If you bought a copy of The Cleaner, thank you. Its hardback debut, even after being out for five years, placed it at number eight on the The Sunday Times Bestseller List. More where that came from. pic.twitter.com/PawwvIXuul

— Mark Dawson (@pbackwriter) July 11, 2020

In short, folks, making the top ten on the “Original Fiction” list is about as meaningless as the best-seller lists for the niche categories on Amazon. The books on that list aren’t actually best-sellers.

You just finished reading You Can Get on the Sunday Times’s Best-Seller List by Selling Fewer Than 2K Copies which was published on The Digital Reader.

There’s a report from the blog known for its “exclusive” hardware stories that Barnes & Noble has stopped selling Android tablets. Their story implies that B&N has gotten put of Android tablets, or discontinued them, or what have you.

None of which is true.

I’ve just heard back from Barnes & Noble, and they have denied the story.  I was told, and I quote “This is not true. We are currently out of stock but will continue to sell NOOK tablets.”

Rather than B&N having stopped the sales of Android tablets, it looks like this is another example of a supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic,  just like when your local grocery store ran out of toilet paper. They did not stop selling toilet paper so much as they were unable to acquire a sufficient supply, and the same is very likely true for B&N.

O O O

Well that was an interesting 43 minutes. (That’s how long to took to get an answer from B&N.)

I actually had this whole history of B&N’s hardware that I wrote while waiting for confirmation. I guess I will just have to stick it in my files (let’s hope I never have to use it).

You just finished reading No, B&N Didn’t Stop Selling Android Tablets which was published on The Digital Reader.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that large automated content filters do not function well at all, and the only thing keeping such a system from screwing up is constant human supervision.

Alas, no one was paying attention to Youtube’s ContentID copyright bot yesterday until after it shut down a couple officially sponsored livestreams from San Diego Comic-con. The first to get the boot was a Star Trek panel, and then a couple hours later Cartoon Network’s panel was also cut off.

Here’s why this is newsworthy: Both of these panels were blocked by Youtube the networks were streaming content that belonged to the networks.

From Ars:

ViacomCBS kicked things off today with an hour-long panel showing off its slew of current and upcoming Star Trek projects: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds.

The panel included the cast and producers of Discovery doing a read-through of the first act of the season 2 finale, “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2.” The “enhanced” read-through included sound effects, effects shots, and storyboard images meant to bolster the actors as they delivered lines from their living rooms and home offices.

Even if the presentation didn’t look like a real episode of Discovery to the home viewer, it apparently sounded close enough: after the Star Trek Universe virtual panel began viewers began to lose access to the stream. In place of the video, YouTube displayed a content ID warning reading: “Video unavailable: This video contains content from CBS CID, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”

After being blacked out for about 20 minutes, the panel was restored, and the recording of the virtual panel has no gaps in playback

This is not the first time that livestreams have been blocked when they were legally using content; I am reminded of the  Worldcon awards dinner livestream that was shut down because someone played a Doctor Who clip. The video had been provided by the BBC (the show had won an award that year) but apparently no one told Ustream’s bot.

The Hugo Awards were being streamed live on video site Ustream when, at 10:43 p.m. ET, the feed went dark during an acceptance speech by fantasy writer Neil Gaiman.

The reason? Ustream says automated software designed to detect the unauthorized posting of copyrighted material was triggered when, before Gaiman’s speech, the ceremony showed clips of “The Doctor’s Wife,” an episode of the popular sci-fi series “Doctor Who,” that Gaiman penned.

Instead of Gaiman, text reading “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement” appeared.

That was eight years ago. Apparently the tech has not gotten better in the past 8 years, nor have the people running the software gotten better at their jobs.

You just finished reading Cartoon Network and Star Trek Panels at San Diego Comic-Con Were Blocked by Youtube’s ContentID which was published on The Digital Reader.

Did you see the story this past week about AI-written parody song lyrics were DMCA-ed from Twitter? I for one don’t think it’s been reported accurately.

From Vice:

Georgia Tech researcher Mark Riedl didn’t expect that his machine learning model “Weird A.I. Yancovic,” which generates new rhyming lyrics for existing songs would cause any trouble. But it did.

On May 15, Reidl posted an AI-generated lyric video featuring the instrumental to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” It was taken down on July 14, Reidl tweeted, after Twitter received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice for copyright infringement from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents major and independent record companies.

“I am fairly convinced that my videos fall under fair use,” Riedl told Motherboard of his AI creation, which is obviously inspired by Weird Al’s parodies. Riedl said his other AI-generated lyric videos posted to Twitter have not been taken down.

