Today ends in Y, and so Amazon is holding another sale.
The retailer to end all retailers has put various Kindle models on sale to celebrate the martyrdom of an early Christian saint, including the Kindle Paperwhite, Kids Kindle, and more.
You just finished reading Kindle On Sale for Valentine’s Day which was published on The Digital Reader.
Barnes & Noble managed to find just the laziest but also the most tactless way to "celebrate" Black History Month. They have partnered with Penguin Random House in "a new initiative to champion diversity in literature", but rather than actually publishing the works of the works of diverse authors, B&N and PRH thought it would be a good idea to slap brown faces on novels by white authors.
They have selected twelve "classic" public domain works and gave each one "five culturally diverse custom covers designed to ensure the recognition, representation, and inclusion of various multi-ethnic backgrounds reflected across the country".
Update: B&N canceled the project Wednesday morning.
Edit: I am being faulted on Twitter for blaming B&N when this project was actually the brainchild of a famous ad agency. Okay, fine, it was B&N's contractor, and B&N's involvement was only the six or seven meetings at B&N corporate where this project was discussed and approved. (That's not a huge difference in my mind.)
The books in question are:
The astute reader will note that eight of the books are by British authors, and two are by Americans. And while the list includes two novels by a black author, I am sure this was an accident (they probably didn't realize Dumas was a black Frenchman). You will also note that this list includes a work by Shakespeare, just not the one starring a black character.
There are also several titles on this list with problematic content, including Peter Pan and The Secret Garden, where the main character is explicitly racist. (This last issue could be dealt with by bowdlerizing the book, but even so why would you bother to do so when you could just choose a work by a black author?) Edit: There's also the hints of antisemitism in Jekyll & Hyde.
And then there are the covers. I don't know which is worse, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cover where Hyde is depicted as Asian wearing a turban, or the cover of Frankenstein, where Frankenstein's creation is portrayed as black (in the book, this creature is pursued by pitchfork-wielding and torch-bearing villagers).
I will let you decide which is worse, but I plan to hold back. There are sixty covers, so I am expecting that the worst is yet to come.
Barnes & Noble will be unveiling all 60 covers at an event Wednesday night in NYC (RSVP here). We are also supposed to be able to download the covers from B&N's website, and I would go look for them, but I just can't get past the banner on B&N's home page touting B&N's book club pick for February.
It is the racist, plagiarized Macmillan novel American Dirt.
Folks, what Barnes & Noble did here was no more and no less than literary blackface. They republished questionable works by white authors when it would have been so easy to find actually diverse authors to promote.
It took me less than 5 minutes of searching Wikipedia to find the lists of American authors (Mexican, African-American, Egyptian, etc), and about 5 seconds to figure out how to identify the ones with works in the public domain.
Barnes and Noble could not be bothered to do even that tiniest of work. Instead, they blindly grabbed whatever "classic" was handy, and slapped new covers on them without putting even the slightest thought into the message they were sending.
Update: According to the promotional materials, AI was used to select the titles.
We used artificial intelligence to analyze the text of 100 of the most famous titles, searching the text to see if it omitted ethnicity of primary characters. Using speech and linguistic patterns,or natural language processors (NLP) accounted for the fact that when authors described a character, they rarely outright state their race, but often use more poetic and descriptive language.
I was originally going to simply mention this in an update, but I decided to pull it out and put it at the end after I realized what this said about the thinking behind this project. They blindly put their faith in tech to save them when they should have been aware of the principle of "garbage in, garbage out". AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and since this one wasn't fed diverse books, there was no way that it could have picked up on problems like the racism in The Secret Garden, or the symbolism of the Frankenstein or Jekyll & Hyde covers.
And the worst part is that there were any number of people who could have pointed out the problems, had someone thought to ask.
