The Nikkei reported today that Apple will be expanding their ebookstore soon. Some time in the near future, possibly as early as next month, Apple will start selling ebooks in Japan. They have reportedly already signed a number of Japanese publishers, including Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and others.
Apple reportedly has 80 thousand titles lined up, all from local publishers. When combined with their dominance of the Japanese tablet market (iPad has a 60% market share), Apple will likely have a sizable advantage over the competition, one which is should be enough to help overcome the fact that Apple was beaten to the Japanese ebook market by Kobo, Google, and Amazon.
All this competition is expected to boost the growth of the Japanese ebook market. It’s currently estimated to be worth 70 billion yen, and some believe it will grow to 200 billion yen in the next few years.
If today’s news is a sign of what’s to come then 2013 promises to be a very interesting year.
Not sure what I mean? If you look at the pattern of the ebookstore launches in the past 60 months I’m sure you’ll see why I think that.
Twice in the past 6 months one of the maj0r ebookstores launched a local store, just to have their competition follow suit weeks or months later.
Brazil? Kobo, Apple, Amazon
Japan? Kobo, Amazon, Google, and Apple (soon)
China? Amazon, for now
India? Amazon again
The pattern of where you don’t see competing launches, China and India for example, is going to make for an interesting comparison. Will those ebook markets grow as fast as the hyper competitive markets?
More importantly, which ebook market will be the next to see multiple ebookstores launch? I’m thinking Russia, myself, B&N is already sniffing around in that market, so Amazon is probably hot on their heels. If there’s anything that I learned from the Waterstones-Amazon deal, it’s that Amazon won’t let B&N get the slightest advantage. Why else did Amazon sign with Waterstones if not to keep the bookseller away from B&N?
In what was perhaps the shortest beta test in recent memory, the ebook distributor/retailer Smashwords has just officially launched their new Epub only distribution channel.
Smashwords Direct had originally been announced late last year in the response to the requests from quite a few authors, publishers, and ebook pros (myself included). A lot of us take pride in the ebooks we make, and it bothered us that we had to make a DOC file which would then be automagically mangled into a dozen different file formats. The automatic process is all well and good, but given that we often make a good quality Epub anyway it is galling to watch a poorer quality file be be distributed to iBooks and other ebookstores.
But with Smashwords Direct, the gall is gone.
Authors and publishers can now upload an Epub file and either use it to replace the Epub which had been produced by the MeatGrinder, or, and this is the good part, they can upload an Epub for a new title and not have to make the DOC file to feed into the MeatGrinder.
That second option is going to open up a lot of possibilities for making use of the finer aspects of Epub, which starts at dropcaps and ends with Epub3. But one thing that the second option blocks is the ability to sell in multiple formats, and if an author only uploads the Epub they’ll also lose out on the samples which would be available to any ebook fed through the MeatGrinder. Luckily future plans include allowing for authors to upload PDF, Kindle, and other formats. Support for samples is also planned.
And even in all this good news there is a few serious issues. SW Direct was tested over the weekend and while many of the Epub files looked nice quite a few also failed Epubcheck. Mark reported that nearly a third of the test Epub files failed EpubCheck and thus doesn’t comply with the Epub specification. That is a sign that the ebook is not well made, a detail which is both embarrassing and a aserious issue which will hinder that ebook being sold in all the ebookstores. Apple in particular requires the ebooks to pass EpubCheck.
There was also a few Epubs which reportedly didn’t look as good as the Epub which come out of the MeatGrinder. A survey of the tools used to make the Epub files returned a surprisingly diverse set of answers, including:
Adobe InDesign
Nisus writer pro
OpenOffice
Jutoh
Atlantis
Epubmaker
LibreOffice
Writer2epub
Scrivener
HTML
Sigil
Calibre
The last 3 were the most popular by far, and to be perfectly honest there are at least 2 names on this list that I have never heard of before.
In any case, files uploaded to Smashwords will need to comply with the Style Guide. They will still need to meet certain requirements, some of which are so they can be distributed to the ebookstores (they don’t like you mentioning the competition).
What is an ebook blog without ereader reviews? I don’t know, but that’s what this blog has been for quite some time. Today that changes.
Several weeks ago I got a new ereader shipped to me from Europe. It’s the Boox i62HD Firefly, and it’s Onyx’s latest and greatest 6″ ereader with the new HD E-ink screen, frontlight, and pretty much all the same great hardware as the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Glo as well as a couple things the other ereaders lack, namely a microSD card slot and page turn buttons.
