Author: Laura Hazard Owen

Amazon released its 2012 annual report (PDF) Friday, and as usual it is accompanied by a letter to shareholders (PDF) from CEO Jeff Bezos. The letter focuses on the things that Amazon does to “improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to.” A few tidbits:

• “Prime Instant Video selection tripled in just over a year to more than 38,000 movies and TV episodes.” Amazon got streaming exclusives this year on shows like Downton Abbey, Justified and Under the Dome (which it will be streaming in-season).
  
• The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now contains over 300,000 ebooks, nearly all of them self-published, though Bezos notes the company’s “investment of millions of dollars to make the entire Harry Potter series available as part of that selection.” (At the time of that deal, Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne said that the deal was large enough that any lost sales were “more than made up for.”)
• The authors that Amazon Publishing works with are customers, too. Amazon recently announced that it will start paying the authors in its publishing imprints royalties every 60 days (KDP authors are already paid that frequently). “The industry standard is twice a year, and that has been the standard for a long time. Yet when we interview authors as customers, infrequent payment is a major dissatisfier. Imagine how you’d like it if you were paid twice a year. There isn’t competitive pressure to pay authors more than once every six months, but we’re proactively doing so.”
• Amazon Web Services is “a very clear example of internally driven motivation…we’ve reduced AWS prices 27 times since launching 7 years ago,” and with its Trusted Advisor monitoring tool “we are actively telling customers where they’re paying us more than they need to.”
• Bezos mentions an “industry observer” who, as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD points out, is actually Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget. Bezos recently led a $5 million round of investment in Business Insider.
• Another reminder to investors who fear Amazon’s “Our business approach is to sell premium hardware at roughly breakeven prices….We don’t need our customers to be on the upgrade treadmill.”

As previously reported, Amazon’s revenues in 2012 were $61.09 billion, up 27 percent from 2011. Operating income fell to $676 million, from $862 million in 2011, and the company saw a net loss of $39 million, compared to net income of $631 million in 2011. Amazon is set to release its earnings for the first quarter of 2013 on April 25.

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Tim Waterstone, founder of the U.K.’s Waterstones bookstore chain, is involved in a new venture: Read Petite, a subscription site for long-form fiction and nonfiction. The site will be announced at the London Book Fair next week and will launch to the public in the fall.

Waterstone is chairman. Read Petite was founded by literary agent Peter Cox and consultant Martyn Daniels. Neill Denny, a former editor of book trade magazine The Bookseller, is COO.

Cox tells The Bookseller, “We are genuinely trying to expand the reading market, and bring publishers together under our aegis to do something new. Up until now short-form writing has not really been economic to produce, but we think we can unleash it.”

Monthly subscription prices haven’t been set yet, but Waterstone tells the Guardian that they will likely be “a few pounds,” giving readers unlimited access to a library of long-form journalism and short stories. The stories will be submitted by publishers.

Read Petite sounds similar to U.S. e-singles sites Byliner and the Atavist, both of which are experimenting with subscriptions that give readers access to all their titles for a monthly fee.

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Worldreader, an NGO that distributes Kindles to students in sub-Saharan Africa, has also been testing a mobile reading app for the past year. Today, Worldreader Mobile comes out of beta. The organization announced that Worldreader Mobile, through technology partner biNu, is now installed on five million feature phones (basic cell phones) throughout Africa, Asia and the rest of the world, and has 500,000 active readers per month.

“There are more mobile phones than toothbrushes on this planet,” David Risher, cofounder and CEO of Worldreader (and a former Amazon executive) said in a statement. “Together with our growing e-reader program, Worldreader Mobile connects us to millions of the world’s poorest people, providing the books they need to improve their lives.”

The Worldreader Mobile app makes 1,200 ebooks available for free (see a breakdown of genres on the left) through the biNu app. The app compresses mobile data so that it can be downloaded quickly even on 2G networks, which are the norm in the developing world.

Participating publishers include Pearson, Harlequin, the World Health Organization and stories from Africa’s Caine Prize winners, among others. The ebooks available through the mobile app aren’t all the same as the ones available through Worldreader’s Kindle distribution program, but this year the company is working to get participating publishers to offer their books on both platforms.

Most of the Worldreader Mobile app’s users live in India, Nigeria or Ethiopia. Users are reading 19.5 million pages on Worldreader’s app per month, the company says, which translates to 17,000 200-page books read per month. Eighty-two percent of the readers are male, and 90 percent are between the ages of 16 and 35.

The platform’s most active readers, however, are women. Seventy percent of the platform’s “power users” are female, and they read an average of 17 books per month. I asked Susan Moody Prieto, Worldreader’s director of marketing, to explain the discrepancy: Is it an issue of access, with men more likely to own cell phones? She said the company isn’t sure but guesses that men tend to be early adopters of the platform.