* * *
B&N's statement:
We acknowledge the voices who have expressed concerns about the Diverse Editions project at our Barnes & Noble Fifth Avenue store and have decided to suspend the initiative. Diverse Editions presented new covers of classic books through a series of limited-edition jackets, designed by artists hailing from different ethnicities and backgrounds. The covers are not a substitute for black voices or writers of color, whose work and voices deserve to be heard. The booksellers who championed this initiative did so convinced it would help drive engagement with these classic titles. It was a project inspired by our work with schools and was created in part to raise awareness and discussion during Black History Month, in which Barnes & Noble stores nationally will continue to highlight a wide selection of books to celebrate black history and great literature from writers of color.
You just finished reading Barnes & Noble Pays Lip Service to Diversity By Slapping Brown Faces on the Covers of Novels By White Authors which was published on The Digital Reader.
We still don't know the specifics of the settlement agreement that ended the lawsuit that seven publishers filed against Amazon over Audible Captions, but one thing is clear: publishers care more about winning a fight against Amazon than about how the public might benefit.
AAP president and CEO Maria A. Pallante issued a statement yesterday, revealing that there are two parts to the settlement:
AAP, the plaintiffs, and Audible have resolved their pending litigation.
Audible has agreed that it will obtain permission from any AAP members that are in good standing with AAP before moving forward with Audible Captions for their works. We will be advising our members as to the application of the resolution.
Separately, the parties have presented a consent permanent injunction to the court, which would resolve and dismiss the underlying litigation between the publishers and Audible.
The Association of American Publishers has some 150 members, representing about a third of the titles published each year in the US (and a considerably smaller percentage of the titles published globally).
Those publishers have won their battle against Amazon, and their reward is the ability to deny users from accessing a useful tool.
Folks, I have seen, from the very first announcement of Audible Captions, the value that users can get from this feature. Anyone who had difficulty understanding spoken words, whether it's because English is not their native tongue or because they have hearing loss, could have used the Captions feature to get a clue what the narrator was saying. Furthermore, students who weren't familiar with a strange word spoken by the narrator could have used Captions to see how it was spelled, and then looked it up.
But now publishers have the power to deny the public from using this feature on their books.
I probably should not have been surprised at this outcome; the same thing happened in 2009, when Amazon debuted a text to speech feature on the second Kindle. In what is now misremembered as a legal precedent (it was actually a contract dispute) publishers pressured Amazon into giving them the option of denying users from accessing that feature, too.
So today's news should not be a surprise, but it does beg the question: Was winning your fight with Amazon really so important that throwing the public under the bus was an acceptable result?
image by ActuaLitté via Flickr
You just finished reading Publishers Threw the Public Under the Bus in Their Win Over Audible Captions which was published on The Digital Reader.
I am sure that you have seen the news this past week about Audible Captions, and how Amazon has settled the lawsuit by agreeing to give AAP members the option of disabling Audible's new caption feature on their audiobooks.
This detail was made clear in the AAP statement I quoted, and in the proposed settlement agreement (PDF).
But one thing that was not clearly stated anywhere in public was that Amazon is extending the same option to all authors and publishers.
I have confirmation from Audible PR that all rightsholders with audiobooks in Audible's catalog will have the same option as AAP members, and they will be able to disable or enable Audible Captions on their audiobooks.
(If you're wondering why I didn't mention this on Friday, it's because Audible PR had been radio silent since last August. They had ignored multiple emails, and I had honestly given up on communicating with them ever again, but then they contacted me about an hour after I published my post.)
Will you enable Audible Captions on your audiobooks?
Initially announced in July 2019, Audible Captions is computer-generated text that replicates the spoken words of an audiobook. The text is derived from a process that builds on the voice recognition work done for Amazon Alexa to convert what the narrator says into text.
The voice you hear will continue to be that of the narrator, but with Audible Captions you will have the option of confirming what the narrator just said with Audible's best guess (as anyone who has used Google Voice can tell you, voice-to-text conversion is not a perfect process).
