Tag Archives: readers

Downs and Ups

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to connect a device to the local Wi-Fi, only to find yourself staring at a list of available networks long enough that you have to scroll halfway around the world.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. You can put your hands down.

I started thinking about this when I was setting up the work iPhone. Even at home in my office, I can see ten networks and only three of them are mine. At work, it’s even worse: several different internal networks, networks from businesses nearby, and a whole bunch of those not-really-a-network networks associated with random bits of hardware*.

* If you don’t connect your Wi-Fi-capable printer, TV, or streaming media player to a real network, it’ll announce itself to the world as a network of its own. It’s part of the setup process, so it’s almost necessary. But if that gadget is connected with a USB or Ethernet cable, or you’re just not networking it at all, and you don’t explicitly turn off the Wi-Fi, it’ll be screaming at the world “I’m here, I’m here!” eternally. And, let’s be brutally honest here: nobody I know turns off the Wi-Fi.

Or in a coffee shop. Say you’re in Peet’s and you want to put your laptop on their Wi-Fi. It’s there. But so is the network used by their cash registers. And the networks from the Starbucks across the street. And the three customers using their phones as hot spots, the ubiquitous Comcast and Xfinity networks, the possibly-a-trap network called “FreeWIFI”, and a dozen or so individual machines cut off from their respective corporate networks and desperately trying to reconnect.

It makes for one heck of a lot of scrolling.

As I said, I noticed the issue with the iPhone, but Android, Windows, ChromeOS, and MacOS are just as troublesome. Nor, by the way, is the problem confined to Wi-Fi. Despite the limited range, Bluetooth is nearly as bad.

Sure, the list is sorted by signal strength. Theoretically, that means the local network will be at the top of the list. It’s a nice theory, but one that’s not entirely supported by the evidence. And that’s without even considering that the list reorders itself every couple of seconds as signals come and go.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could focus the list to make it easier to find the network want? I can think of several ways to do it: a menu option to sort the list alphabetically, a quick filter (type “sta” and the list now only shows “Starbucks-Registers,” “Starbucks-Guest,” and “FeedingStation-Guest”), or–since Google, Apple, and Microsoft all have databases of Wi-Fi networks anyway–use geographic and other data to put the most likely candidates at the top of the list*.

* If GPS data shows you’re in Peet’s, you’re probably more interested in their Wi-Fi than Starbucks’, and you almost certainly don’t care about “HPPrinter9000”.

Similar logic could be used for the Bluetooth list: a menu to limit the list to one type of device (headphones/speakers, printers, keyboards, etc.) or the quick filter.

Come on guys, make it happen.

And, now that I’ve griped about the big names, how about a quick shout out to a tech company that got one big thing right?

Remember a little while back when I sang the praises of my Kobo ebook reader?

Two months later, I stand by everything I said then. What I missed was the lack of expandable storage. Eight gigs should be enough for anybody, right?

Not so much. First of all, not all of that space is available for books. Then, put a few picture and art books, a handful of “complete works of…” titles (with cover illustrations for each story in the set), and a bunch of copiously illustrated biographies on the reader, and suddenly eight gigabytes seems cramped.

Sure, I could leave some things off the reader. On a daily basis, I don’t need more than two or three books, after all. But why should I have to decide which ones to take with me? I want the whole darn collection.

I just bought the reader a few months ago. I wasn’t about to junk it and buy a new one with more storage space. So I did my research.

Turns out, Kobo got two things very right in the design of their readers: they are–at least compared to most tablets and similar devices–very easy to take apart and reassemble, and the storage is actually a standard micro SD card in a standard reader. Yes, just like the card from your camera.

The Clara HD–my reader–is particularly easy to open up. It snaps together, with no adhesive, screws, or tricky clips. But most of Kobo’s readers are almost as easy to work with, and most of them have SD cards inside, not soldered-in flash chips.

I won’t go into the details of the upgrade process; the instructions are easy enough to find online. Suffice to say that you don’t need any tools more complicated than a credit card* and the entire process–including reloading my collection after I did something stupid–only took a few hours. If I hadn’t been stupid, it would have been more like an hour and a half.

* Both to buy a larger SD card and to pry open the case.