Opinion
I generally found this to be a run of the mill ereader, and given that it costs 30 euros more that the European price for the Kobo Glo I’m not sure I see the point. Also, given the poor quality of the frontlight I feel I must discourage anyone from buying this ereader.
Hardware
In terms of looks, the Firefly would best be described as a cross between the Nook Touch and the Kindle Touch. It matches the gray color of the KT, while adding the page turn buttons of the Nook Touch on the sides of the screen. It also has a single button below the screen like the KT, and on the bottom edge it has a headphone jack, microSD card slot, and mini USB port.
The back is a smooth but largely featureless gray. As I hold it in my hands, I find that it is quite the heavy ereader. It feels like there’s a noticeable difference, even though according to the specs the KPW is only about 30 grams lighter (12%).
The frontlight is best described as splotchy and fragile. I can see distinct shadows and bright spots on the screen when using the Firefly, and when I look at the screen edge on the unevenness of the lighting is even more distinct.
This ereader also failed the drop test. Remember when I reported that you could drop keys on the Nook Glow and damage the frontlight? The Firefly has the same problem. In fact, the first couple dings on the screen happened before I tested this ereader – even though this ereader came with a case.
Software
It works adequately well as an ereader, and the page turn speed is about as fast as on my K4. You can highlight, type notes, and look words up in the dictionary. There’s also bookmarks, search, and TTS, though that last is painful to listen to.
While this ereader should have shown that a nimble smaller competitor could put out a better product than the big guys, the i62HD is actually missing the one thing I was looking forward to.
I have owned past Onyx devices, and I had come to know and love the annotation options. The earlier ereaders had a Wacom touchscreen, and you could use the stylus to write notes on the text. There were certain limitations, but being able to scribble, underline, or highlight relevant notes was really cool.
Absent the note-taking, this is simply a more expensive, heavier, and somewhat less desirable alternative to the Kobo Glo or Kindle Paperwhite.
Update: It turns out I was wrong. The annotation features which I recalled using with past Onyx models only ever worked with PDF and images, not Epub or other text based ebooks. Please note that I tried to fact check that feature before posting this review; none of the Onyx reps corrected my mistaken assumption.
Where to Buy
The Firefly seems to only be available in Europe, where it is sold by eReader-Store.EU.
You will be able to get the same ereader (albeit with a different firmware) from Onyx-Boox.com in January. I would suggest that you buy from the latter site, even though it is more expensive. I have found that eReader-Store.EU doesn’t exactly want to communicate with me. The alternate model is also worth considering because it has a better TTS engine. According to the website it will use the Ivona engine.
A few months back I posted a rant about why I don’t follow authors on Twitter anymore. I was generally tired of the handful of authors who spammed all their connections, whether by using bots to automatically harass new followers or by sending DMs with faux queries on whether they had read one of the author’s books. (I’m even getting the occasional tweet from authors I do not know and am not connected to.)
My post wasn’t terribly popular among the authors who don’t spam people, but that didn’t change the fact that some authors are using unsolicited contacts to try to generate sales. This rarely works, and as Mark explains in the following post it is guaranteed to annoy at least some of the recipients.
I was working on the post about Smashwords Direct this morning when I happened upon the following commentary by Mark Coker of Smashwords. He’s seeing much the same spam as I have complained about, and it annoys him too.
Today, I received a plea from a gentleman who used LinkedIn’s messaging system to spam his closest however-many-hundred-closest-friends. He says he needs me to buy his book at Amazon, and wants me spread the word to as many people as possible, because he’s gotten himself $800,000 in debt due to falling prey to a scam that originated in the Middle East (I assume it’s one of those scams offering you a big cut of a $20 million ill-gotten fortune from a corrupt politician, if only you’ll front a few hundred thousand dollars in goodwill money).
He said if he can sell 500,000 copies, it’ll get him out of his mess. Seriously. Yeah, okay. We’ve all made mistakes in the past, but that doesn’t give us permission to make a bigger marketing mistake, which is to send out unsolicited bulk emails. Unless someone has given you permission to send them a bulk email (such as them requesting to be added to your mailing list for fans), don’t send the email.