When this feature is enabled, users will have their choice of font sizes. They will be able to follow the narration line-by-line, word-by-word, or through progressive type (the text will appear as if someone is typing - like one of those bad hacking scenes in a movie). Users will not, however, ahve access to the entire text (in spite of the ridiculous claims on Twitter, Audible Captions is not an ebook).
Audible Captions was delayed due to the lawsuit filed by seven publishers, but it should be available shortly.
Will you disable it on your audiobooks?
image by jeff_golden via Flickr
You just finished reading Amazon is Extending the Audible Caption Settlement to All Publishers and Authors – Will You Disable This Feature? which was published on The Digital Reader.
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
You just finished reading Morning Coffee – 10 February 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.
Earlier today a certain blog known for not crediting their sources reported that a quarter of Americans had not read a book in the past year. While that factoid was true at one point, it is now so old that it is a historical fact, not current news.
The uncredited sources for this factoid is a Pew Research Center article from September which is based on a survey conducted in January and February 2019.
So basically, 27% of Americans had not read a book in 2018. And as you would expect, the data on the non-readers corresponds to the survey subject's educational level and socioeconomic status:
Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school diploma or less are far more likely than those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree to report not reading books in any format in the 12 months before the survey (44% vs. 8%). Adults with lower levels of educational attainment are also among the least likely to own smartphones, a device that saw a substantial increase in usage for reading e-books from 2011 to 2016. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)
Adults whose annual household income is $30,000 or less are more likely than those living in households earning $75,000 or more a year to be non-book readers (36% vs. 14%). Hispanic (40%) and black (33%) adults are more likely than whites (22%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months. But there are differences between Hispanics born inside and outside the United States: 56% of foreign-born Hispanics report not having read a book, compared with 27% of Hispanics born in the U.S.
image by freestocks.org via Flickr
You just finished reading 27% of Americans Have Not Read a Book in The Past Year (That Year Was 2018) which was published on The Digital Reader.
I would not actually call these verbs boring, but if you checked your latest work and found you used one a lot, you might want to consider the alternatives.
You just finished reading Infographic: 16 Boring Verbs & What to Use Instead which was published on The Digital Reader.
So as you may know, my mother is on my Amazon account. (There is a point to this anecdote, trust me.) We mainly use it to read ebooks; I sideload SF ebooks while she reads free romance novels.
This worked out well for us (since long before Amazon had any sharing options) because our reading interests didn't intersect, and because I could use Amazon's system to email tech docs from her job to her fire tablet. Or at least this did work out well until yesterday, when I got an email from Goodreads, congratulating me for finishing a romance novel.
It seems that when I set up my mother's new Fire tablet, Amazon automatically re-connected my Goodreads account with my Kindle account. I had set the accounts so that my Kindle reading activity would not be uploaded to my Goodreads account, but Amazon overrode my wishes, and now my Goodreads account public profile says I am currently reading four romance novels and have finished another two.
I have since disconnected my Goodreads and Kindle accounts, but I was inspired today to write about default Amazon security settings that authors should change to protect their privacy.
Update: In light of revelations that Amazon shares your Alexa utterances with contractors, I have expanded this post with a 7th suggestion.
Update (12 February 2020): I just added instructions on how to stop Amazon from tracking what you are doing on Kindles and Kindle Fires (don't worry, this will not affect your reading activity).
Let's start with Goodreads.
An author who writes children's books probably doesn't want the non-child-friendly novels they're reading showing up on their Goodreads profile. Goodreads doesn't have many account level privacy options, so really the only way to solve this is to separate your Goodreads account from your Kindle account.
Note: If you use your Amazon account to log in to Goodreads then you will first need to set up new login credentials, otherwise your Goodreads will be deleted.
I just changed this setting on my mother's Fire tablet by going in to the settings menu, opening the accounts menu, and selecting the social networks option. I was presented with options for Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads, and I made sure to disconnect all three.