Riedl has contested the takedown with Twitter but has not received a response. Twitter also did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

My problem with this story is that it is being framed as the industry taking action, when for all we know this could just be a copyright bot taking action on its own. No, I do not have anything to base that on, but it is about ten times more likely.

Only the one video was removed when they are all equally legal or illegal. If the _industry_ is going after these videos, then why did they not file DMCA takedown notices for all the other videos?

Why was there no press release?

Why was there no letter to the university, or to the college professor who created the videos?

The most likely explanation is a copyright bot found one video, jumped to the wrong conclusion, and filed the DMCA notice all on its own. We all know that automated systems do this all the time; in fact, just this past week Youtube’s ContentID shutdown two different livestreams from San Diego Comic-con. And previously, Digimarc showed us in 2016 what could happen if you let a bot file hundreds of (bogus) DMCA notices without supervision.

So until someone can show me that a person was involved in the decision loop somewhere, I am going to conclude this is an example of a bot-on-bot legal fight.

That just makes more sense to me.

image by jeffedoe via Flickr

You just finished reading Copyright Bots Are Now Going After Bot-Written Parody Songs (Well, One Song) which was published on The Digital Reader.

Wattpad may have been the victim of a security breach some time in the past few months, so you may want to go change your password:

We are aware of reports that some user data has been accessed without authorization. We are urgently working to investigate, contain, and remediate the issue with the assistance of external security consultants.

From our investigation, to date, we can confirm that no financial information, stories, private messages, or phone numbers were accessed during this incident. Wattpad does not process financial information through our impacted servers, and active Wattpad users’ passwords are salted and cryptographically hashed.

July 20 Update: Out of precaution, and as is common in these situations, we are resetting passwords and advising users to change passwords on other sites if they used the same password.

We are committed to maintaining the trust that our users have placed in us to ensure the safety and security of the Wattpad community.

You just finished reading Go Change Your Wattpad Password which was published on The Digital Reader.

Earlier this week NPD confirmed what the AAP had lead us to expect (and many had assumed would happen): publisher ebook sales rose in the US in April compared to March 2020 and to April 2019.

NPD is reporting the ebook unit sales, while AAP reported revenue, but both agree that sales were up for the month of April while still being down for the year. (Just imagine what the sales reports would have been like if those self-same publishers hadn’t systematically suppressed their ebook sales for the past 12 years.)

Year-over-year e-book sales in the United States declined by 5 percent, with 55 million units sold through April 2020. However, unit sales in April 2020—the first full month of COVID quarantine—rose by nearly one-third (31 percent) compared to March 2020. All major categories experienced e-book growth in April 2020, compared to previous month, with adult fiction posting the largest unit gain of 1.8 million units, according to The NPD Group (www.npd.com).

Traditionally published e-book sales volume, tracked by NPD PubTrack Digital, declined 6 percent in the first half of the year. However, looking only at the month of April— the first full month of COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.S.—e-books were up 31 percent compared to March, selling 4.2 million more units.

This data obviously does not represent the entire market, but it probably does reflect general market trends. I would not have said that last year, or any previous years, but in 2020 larger market trends caused by the pandemic  are overcoming publishers’ own self-destructive decisions.

You just finished reading NPD: Publisher eBook Unit Sales Rose in April 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.

• I find Brewster Kahle’s attempts to mischaracterize the Internet Archive’s recent actions to be infuriating, but the fact he choose to fib makes me wonder if his legal arguments are even weaker than I thought. 
• A law student dug into the fair use arguments surrounding CDL (controlled Digital Lending), and found them wanting. 
• David Gaughran explains why the “A9 algorithm” training touted by marketers is a scam based on a myth. 
• EG Radcliff delves into how to develop a research strategy. 
• Here’s a handy guide on the California Consumer Privacy Act. The tl;dr version is that 99% of us can ignore it. 
• The inspiration for Richard Curtis’s “Yesterday” was a screenplay with a much less cliched story. 
• The Daily Beast published a memoir by a writer who had chauffeured Jorge Luis Borges around Scotland in 1971. 
• As many as 270 million records may have been stolen in a security breach at Wattpad. 

You just finished reading Monday Morning Coffee – 27 July 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.

Pocketbook has just announced its newest entry-level ereader.