Your immediate family and closest true friends will put up with an unsolicited bulk email, but the rest of the world will not. Almost every day I receive bulk email solitications from authors, simply because I’m in their address book because I responded to an email months or years ago, or I agreed to connect to them on LinkedIn or Facebook. When I receive these bulk solicitations, I unfriend these people from my connections, or I’ll politely ask them to remove me from all future communications.
It saddens me to see such emails, especially the case of the man above we’ll call Mr. Pickle. I’m going to remember him and his book for the wrong reasons. The author is the brand, and this type of email is not good brand-building. I’ve noticed a marked increase in such emails originating from my connections on LinkedIn.
If you face the same issue, LinkedIn makes it easy to remove these people from your connections. Here’s how: Log into LinkedIn, click connections, then click the link at right that says "remove connections," then click the checkbox of the user and click remove. If someone’s spamming you on Facebook, like tagging you in posts for which you have no connection, or posting spam on your wall, it’s easy to unfriend them. Click to their Facebook page, and float your mouse over the box that shows a checkmark and the word "Friends," and then click the "unfriend" option that pops up below.
Speaking of spam, almost every day I receive spam emails offering to sell me access to huge mailing lists of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes over a million people, for as little as a couple hundred dollars, or less. All these emails claim they’re "100%-opt in," but 99.99999% of the time, they’re not.
They’re spam lists. They’re scams. I’ve seen multiple authors fall for these scams in the past. Please don’t. Some have even complained to us, "I sent out a million emails, I got 900 page views at Smashwords, but not a single sample download or sale. What’s wrong?"
Spam doesn’t work. It’s a sucker’s bet. There are no easy shortcuts to book selling. It’s incredibly tough, hard work. Realize that most books don’t sell well. Focus your attention on your craft, and on producing books that are as good or better than what the big NY publishers are putting out. Give readers great, professional-looking book covers. Price your books competitively. Study the best practices in The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. Then get to work writing the next book. The best marketing you can do for you book is to write a book that markets itself on the wings of reader word of mouth.
The ebook distributor Smashwords is now testing a new submission process for Epub files.
Rather than submit a Word DOC file for conversion via the Smashwords Meatgrinder, authors and publishers can now submit an Epub file which will be sold by Smashwords and distributed to the various ebookstores:
Smashwords Direct alpha testing underway. We’re preparing to launch Smashwords Direct, our direct .epub upload option. One year ago in my 2011 annual year-in-review over at the Smashwords Blog, we made a commitment to launch SWD in the second half of 2012. We’re working to fulfill that commitment. We’re nearing completion of a beta version of SWD. The first iteration will enable those of you with professionally designed .epub files to replace your current Smashwords-generated .epub with another .epub. It’ll also allow authors to upload .epub files instead of Word .doc files. We’re inviting people with custom epubs to email them to us at [email protected]. In your email, please tell us your process for creating the file (did you use a tool such as Calibre or InDesign, or did you hire someone?). We will perform internal testing with these files, though we will not publish them or go live with them (after we launch, we’ll let you do this yourself). Once we receive a critical mass of testing files, this request for testing files will disappear. Thank you!
Speaking as someone who has prepped ebooks for submission to Smashwords, I must say that I danced a jig when I heard this bit of news. I recall that Mark Coker promised this was coming sometime this year, and even though there are only a few days left in the year it’s good to see it finally happening.
As much as I like the option of having a low cost ebook distributor, the MeatGrinder process which Smashwords uses to convert from a DOC file to a half dozen ebook formats is something else. The MeatGrinder is aptly named in that it takes a DOC file which no one would want to read for any length of time and grinds it up into a sausage-quality Epub or Kindle ebook. Like any sausage, you don’t want to look at the guts. Also like a sausage, the general quality of MeatGrinder output falls far short of what can be done with an ebook made from scratch.
But even if you leave aside such professional complaints like the fact that prepping a DOC for Smashwords takes as much time than creating both the Mobi and Epub versions of a title, there’s a whole other reason for why this is a good idea:
Epub3
The Meatgrinder was conceived at a time when ebooks were rarely more than text and images. Even the base Epub2 format is not that much more complicated than the Kindle format – not when compared to Epub3.
We’ve already reached the point where embedding audio, video, Javascript, and fixed layout images in ebooks is no longer the exception. These extra features might not be commonplace yet, but they are mainstream and no one even blinks anymore if they turn up in an ebook.
The MeatGrinder can’t handle the extra features, so if Smashwords wants to continue to be relevant then they’ll need to offer a way to bypass the MeatGrinder.