Note: I could not find any similar setting in my accounts on the Amazon website or the Goodreads website; while the setting might be there I could only find it on the Fire tablet.
Once that is done, let's do something about Amazon tracking your web browsing.
When you first visit Amazon's website, the retailer installs a cookie on your device. As you navigate around the site, that cookie reports your activity back to Amazon.
Here's how you can stop that from happening.
Visit Amazon.com, and select the "browsing history" option from the menu bar.
Select the "manage history" option on the right, and then when the new menu options, click the toggle button to disable tracking. Also, click the "remove all items" button, to clear your history.
That will stop Amazon from tracking your browsing on its site. It won't stop Amazon from tracking your other activity - if you have an Echo, for example, Amazon records everything you say to it.
If you have been following smart speakers in the news then you probably know that they listen to everything. What you might not know is that Amazon records everything you say to Alexa and stores an audio recording of every voice command you’ve issued, not just in the device itself, but on Amazon’s servers.
You can play back all of the recordings in the history menu on Alexa.amazon.com, and if you like you can delete the recordings one by one. But if you want to delete all of the recordings, the best way to do that is to visit the "Manage your content and devices" page on Amazon.com. Any Alexa apps you have registered, as well as the Echo smart speakers, will be listed on this page.
You can select each one, and delete the recordings associated with the app or device. If you use Alexa on a Fire tablet, you can also delete those recordings from this page.
I just deleted the recordings related to my Echo Dot. The confirmation said that my request was received, not that the files were deleted. There's no way for us to tell that Amazon actually followed through, unfortunately, so we'll just have to take their word it.
And while I was at it, I disabled the option to order from Amazon using Alexa.
I have heard far too many stories about pet parrots or small children using Alexa to place orders at Amazon, and that is why once I decided to take steps to enhance my privacy I made sure to go in and disable this feature.
You can disable this feature by going to the relevant settings menu on Alexa.Amazon.com, and clicking on the toggle button to turn it off.
Okay, so this technically is not a privacy setting, but disabling this feature is still a good idea.
Even though you might never have rated a product or posted a review, Amazon automatically created a public profile for you that lists a lot of what I would describe as personal and private info. This won't include your buying history, but it does include any biographical information you've provided as well as your comments, ratings, the authors you follow on Amazon, your public wish lists, and other interaction with Amazon.
You can control what Amazon reveals about you by going to your account page on Amazon.com, scrolling down to the "Ordering and shopping preferences" section, and selecting the "profile" option
This will bring up a new menu showing your public profile. If you select the edit option near the top of the screen, you will be taken to a menu where you can edit the content on your profile and its privacy settings.
I decided to hide everything from my profile, but you also have the option of being more selective.
On a related note, I also decided to hid my shopping and wish lists.
When you created your last Amazon Shopping List, did you check the privacy settings?
Those lists have a default setting of public, which is great if you want to share them but not so great if your shopping list is filled with sex toys.
If you're not sure about the privacy settings of your Amazon Lists, go to Amazon.com, click on the Accounts & List drop-down menu, and then select either "Shopping List" or "Wish List." This will bring up the "Your Lists" page. If you look on the left side of the screen you will see a list of your lists and their privacy levels.
If you see a public list that should be private, select the list and then click the 3-dot menu icon and then select the "Manage List" option.
This will bring up a menu where you can change the privacy status and other details.
Amazon has admitted to not only recording what you say to Alexa but also sharing those recordings with contractors. If you're reading this post then I am sure you will want to stop Amazon from sharing your info, and here's how you can do that.
Visit the Manage my Content & Devices page on Amazon, and select the option of Alexa privacy. Then, on the Alexa privacy page, Scroll down to the section labeled "Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa". Click the arrow.
On the next page you will see a blue toggle next to a label that reads "Help Develop New Features". Click the blue toggle to disable this feature and enhance your privacy. You may also see one or more blue toggles in a section labeled Use Messages to Improve Transcriptions. Uncheck those blue toggles as well.