The Pocketbook Touch Lux 5 features a Carta E-ink screen. It runs Pocketbook’s software on a dual-core CPU with 512MB RAM and 8GB RAM. Its 6″ display sports a capacitive touchscreen, color-changing frontlight, and a screen resolution of 1024 x 758.

In addition to supporting a wide variety of file formats  (ACSM, CBR, CBZ, CHM, DJVU, DOC, DOCX, EPUB, EPUB(DRM), FB2, FB2.ZIP, HTM, HTML, MOBI, PDF, PDF (DRM),  RTF), the Touch Lux 5 ships with a number of apps builr in, including a dictionary, Dropbox, a web browser, ReadRate, Calculator, Notes, RSS News, Chess, Klondike, Scribble, Sudoku.

The device also integrates into Pocketbook’s online services such as Send-to-Pocketbook and Pocketbook Cloud, and it comes with ABBYY Lingvo translation dictionaries in 24 language combinations.

Retail is 125 euros.

Specs

• Display: 6″ Carta E-ink screen, 758 × 1024 resolution
• Touchscreen: Capacitive
• CPU: dual-core 1GHz
• RAM: 512MB
• Storage: 8GB, microSD (32MB cards supported)
• Battery: 1.5 Ah
• Dimensions: 161.3 × 108 × 8 mm
• Weight: 155 grams

You just finished reading Pocketbook Touch Lux 5 Ships Soon in Europe, Costs 125 Euros which was published on The Digital Reader.

Pocketbook’s long-awaited second color ereader has arrived.

On Monday Pocketbook announced the Pocketbook Color, or PB 633. This ereader sports a 6″ color E-ink screen capable of displaying either grayscale (at 300 ppi) or color (at 100 ppi).

The Pocketbook Color uses one of E-ink’s new Kaleido screens to display up to 4096 colors while preserving all the unique properties of E-ink tech.

And thanks to the frontlight, you will be able to see all those colors while reading in the dark. Moreover, users can adjust color settings of each specific book, easily changing parameters such as contrast, brightness, gamma correction, and saturation.

Equipped with both Wifi and Bluetooth, the Pocketbook Color supports six popular audio formats  as well as 23 other files formats, including Mobi and Epub. It has 16GB to fill with ebooks before you’ll need to add a microSD card (up to 32GB supported).

Weighing in at 160 grams, the Pocketbook Color measures only 8mm thin.

It ships at the end of the month, with a retail of 199 euros. (My unit is arriving on Thursday.)

You just finished reading Pocketbook Color Launched in Europe – 6″ Color E-ink Screen, 199 Euros which was published on The Digital Reader.

Pocketbook’s newest ereader arrived on my doorstep yesterday.  I’ve had a day to play with it, and while I am impressed with its speed and svelte design, I am not sold on its main feature.

The Pocketbook Color features the new Kaleido E-ink screen, and this screen tech is a vast improvement on E-ink’s two previous generations of color screens. Where the previous color E-ink screens were cursed with a very slow refresh rate and a muddy gray undertone, the new Kaleido screens are capable of displaying up to 4096 colors. The new screens have a white undertone, not gray.

Furthermore, the Pocketbook Color can refresh the screen at a speed that matches that of the Kindle or any other leading ereader. It is so fast that I wish I could play a video on it just to see what happens; I think it might actually be able to play video at 30 fps (or at least close to that speed).

I was in fact testing the Pocketbook Color with a gallery of astronomy photos that I have been saving for wallpapers on my smartphone, and I found that this ereader could refresh the screen – in color – at a rate faster than I had believed possible. I’m not going to claim that it’s as fast as an LCD or LED screen, but it’s in same the ballpark.

You will never complain about this ereader’s speed.

Its color quality, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.

Kaleido screens can display up to 4096 colors, but they are limited to displaying those colors at 100 ppi. On the one hand, that is significantly below the resolution of the Carta E-ink screens (300ppi), but at the same time the Kaleido screens have about the same resolution (when displaying color) as the screen on my 15″ Dell laptop.

The reason I made that comparison is that I am not one to worship stats for their own sake. I care about what screens look like when they are in front of me.

And the screen on the Pocketbook Color, well – I think the best way to describe it would be “old newsprint”. It reminds me of the old, cheaply-printed periodicals I might find in an archive.

The 4096 color limitation means that the images are not as vibrant as you would see on an LCD screen. They seem rather washed out, or muted. (The colors are more vibrant than you would expect on a grayscale E-ink screen, however.)

O O O

I have to say I am torn. Yes, this is a major breakthrough, and yes, it is faster and better than any color E-ink screen we have seen before, but I am just not that thrilled with the main feature.