Smashwords Direct is the first step in that direction, and it cannot come soon enough.
It’s been quite some time since I last discussed how many visitors this blog is getting, and today that interregnum ends.
It’s been a great year at The Digital Reader, and website traffic has never been better. Over the last 6 months* this blog was visited 1.4 million times, up from 932 thousand visits over the same period of 2011. I had over a million unique visitors, a significant in crease from the not quite 700 thousand in 2011. Page views were also up 50% over the second half of 2011, with 2.1 million pages having been read in the last 6 months.
I’ve posted a couple clippings from Google Analytics below, and all in all I’m rather pleased about my gains. It’s not quite the doubling of traffic which was my goal this year, but it’s still not bad.
On a related note, this blog is 3 years old and has been growing more or less continuously for all that time. The first year saw a meteoric growth, and in the second year traffic peaked at a 40% increase in December.
* In case you’re wondering why I didn’t compare the entire year: There was a month long period in 2012 when GA wasn’t collecting data. I wasn’t checking traffic either, so it took me a while to catch the lapse.
Christmas is the prime gadget buying season in the US, but not everyone is feeling the joy. Based on what Amazon didn’t say in yesterday’s press release, I have a strong feeling that Barnes & Noble wasn’t the only ereader maker who had disappointing sales this holiday season.
Amazon is like pretty much any business. They like to boast about the good news and avoid mentioning the bad. They don’t often get into specific details about things like Kindle hardware sales, but they usually make at least a vague statement of some kind.
For the past 3 years Amazon has posted a press release in late December which boasted about how great Kindle sales were. Each year the statements lauding the Kindle got more and more colorful, with Amazon saying that sales were better and better.
Until this year, when Amazon didn’t say anything. Oh, there was a press release and it did say things like:
Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle hold the top four spots on the Amazon worldwide best seller charts since launch.
But Amazon said that last year and the year before, so it doesn’t mean much. No, the important detail here is what Amazon didn’t say.
They didn’t say that this was the best year ever for hardware sales. A similar statement was in the 2010 and 2011 press release, but not the press release that came out yesterday. In fact, the older press releases led with the boast about sales. Do you recall the million Kindles sold each week claim? That’s what Amazon said last year, but they didn’t say anything like that this year.
I know that this is awfully thin evidence, but don’t you think Amazon would have boasted about sales if they could have? I certainly would have done so.
Assuming I am right, what impact do you think this will have on the ereader market? Could this drop in sales cause Amazon to cut back on developing new hardware? I could see them delaying ereader releases, sure; the adoption rate for ereaders has plateaued here in the US, so it might make sense for Amazon to sell their current models to the rest of the world rather than spend lots of money finding something new.
I’ve just been sent a copy of an SEC filing that Barnes & Noble submitted today, and it contains a couple interesting nuggets of info which might explain why Pearson bought a chunk of Nook Media.
Here’s what B&N had to say about their holiday sales:
The Company expects to announce its holiday sales results on January 3, 2013. Based on preliminary sales results to date in the holiday period and sales trends, the Company expects its holiday sales results will be below expectations and that the NOOK business will not meet the Company’s prior projection for fiscal year 2013.
For the longest time now I’ve been concerned about how well B&N is doing, and now it looks like I was right. I might not have had any good evidence to show that there was a problem, but my gut instinct told me B&N was not having much success with the Nook.
In fact, one feeling I had had for the past several weeks was that B&N was seeing poor sales this holiday season. I do so wish that I had had courage to actually express that impression.
I think we can clearly see now why B&N has been trying to foist the Nook division onto someone else. Unfortunately, B&N couldn’t find a sucker dumb enough to buy the entire Nook division, so instead they’ve been picking up piecemeal investments from Microsoft and (as of today) Pearson.
These new sales projections change the entire tone of the investment. Now it is no longer a strategic investment; instead Pearson is propping up one of Amazon’s competitors.
When Barnes & Noble announced plans to spinoff the Nook division in January of this year, it seemed likely that B&N wanted to find someone else to fund the capital intensive development costs for the Nook hardware.
Today B&N got another step closer to their goal. Pearson has just announced that they’re buying a 5% stake in Nook Media. It’s going to cost them $89.5 million in cash and puts the value of B&N’s subsidiary at approximately $1.8 billion.