It's not clear that this will stop Amazon from sharing your recordings, however. According to Bloomberg, Amazon said "people who opt out of that program might still have their recordings analyzed by hand over the regular course of the review process".
This slipped my attention when I first wrote this post, but Amazon tracks everything you do on your Kindle ereaders and Kindle Fire Android tablets. You can disable this tracking on devices that run the latest version of the firmware, but not Kindle apps or older devices. This means that at least two-thirds of users cannot take advantage of this option, but some will be able to.
Here's how.
Go to Amazon.com, click on the Accounts & List drop-down menu, and then select "Manage Your Content & Devices". This will take you to the page where you can manage your devices, apps, and the content on them.
When you are in the MYC&D menu, select the option for "Privacy Settings".
In the next menu, click the "Manage Settings" button under Amazon Devices Privacy. This will take you to the menu you can manage the privacy settings for each applicable device.
You will need to select the devices one by one, and disable each type of tracking one click at a time.
You might find that some of your devices are listed here but do not have any settings you can change. Those are the devices that need to be updated before you can manage the device's privacy settings.
And of course, any devices not listed are going to be running software so old that you can't stop Amazon from tracking what you are doing. (You also can't stop Amazon from tracking what you are doing in the Kindle and Audible apps.)
You just finished reading Eight Default Amazon Security Settings You Can Change for More Privacy which was published on The Digital Reader.
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
You just finished reading Morning Coffee – 17 February 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.
Sunday, 16 February 2020, was the day that I became a real author.
I have been a writer for over a decade now, but Sunday was the day that I learned that one of the workbooks I had uploaded to KDP had been pirated and was being sold on a pirate site.
I didn't really care that it had been pirated; my blog posts have been pirated so many times that I have grown a thick skin. Furthermore, the workbook was a lead magnet I had uploaded so I could learn how KDP worked.
But since I was filing DMCA notices Sunday night; I thought this would be a good opportunity to share my process and explain the most effective way to deal with piracy.
For starters, the primary way you fight piracy is by filing a DMCA takedown notice.
A DMC notice was originally named for a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which required tech companies in the US to remove online content when they were informed that the content infringed on a trademark or copyright.
Since then it has become a common term on the internet. Most web companies will respond to a DMCA notice, including companies in countries not covered by the DMCA. They do so more because it's SOP in the industry than because they have a legal obligation to do so (depending on where they are based, they might not have any law that requires compliance).
Well, that will depend on where you found the pirated ebook. You might find the pirated ebook in an ebookstore, or in a cloud storage service, or on a pirate site.
Each requires a different approach.
If that is the case, then you need to file a takedown notice with the retailer. Here are the relevant pages for the larger ebook retailers.
Be sure to fill out the form for each pirated ebook you find. Be thorough, and precise. Many of these companies get millions of notices a day, and if they can deal with your notice by rejecting it because you missed something, they will.
TIP: If you don't see the name of the company you need to contact, you can find their contact info by googling their name plus "DMCA". If that doesn't work, try their name plus "copyright".
If that is the case, then you need to file a DMCA notice with the service that is hosting the file. Here are the submission pages for the larger ebook retailers:
Again, if you don't see the name of the company you need to contact, you can find their contact info by googling their name plus "DMCA". If that doesn't work, try their name plus "copyright".
This is where things get complicated.
My rule of thumb is to only send the notices to companies that I can trust will respond. This is why I will send a notice to, say, Google, but not a pirate site like eBookBike.
I do not bother sending notices to pirate sites because rarely respond. In the ten years I have been a blogger, I have found they often ignore DMCA notices because they know they can get away with it. A lot of the time they are in a different legal jurisdiction, making it difficult to pursue legal action, and even if you did have the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to sue them, you will be throwing your money away for little benefit. The pirates know this, which is why many pirate sites will simply ignore you.