Users are also sharing the books with others. Twenty-nine percent of Worldreader Mobile users read stories to young children from their mobile phones, and 88 percent said they’d like “materials to help young children learn to read” on their phones.”

For now, all of the books on Worldreader Mobile are free. But Moody Prieto said that the organization is looking into a paid platform down the road. “I don’t think people in the developing world will pay $9 for an ebook,” she said, “but they’ll pay something. This is a blooming economy.”

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Barnes & Noble has rebranded its digital self-publishing platform, PubIt!, as Nook Press, and has added some new features that aim to make self-publishing an ebook faster and easier. The company aims to compete with Amazon’s KDP and other self-publishing tools.

Nook Media’s primary new feature is a tool that allows authors to write, format and edit, and preview ebooks directly in a web-based platform (see image at left). “It’s an end-to-end solution, from content creation to reaching the customer,” Nook Media’s VP of digital content Theresa Horner told me. “What we are trying to do here is make self-publishing simple. You can come to the product, write, edit and publish into EPUB without ever knowing any bit of technology.” Authors who already have their title as a Microsoft Word file upload it, preview it as an EPUB and can sell it right away.

Barnes & Noble has also added a “quick start” option that lets authors test the product without entering all their vendor information at the start. And authors can “safely and quickly invite their network of friends and editors to read and comment on any NOOK Press project in a secure environment.”

Royalties haven’t changed: Ebooks can be priced between $0.99 and $199.99. Those priced between $2.99 and $9.99 get a 65 percent royalty, while those priced under $2.99 or above $9.99 receive a 40 percent royalty. By contrast, Amazon’s KDP pays a 70 percent royalty on most ebooks between $2.99 and $9.99 and a 35 percent royalty on those under $2.99 or over $9.99.

Nook Press is currently only available to authors in the U.S., though they can opt to sell their titles in the U.K., the only other country where Nook operates.

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Saving something to read later, in Instapaper or Pocket, doesn’t mean that you’ll ever actually get around to reading it. A company called Blackstrap aims to fix that: It will print all of your read-later articles into a $15 book. “If an article deserves a little time, then Blackstrap it: choose the ones you want to linger over and we’ll print, bind and send them to you, to enjoy undistracted,” the company says.

Blackstrap’s Tyler Fonda tells the Huffington Post, ”We had been thinking a lot about slowing down the digital flow. So we formed an LLC called Molasses in honor of that thought. Blackstrap is the most distilled, viscous version of molasses. We thought that was fitting for this product.”

To make your book, you log into your Pocket, Instapaper or Twitter account through Blackstrap and then select which articles you want in print form. (On Twitter, you’re selecting links from tweets you’ve favorited.) Each book can be up to 74 pages long. Shipping in the U.S. is free. Turnaround time is 10 to 15 days, though the company told me it’s working on making that faster.

Blackstrap says its service doesn’t run afoul of copyright law: You can only print an article from a given URL once, and the company’s terms and conditions specify that users can’t make copies of their books. “We believe that the service we provide is merely allowing our customers to ‘space-shift’ digital content they are interested in reading offline,” Fonda told HuffPo.

So is anybody actually going to use this? $15 plus the wait for shipping seems like a lot for a service that can largely be replicated by printing articles at your desk — and the blog-to-book services that sprang up around the time that blogs got popular never really took off. It made me think, though, that Pocket and Instapaper should consider adding an option that would let users export all their saved articles into a single PDF. At the very least, as the image shows, Blackstrap’s resulting product is a slim volume that can fit neatly into that stack of magazines you also never get around to reading.

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Jason Merkoski was a founding member of the Amazon team that launched the Kindle. He no longer works at Amazon, and in a new ebook, Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading (Sourcebooks, ebook $9.99) he discussed how the Kindle came to be, the features it (and other e-ink readers) lack, and what he imagines the future of digital reading will look like. While Burning the Page often reads more like a series of rambling blog posts than a well-edited narrative, it offers some interesting thoughts on how technology will change books and reading in the coming years.

Merkoski ran technology departments for a number of companies and headed e-commerce initiatives at Motorola before joining Amazon as a technology manager in 2005. For the next five years, he served at the company in a number of Kindle-related roles, helping to launch the first two Kindle models and the Kindle DX. “I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all,” he wrote. “I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I’ve traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I’ve watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I’ve talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks.”

I found Burning the Page the most interesting when Merkoski discussed his experience at Amazon, working directly for CEO Jeff Bezos. “I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg’s workshop,” he wrote. But he can’t share much:

• “I believe Jeff [Bezos] wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.”
• “The Kindle organization was in some ways a startup within Amazon and benefited from Jeff Bezos’s venture capital infusions, long-range vision, and full support.”
• “Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.”