Following the closing of the transaction, B&N will own about 78.2% of Nook Media and Microsoft will own approximately 16.8%. MS was the first investor in Nook Media, and they brought $300 million to the company when it was first announced in April as Newco.
On a sidenote, Pearson also has the option of buying a second stake in Nook Media at the same price as they’re paying today.
It’s not clear yet what MS is getting out of the deal, but why did Pearson get involved? According to the press release, they’re in it for the same reason B&N College was pulled into Nook Media: the academic market.
Here’s what Pearson CEO Will Ethridge said in the press release (rather, here are the words put in his mouth):
With this investment, we have entered into a commercial agreement with Nook Media that will allow our two companies to work closely together in order to create a more seamless and effective experience for students. It is another example of our strategy of making our content and services broadly available to students and faculty through a wide range of distribution partners.
So it’s a horizontal integration then. It’s not quite a vertical integration; Nook Media is not a distributor or a retailer. They develop the Nook apps and hardware and are probably working on something new for digital textbooks (why else would Pearson be interested).
And now that one publisher has invested in Nook Media, how long do you think it will be before the rest of the major US publishers buy a stake? I’m thinking 6 months, myself.
Any number of people in digital publishing have argued that publishers should buy a retail channel so they can compete better against Amazon; an interest in Nook Media could be exactly what they wanted. It would give publishers a direct relationship with one of Amazon’s competitors. And when it is trounced by Amazon, the pain will be all that much sharper.
Apple has long been known for making devices with visually distinct designs (and then accusing everyone of copying them). As we can see today, those designs didn’t just fall off the back of a truck.
Design Boom has just posted a gallery of photos showing off the work of Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who worked with Apple in the early and mid-80s.
The gallery includes a number of gadgets which were never made, including the Macphone and a funky looking dual flat-screen work station, but it also includes a design from 1982 which clearly became the first Macintosh. There’s also a photo from 1985 which hints at the design of the iMac, even though that computer wasn’t released until a decade later.
Update: DesignBoom has asked me to reduce the number of images in this gallery and direct you to their website to see the rest.
The one I like best is the MacTablet. There had been hints before that Apple had looked at that concept in the 1980s. That tablet, which was codenamed Bashful, was more of a fixed desktop touchscreen computer than what we would call a tablet today.
It’s a pity that Apple never made the Bashful; it would have been expensive but it would also have turned computing upside down – again.
The social reading site Goodreads had a very good year in 2012, better than me in fact (my traffic only increased by 50%). They posted the following infographic to share the good news.
The site’s 13 million members have contributed over 20 million reviews and added 210 million titles to their virtual bookshelves this past year.
Piracy is as much of a problem in China as in the rest of the world, only with a twist.
Some litigants in China have decided (rather than pursue the actual pirates) to instead sue the easier target (who also coincidentally happens to have deep pockets). Today that is Apple. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported today:
The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ordered Apple to pay a total of 1.03 million yuan (165,908 U. S. dollars) to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.
This case involved some apps which a pirate uploaded to the Apple’s Chinese app store last year. The apps reportedly included copyrighted works belonging to the plaintiffs.
I only have the one English language summary to work from, so I don’t know all the details. I did find the court in question, but there’s no reference to this particular case on the website. There are mentions of Apple and past lawsuits (the iPad trademark, for example), but nothing about this most recent case.
I am withholding further judgement until I can turn up the court docs, Chinese language coverage of the case, but I will point out one important detail.
This is the second copyright lawsuit Apple has lost in China this year. The first was concluded in September, costing Apple 520,000 yuan. That’s not a whole lot of money, but no company wants to be dragged into court.
Don’t you think that Apple would have made sure there was some procedure to remove pirated content from iTunes app store in China? There’s certainly a procedure for the US, and I don’t understand why that would not be the case in all markets (legal requirement or not).
So either Apple didn’t set up a DMCA-like takedown procedure in China, or the authors didn’t avail themselves of it, or they decided to go after the deep pockets.
Does anyone know which situation is the correct one?
The app analytics service Flurry reminded us today how someone is always watching. According to their latest blog post, Tuesday marked the new record for the largest number of mobile devices being turned on for the first time, and it also set a new record for the number of apps downloaded.
Over 17 million new iThings and Android devices were activated on Tuesday, up from an average of around 4 million a day for the part of December. Flurry also tracked 328 million new apps being downloaded, which was just over twice the daily average for the first 20 days in December.