Also, a lot of pirate sites are only pretending to have your book. This type of site is usually running some kind of con (it varies). Since this type of site doesn't have your ebook, it's not worth your time even talking to them. What you should do instead is file a DMCA notice with Google. Ask Google to remove from its search results any pages on the faux pirate site that mention your book. You can do that here.
So how do you send a DMCA notice to a hosting company when you don't know their name?
This is going to require a little investigative work.
The first thing you should do is open a new browser tab, go to www.whois.com/whois/, and enter the pirate site's domain.
With most sites this will give you a page full of technical and contact info about the site.
The section you need to look for is the "nameservers". This can contain anywhere between one and 4 entries, and the reason we are looking at it is because the entries will give us a clue about the hosting company.
For example, the site that pirated my ebook uses Cloudflare's nameservers.
To be clear, this pirate site is not hosted by Cloudflare (it's just using CF's services). This detail is not strictly relevant, however; what matters is that I can send a DMCA notice to Cloudflare.
I do not know where to send the notices, exactly, so what I do is google Cloudflare and DMCA. This often turns up a good result, so you might want to try a similar trick if you are in my position.
This trick does not always work, however. Some hosting companies use obscure names for their nameservers, and when I encounter that I either have to ask for help in a forum for web techs, or spend a few minutes looking up obscure technical info. If you need a place to ask fro help, may I suggest my FB group, The Help Desk. If you ask me there I will be happy to help you figure out the answer.
But most of the time googling for the hosting company's DMCA page will give me a link to the page, and what I do next is fill out the form on that page.
Again, be sure to fill out the form for each pirated ebook you find. Be thorough, and precise. Many of these hosting companies get millions of notices a day, and if they can deal with your notice by rejecting it because you missed something, they will.
After you have sent the DMCA notices, you're going to need to follow up. You will need to be persistent in making sure that each notice is complied with, and that each pirated ebook is removed.
A couple years ago I had a problem with a pirate scraping my blog. I ended up having to send dozens of DMCA notices, and I had to repeatedly follow up because the hosting company, LeaseWeb, kept falling for the pirate site's lies when it claimed to have removed the pirated blog posts.
What was particularly frustrating about that incident was that I had to file DMCA notices with three different divisions of the company in three different countries. Then I had to yell at the three different divisions to get them to follow through.
That was frustrating, but I did finally manage to put an end to that particular piracy issue.
If this seems like too much work, here's a list of companies that can fight piracy for you - if you pay them enough.
BTW, you might also want to consider engaging Heather Cassaday. She's a virtual assistant who works with authors, and this is one of the services she offers. (She tipped me to my ebook being pirated.)
You just finished reading eBook Piracy – How to Respond If Someone Steals Your eBook Online which was published on The Digital Reader.
Things are about to get interesting again for Kindle owners.
Amazon just rolled out a new firmware update for the Kindle. The official notice for the update doesn't give much in the way of details, but a hacker combed through the code and found a few clues that hinted at new features.
Here's what Amazon told us:
Here’s what’s new:
Aa Menu: Over the next couple of weeks, you will see an updated Aa menu that makes it easier to access all font, layout and reading options without leaving your book.
Performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general enhancements.
That's not even close to being worth writing about, but the stuff Amazon left out, now that is another story.
JHowell posted over at MobileRead earlier today that he has already taken apart the firmware update, and found references to a couple new features:
Using your book cover as a screensaver will be fun, but I think the contrast setting could be the most useful. If understand it correctly, Amazon is going to give users the option of adjusting the contrast between the white, black, and shades of gray displayed by the Kindle.
We'll be able to make the whites "whiter" or "grayer", depending on the setting chosen. The lighter shades of gray will also be affected, but black will not be affected at all.
This won't help much with text, but it should prove useful with images in an ebook. Adjusting the contrast should bring out additional detail in images that would otherwise be indistinguishable.