The reader now has approximately fifty-six gigabytes available for storing my library. Unless I go wild loading it up with comic books (unlikely), that should be enough for the next five years or more. And by then, I’ll probably be ready for a new reader, one with all the latest technology.

And if Kobo continues to make their devices as easy to upgrade as this one, it’ll be an easy choice.

Scribd

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s new e-book subscription program. I mentioned that Amazon was not the first e-book seller to try the subscription model. Today I’d like to take a look at Scribd, one of the other sellers trying the subscription route.

Scribd advertises a collection somewhat smaller than Amazon’s 600,000 titles*, but unlike the big A, they have agreements with HarperCollins and other traditional publishers. In addition to “books,” whether self- or traditionally-published, Scribd also has a large collection of what they call “member-contributed documents”.

* I’ve seen estimates ranging from 400,000 to 500,000. The variation may reflect change over time, or it may reflect different ways of counting the “member-contributed documents”.

Payment to authors is more transparent than Amazon’s plan. Scribd pays nothing for browsing the first 10% of a book, the same as Amazon. Between 10% and 30%, authors will receive partial payment (10% of full royalties). If a reader goes beyond 30% of the book, the author will receive full royalties: whatever they would have received for a sale through a non-subscription distributor. Recall that Amazon’s deal is a simple “you get paid if a reader goes beyond 10%,” but since they don’t discuss how much you get paid, there’s no way to tell which distributor offers the author a better deal. My suspicion is that authors will do slightly better per-read on Scribd, but Amazon’s sheer size will result in more reads (on the average).

In order to track actual readership and percent read, Scribd subscription books can only be read on the Scribd website or through their Android and iOS apps. Reasonable, and similar to Amazon’s restriction of reading to Kindles or Kindle apps. It is, however, disappointing to anyone who has a favorite e-book reader.

In the Kindle Unlimited discussion, I pointed out that KU will live or die based on the quality of their recommendation software. The same is true of Scribd. Amazon needs to shift away from “another cheap title by the same author” to “books similar to this one”. Scribd already has a “books similar to this one” core to its recommendation engine. However, it has some problems. At one point, it failed to recognize it was suggesting multiple different editions of the same title (On one search for books similar to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency it suggested a specific Kurt Vonnegut title (and please forgive me for forgetting which one–it may have been Cat’s Cradle–at the time, I wasn’t planning on reviewing the service, so I wasn’t taking notes) more than twenty times.)

That does touch on another area where Scribd’s recommendation engine runs into trouble. The system allows for very specific classification of books, which means that recommendations can be very close, but it also means that the number of matching titles can be limited. Let’s face it, how many matches are they going to turn up for “Private Eye Mysteries Set In Idaho”? Probably fewer than “Private Eye Mysteries Set In LA,” which is an example Scribd uses.

Scribd is aware that they need to step up their game. Today I received an e-mail from them announcing that they’ve implemented “Thousands of new categories and personalized recommendations”; the enhancements include curated collections, editor’s notes, and “top books: trending, bestselling, and award-winning”. A more human touch will certainly help. Will it help enough to allow them to survive in a market dominated by Amazon? We’ll see.

As I said, Amazon’s biggest problem is the change in the business model. Scribd’s biggest problem is one of perception. In the past, they’ve had trouble policing the “member-contributed documents”. Scribd has apparently responded well to DMCA requests to remove unauthorized books, but I’ve seen a number of authors complain that they have not punished posters or taken steps to prevent the same books from being re-contributed. That perception by authors and publishers will make it difficult for Scribd to set up distribution deals with additional traditional publishers; since that’s a key piece of their differentiation from KU, they need to make changes in that area.

To their credit, Scribd is making changes designed to improve their reputation with authors and publishers. They’ve expanded the use of their content-scanning system to make it harder for members to repeatedly upload the same work, and they have made the DMCA complaint process simpler and more visible. That has helped, but there are still authors unhappy with where Scribd sets the balance between in-house prevention of copyright infringement and requiring authors to monitor Scribd’s library and report violations.

Bottom line: The subscription model is attractive to readers. If Scribd can overcome author and publisher resistance, continue to expand their library, and successfully publicize the titles they offer that Amazon doesn’t, they should thrive despite the competition from Amazon. As with Amazon’s ability to refocus their recommendation engine, it’s a very big “if”.

Stay tuned. This game is going into extra innings.