And of course Apple came out ahead. The single most common device was the iPad, followed by the Kindle Fire HD. Just over half the new activations were for tablets, a marked difference from the rest of December.
It seems that smartphones are the gadget people tend to buy for themselves, while tablets are more likely to be gifts. That would fit in well with today’s news from the Pew Research Center which showed that tablet ownership rose much faster during the last holiday season than it did in the year that followed.
The above chart suggests that next month we’ll be reading about another significant jump in tablet ownership.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem like the Microsoft Surface is seeing the same love as the iPad and Android tablets. As you can see from the following chart, a survey of first tweets from various gadgets resulted in a rather low number for the Surface.
That survey is not at all scientific, but it stands as a good rule of thumb. One of the first things I did after setting up my new U410 was to tweet about it. I’m sure lots of other gadget owners did the same.
And the anecdotal evidence provided by the tweets is backed up by a new report from Chitaka. That showed that the Kindle Fire was generating about 5% of the ad impressions of the iPad, with Samsung and Google tablets coming in a distant 2nd and 3rd place. The Surface generated about a fifth of 1% of the ad impressions generated by the iPad.
The Pew Research Center has just released the results of their fall surveys into gadget ownership, and it’s a lesson in why you shouldn’t try to compare the results of 2 different consumer surveys, no matter how close the survey topic.
In a seeming contradiction to last week’s Forrester news, the Pew Center reports that tablet ownership is up noticeably, while the number of Americans who own an ereader is only negligibly different from Pew’s January 2012 survey.
Around 2300 Americans were polled in October and November, and 24% now own a tablet of some kind. That’s a nice increase from the 19% of respondents in the January survey who reported owning one, and a significant change from the 10% who reported last December that they owned a tablet.
eReader ownership stayed at 19%, the same as in January, though that figure is higher than the 10% of respondents who owned one in December of last year. This statistic comes as no surprise, because in spite of the many ereaders which launched this year E-ink repeatedly reported that their earnings were down (link). The market guesstimators at iSuppli concur in the flatline of ereader ownership; in fact they predicted that only 2/3rds as many ereaders would be made in 2012, compared to 2011.
But on the upside, digital reading was up this year. It seems that more people are reading n tablets and smartphones than before, with 23% of respondents saying that they read an ebook, up from 16% last December. At the same time the number of people who had read a paper book had dropped from 72% to 67%.
All in all, this is good news. eBook adoption continues apace, just not with a similar increase in ereader ownership. Instead it seems that Americans are moving more of their reading on to tablets, smartphones, and the like.
And library ebook are also seeing greater demand. The Pew Center also reported that ebook borrowing was on the rise (now 5% from 3% in December 2011), though it still only represents a very sliver of the population. Of particular interest is the footnote that this statistic was defined by the respondents; some may have included the ebooks they shared via the Nook LendMe program or the ebooks borrowed from the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library.
And on a sidenote, the Pew Center has changed how they define library users and ebook borrowers. That means the news from back in June that 12% of Americans had checked out a library ebook is no longer relevant; the current statistics are defined differently. (more to come on this point; I want to better understand what changed)
Did you hear about the latest terrible mean thing Amazon didn’t do?
According to BoingBoing and Techcrunch, Amazon has supposedly removed a personal memoir because the author reflects on his childhood and references Star Wars. The author reported that Amazon pulled the book because the obvious trademark issues.
Kindle Direct Publishing informed me today–Christmas Day–that they have removed my self-published book, A Long Time Ago: Growing up with and out of Star Wars, from the Kindle store because it "contains references to the trademarked term, “Star Wars".
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Well, no.
I checked and this book is still listed in the Kindle Store (here).
I don’t know if someone at Amazon reversed the decision or if the author simply made up the story. Perhaps the ebook is only missing from the Canadian Kindle Store, possibly due to differences in their trademark laws. It’s also possible that someone at Amazon saw the early reporting, looked into the matter, and reversed the removal.
Update: It seems the ebook may have been removed and then restored. Jason Boog of Galleycat covered this story and his post implies that he looked at the listing before publishing his post earlier today. If he didn’t see the ebook then it probably wasn’t there.
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The Nikkei reported today that Apple will be expanding their ebookstore soon. Some time in the near future, possibly as early as next month, Apple will start selling ebooks in Japan. They have reportedly already signed a number of Japanese publishers, including Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shogakukan, and others.
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