Now that is going to be useful, IMO.
You just finished reading Kindle Firmware Update 5.12.4 Drops Hints About New Contrast, Screensaver Features which was published on The Digital Reader.
Earlier this week The Publishers Authors Guild released a report that "explores the factors leading to the decline in the writing profession. Alas, this report is based on the flawed survey that I debunked last January, making it the epitome of the "garbage in, garbage out" error.
As I reported last year:
The Authors Guild report in particular is flawed because it is based on a self-selected survey group where self-published authors are under-represented and retirement age traditionally authors are over-represented.
And as Len Epps pointed out in the comment of that post, 18% of the survey respondents didn't make any income from their writing in the previous year. This would arguably disqualify the from being "full-time authors" (I would call them retired, actually).
You can find the report as a PDF on The Authors Guild's website.
It is based on a number of false assumptions, so it has little merit.
If nothing else, its very mindset is flawed. Like we've seen in other The Authors Guild statements on this topic, this report focused on the income of published authors and conveniently overlooks the fact that before the internet, 99% of authors made nothing from the sale of their books because they could not get published in the first place.
Of the remaining 1%, maybe one in a hundred could make a living at it.
What The Authors Guild wants you to do is focus on the 0.01% so they can wring their hands over the poor, beleaguered authors. I am not sure what The Authors Guild gains by pushing this narrative, but it is as false as TAG's claim that piracy is a major problem (when in fact their data shows the opposite is true).
What I do know was that author income as an aggregate is up. The 99.99% are making more than ever before by bypassing publishers entirely and going directly to market. Thanks to Amazon setting the standard, most ebook retailers pay better royalties than publishers ever did (another detail that The Authors Guild hoped you would overlook).
All authors have to do is strive to get those sales. The way to win in the current market is for authors to save themselves.
The Authors Guild, on the other hand, is focused on authors getting rescued. (I think that says a lot about their mindset, actually.)
image by James Cridland via Flickr
You just finished reading The Authors Guild Rehashes Bogus Author Income Survey as a “New” Report which was published on The Digital Reader.
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
You just finished reading Morning Coffee – 24 February 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.
Judging by the Kindle Unlimited stats for January, Amazon saw a huge jump in reading activity last month.
Last week the retailer announced that the KDP Select funding pool totaled $28.2 million for January 2020. That is an increase of $2 million over December, and $3.8 million more than the amount paid out the previous January. At the same time, the per-page rate dropped to $0.004411, from $0.004664 in December.
There's no way to tell how that translates into revenue for Amazon, but it does suggest that a lot more ebooks were being read in KU in January than in December.
In related news, Amazon paid out over $300 million through the KDP Select Fund last year.
P.S. Here's a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.
You just finished reading Kindle Unlimited Fundung Pool Grew by $2 Million in January 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.
IngramSpark, the self-publishing division of the book distributor Ingram Content Group, sent out an email today informing users of a new policy intended to reduce misleading and poor-quality books.
IngramSpark is taking a necessary stand to uphold the integrity of and reduce bias against independently published works. To align with our industry's needs for content integrity, we will actively remove print content from our catalog that does harm to buyers and affects the reputations of our publishers and retail and library partners.
So what content will be affected?
Blank notebooks, for one, and you will no longer be able to make a workbook without first getting permission of the copyright holder, but mostly books that are crap. Ingram gave us a list:
All in all, this is a great policy; let's just hope that they put as much care into implementing it as they did when they devised the rules.
According to the email, the policy will take effect on 27 April. You can find the body of the email here, and there is also a PDF with FAQ that you can download.
image by WabbitWanderer via Flickr
You just finished reading IngramSpark Announces New Quality Standards for Its POD Service which was published on The Digital Reader.
Amazon rolled out an update to its Kindle iOS app today The new features include a reorganized font and formatting menu (Aa menu) as well as a couple new features for the continuous scroll reading mode.