Kindle Unlimited

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You probably figured I’d have a few things to say about Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited service. You are correct.

For those of you who missed the announcement, Kindle Unlimited is an e-book subscription plan. For $9.99 a month, subscribers get access to a library of what Amazon estimates as 600,000 books. That’s “Unlimited Reading” according to the ads. Essentially the same deal that Oyster and Scribd are offering. As usual, though, the devil is in the details.

Sounds great for the reader at first glance (we’ll come back to the author in a couple of minutes): for the price of a single e-book purchase from a major publisher, you can read as many books as you can gobble. Assuming, that is, you can find anything you want to read.

It appears that, at least for now, the 600,000 titles are the same ones that Amazon has long offered through Kindle Direct Publishing Select–one of their e-book self-publishing programs. KDP Select requires that books only be available through Amazon. If authors want to try wider distribution through Smashwords or Barnes & Noble, they have to use a different Amazon self-publishing program.

Aside from a select few high-demand titles such as Harry Potter, the major publishers are not represented in KU. There’s no sign that Amazon is even negotiating with them at this time–though it does shed a new light on the argument Amazon is having with Hachette over e-book pricing, doesn’t it?

I’m certainly not going to take the “all self-published books are crap” line that many commentators are pushing, but let’s face it: there are thousands of self-published books lurking out there that, to be polite, could use the attention of an editor who is not related to the author. Amazon’s ability to help KU readers find the titles that will not make their eyeballs bleed or drive them to shove their Kindles into a blender will ultimately be the factor that controls whether KU lives or dies.

And that’s a big question mark right now. Under a sales model, Amazon’s success has revolved around their ability to sell in quantity. The one and two dollar books have driven Amazon’s success, because if a reader gets a clunker, they can just delete it from their library and try the next potential classic for pocket change. Under a subscription model, all books cost the same to the reader. There’s no inducement to stick with a book past the first few pages if they don’t grab you. A reader who hits a string of unappealing works is going to start thinking “Why the heck am I paying ten bucks a month for this crap?” and cancel their subscription. Amazon needs to be sure that their recommendation engine digs a bit deeper than “Another cheap title by the same author”.

And, speaking of authors, what’s the benefit of KU to the author?

Well… From my admittedly biased position, not a whole lot. According to one writer, Amazon will be setting aside a pool of money in something called the “KDP Select Global Fund”. That pool will vary in size from month to month based on “all factors that impact the KDP Select fund,” whatever that means. Every time a reader reads more than 10% of your book, you get a share of the KDP Select fund.

I don’t have any problem with the 10% or more rule. That’s twenty to thirty pages for a typical adult novel, and if you can’t intrigue readers enough to hold them that long, well, maybe the book wasn’t quite ready for release. In reality, I suspect most readers are going to make the decision to keep going within the first couple of pages, a habit picked up through browsing the shelves in book stores. If you hook them for long enough to get through Page Two, you’ll probably keep them through Page Twenty and get your payment.

My objection is to the unknown and variable amount of that payment. The typical author’s contract gives them 25% of the price of an e-book sale (although Amazon’s rates for self-publishers vary from, I believe, 70% if the book is under $4, down to 20% if it’s over $10–again, the sales model is built around selling a huge pile of cheap books). Under the subscription model, the author gets an unknown percentage of an unknown amount. How does Amazon set the size of the fund? Does the author’s share vary based on the “sell” price of the book? Only Amazon knows and they’re not telling.

The bottom line, though, is that Amazon is–as they’ve kept saying throughout the Hachette dispute–a business, and their focus is on, well, the bottom line. Anyone who thinks authors will be paid more under a new model is most likely delusional. IMNSHO, of course.

Granted, I’d rather have an unknown, ever-changing royalty than no royalty, but it’s depressing to see the legions of self-publishing worshipers crowing about how KU and the other subscription services are going to magically improve the lives and incomes of all writers everywhere by freeing them from the tyranny of the outmoded traditional publishers*. That’s a claim that doesn’t even stand up to the most cursory logical analysis.

* Don’t believe me, or think I’m exaggerating? Read through the comments on the blog post I linked a couple of paragraphs back.

To improve the lot of all writers, we need more people reading, not the same number of people reading more: a larger pie, not a new way of slicing the same, ever-shrinking pie we’ve got.