Given the Pocketbook Color’s overall quality, however, there is a good chance that I might be in the minority.

This ereader will be shipping soon in Europe. Retail is 199 euros.

You just finished reading Hands On With the Pocketbook Color which was published on The Digital Reader.

At the request of a reader, I am restarting the monthly posts about Kindle Unlimited funding. I will go back to the standard format next month, but for now I will have a quick summary to bring everyone up to date.

The funding pool had larger than average jumps March, April, and May as a result of more people reading ebooks during the early parts of the shut down here in the US.

• January 2020: $28.2 million, $24.7 million
• February: $27.2 million, $23.5 million
• March 2020: $29 million, $24 million
• April 2020: $30.3 million, $24.1 million
• May 2020: $32.2 million, $24.9 million
• June 2020: $32.3 million, $24.6 million

The per-page rate, on the other hand, has fallen considerably compared to last year. When combined with the size of the funding pool, this suggests there was a huge increase in activity.

• June 2020: $0.0045
• May 2020: $0.0042
• April 2020: $0.0042
• March 2020: $0.0046
• February 2020: $0.0048
• January 2020: $0.004411
• December 2019: $0.004664
• November 2019: $0.004925
• October 2019: $0.0046763
• September 2019: $0.0046799
• August 2019:  $0.004387
• July 2019 –  $0.004394
• June 2019 – $0.004642
• May 2019 – $0.0046598
• April 2019 – $0.0046602
• March 2019 – $0.0045124
• February 2019 – $0.0047801
• January 2019 – $0.0044227
• December 2018 – $0.0048778
• November 2018 – $0.0052056
• October 2018 – $0.0048414
• September 2008 – $0.004885
• August 2018 – $0.0044914
• July 2018 – $0.0044936

P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million
• March 2017: $17.7 million
• April 2017: $17.8 million
• May 2017 :$17.9 million
• June 2017: $18 million
• July 2017: $19 million
• August 2017: $19.4 million
• September 2017: $19.5 million
• October 2017: $19.7 million
• November 2017: $19.8 million
• December 2017: $19.9 million
• January 2018: $20.9 million
• February 2018: $20 million
• March 2018: $21 million
• April 2018: $21.2 million
• May 2018: $22.5 million
• June 2018: $22.6 million
• July 2018: $23.1 million
• August 2018: $23.3 million
• September 2018: $23.4 million
• October 2018: $23.5 million
• November 2018: $23.6 million
• December 2018: $23.7 million
• January 2019: $24.7 million
• February 2019: $23.5 million
• March 2019: $24 million
• April 2019: $24.1 million
• May 2019: $24.6 million
• June 2019: $24.9 million
• July 2019: $25.6 million
• August 2019: $25.8 million
• September 2019: $25.9 million
• October 2019: $26 million
• November 2019: $26.1 million
• December 2019: $26.2 million
• January 2020: $28.2 million
• February 2020: $27.2 million
• March 2020: $29 million
• April 2020: $30.3 million
• May 2020: $32.2 million
• June 2020: $32.3 million

P.P.S. The last 5 months of data on the per-page rate was found courtesy of Written Word Media (they run the BargainBooksy email list, and others).

You just finished reading Kindle Unlimited Funding Pool Grew by $33.4 million in the First Half of 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.

Everyone has heard that the UK reduced the tax collected on the sale of books earlier this year, but did you know they were not the only ones?

I was just browsing the KDP community when I noticed that, starting in January, Amazon has reported that multiple EU member states have taken advantage of changes to EU rules on ebook VAT status, and lowered the tax rate for ebooks.

• Austria – 20% to 10%
• Netherlands – 21% to 9%
• Slovenia – 22% to 5%
• Spain – 21% to 4%
• UK –  20% to 0%
• Germany – 7% to 5%
• Austria – 10% to 5%
• Bulgaria – 20% to 9%

Before you ask, yes, Austria is on their twice, and no, that was not a mistake. The second change is reportedly a temporary change, and it ends on 31 December 2020. (Bulgaria’s change in VAT also reportedly expires at the end of the year.)

Update: Germany’s VAT change is also temporary. The VAT rate for ebooks was reduced to 7% in December 2019, and then reduced again in response to the pandemic. The 5% rate is set to expire at the end of 2020. Thanks, Ingo!

Have you changed your prices?

image by dailyinvention via Flickr

You just finished reading eBook VAT Has Been Changed in the EU At Least 8 Times This Year which was published on The Digital Reader.