The app now has a new "reading ruler". This is a digital replica of the ruler that some of us were taught to use when reading. It is available in a half dozen different colors and several styles, including:
The reading ruler options are accessible from the "More" tab in the new Aa menu. Enabling this feature will switch you to the continuous scroll mode.
This update also added "a vertical navigation bar to explore your book without losing your place" when you are in the continuous scroll mode. What this means is that when you are in that mode, you can flip to another place in the ebook by first tapping on the center of the screen, and then using the navigation bar that appears on the right side of the screen. Your original location will be marked on the navigation bar as a dot, making it easy to return to where you were reading before.
You can find the app in Apple's unnamed app store.
You just finished reading Kindle iOS v6.28 Adds “Reading Ruler” Feature, New Font Menu which was published on The Digital Reader.
Last week the finance service NetCredit posted an infographic containing the most popular book set in each state. How many have you read?
BTW, NetCredit also has graphics with a quote from each book, but they are frankly illegible so I will not be repeating them here (I am saving them to use to torture designers).
You just finished reading Infographic: The Most Popular Book Set in Each (US) State which was published on The Digital Reader.
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
You just finished reading Morning Coffee – 2 March 2020 which was published on The Digital Reader.
The following poem is called The Chaos. It was written in 1922 by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
This poem is frequently shared as a joke that reinforced the outdated and provincial view that there is only a single correct way to pronounce these words. That was never actually true, not even when this poem was written, but even if that were true, wait long enough and the "correct" pronunciation will no longer be valid. (Shakespeare is the perfect example of this; the lines in his plays rhymed - mostly - when he wrote them 400 years ago, but do not rhyme today because pronunciation has changed.)
In any case, this poem is still a great example of the wild irregularities of English spelling. (A
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
You just finished reading If You Can Correctly Pronounce Every Word in This Poem – (Actually, Most People Can) which was published on The Digital Reader.
It looks like the Big Five is about to become the Not-So-Big-Four.
Variety reports that ViacomCBS (or whatever they are calling themselves today) is considering a sale of its book publishing unit.
ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish told investors Wednesday that the company is taking a hard look at all operations. Simon & Schuster has generated inquiries from prospective buyers in the past, Bakish said during a Q&A held as part of Morgan Stanley’s annual investor conference in San Francisco.
Simon & Schuster “is not a core asset. It is not video-based. It does not have significant connection for our broader business,” Bakish said. “We have had multiple unsolicited inbound calls about that asset, and so as the market stabilizes, we are going to engage in a process” to examine strategic alternatives. ViacomCBS said publishing revenue in 2019 came to $814 million, down 1.3% from $825 million in the prior year.
PW reports that S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy confirmed the potential sale in a letter to staff. The letter did not include much in the way of addition detail, however.
This does not come as a surprise. Simon and Schuster is not technically the smallest of the "Big Five" US trade publishers, but it is the most vulnerable. The other four are either significantly larger in their own right or part of larger international publishing conglomerates (Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrink, Hachette is owned by Legardere Publishing, HarperCollins is twice the size of S&S, and PRH is PRH).
In fact, I would have described S&S as the most likely candidate to be bought by Amazon when it looked like the retailer wanted to take a bite out of the industry, and for years now the only thing stopping Legardere, PRH, or Holtzbrink from buying S&S was that CBS didn't want to sell.
That has apparently changed, and soon so could the ownership of S&S.
Who do you think is going to buy them?
It's hard to guess who will, but I would bet that I cam name the one company that will not.
Amazon.
I know that most will assume that Amazon is the leading candidate, but as I see it Amazon already gets enough shit from the publishing industry, and it doesn't need even more regulatory oversight. S&S doesn't have enough revenue to make the headaches worth it, so Amazon is probably going to pass.
Do you think Bezos might buy it?
image by ActuaLitté via Flickr
You just finished reading Simon & Schuster is Up For Sale which was published on The Digital Reader.