While Merkoski described himself as “the closest there was to an ebook shaman, a tribal elder who could talk to all the people who joined Amazon after me about the early days of Kindle, provide the inside scoop,” he didn’t (and may be legally unable to) provide any inside scoops in this book. So the next best thing is when he can speak specifically about e-reading platforms — including the advantages of Amazon’s competitors. The development of the Kindle was highly secretive: “No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning,” Merkoski wrote. That resulted, in 2007, in a $399 device that sold out in five and a half hours, remained out of stock for months and got a lot of mixed reviews (facts that Merkoski doesn’t mention).

Kindle’s flaws — and what competitors did better

Future versions of the Kindle improved on some flaws: Merkoski called the Kindle 2, introduced in 2009, “truly an incredible device.” But “in fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia…Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.”

Kindle competitors, he said, have done better in lots of ways. Take Barnes & Noble: “Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they’re the most innovative. They’re the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive e-ink screens…They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital. They can innovate so fast because they’re not burdened with their own R&D group.” Likewise, “companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more playful…let’s face it: there’s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle.” The winner on that front, he said, is Apple’s iPad.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes, “Amazon is winning the ebook revolution, but it may lose the war…Competitors like Barnes & Noble and Apple have successfully blurred the lines and proven that they can provide a great media experience, so Amazon’s brand matters less in the eyes of readers now.” He says “it’s hard to love Amazon…at best, you respect Amazon for its obsession to detail, for its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products.”

Oddly, Merkoski didn’t mention the Nook division’s terrible performance these days, or the company’s inability to cut into Amazon’s market share. Nooks, he claims, are “downright futuristic.” And that’s really where he wants to go in this book: How will ebooks, reading and writing change?

What’s next: High-speed head plugs and a “Facebook for books”?

Let’s be clear: Merkoski loves books. An endless number of sentences like “Books are priceless,” “Books can inspire us toward greatness,” “Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some,” “Reading is an act of bathyspheric descent into the depths of an inky-black ocean,” “For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you” become increasingly irritating as the book goes on and weigh down Merkoski’s interesting and imaginative ideas on what the future of reading could actually look like.

Once you cut through the platitudes, Merkoski envisioned some specific innovations that are interesting and imaginative. For instance, “the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience.” That sounds horrible to me, but another idea — a screenless e-reader that uses a pico projector to project an ebook onto a blank surface (like a ceiling or the pages of a blank book), pulls ebooks from the cloud and is navigated by voice commands — seems like something that could actually exist in a few years.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes there will be

“just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from an ebook and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link, or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading…The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes.”

The company best situated to make this dream a reality is not Amazon, Merkoski believes, but Google — thanks to its knowledge of search engines and the vast number of titles it’s scanned for Google book search, “Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library.”

For now, rights issues are in the way, and so books–our greatest repository of knowledge and inspiration — aren’t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain books that lag by at least ninety years.” It will take “a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models,” Merkoski acknowledges, before such a hyperlinked database of books can legally exist — even though we have the technology to put it in place now.

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Thin Reads, a website devoted to e-singles, launched Monday. The site offers reviews and author interviews, bestseller lists drawn from Amazon and a database of titles.

The site was launched by Howard Polskin, who was previously the EVP of communications and events for the Association of Magazine Media (formerly the Magazine Publishers’ Association). Polskin told me he loves the e-singles format — which he defines as a work of fiction nonfiction between 5,000 and 25,000 words, generally priced between $0.99 and $2.99 — and wants to help readers discover new titles.

Polskin shared a few findings from his database of about 700 e-singles:

• 54% of all e-singles available in the database are listed as Original, which means they were created especially as short works of nonfiction or fiction intended to be read on an electronic platform for its original release.
• 12% of all e-singles available in the database are listed as Encore, which means they were originally published or presented previously in another format.  2% of all e-singles in the database are listed as Encore+, which means that new or updated content was added to a story that was previously published.
• 31% of e-singles in the database are fiction. 69% are nonfiction.  Narrative nonfiction accounted for 20% of all e-singles in the database.
• More than 150 publishers are releasing content to the e-singles market, according to the findings of the Thin Reads database. Publishers include: The New York Times Company, Penguin, ProPublica, Random House, St. Martin’s Press, Byliner, the Atavist, HarperCollins, American Express Publishing, GQ Magazine, and TED Conferences.
• Byliner, Penguin and New Word City have published the most e-singles, with more than 40 titles each.

Polskin doesn’t plan to monetize the site for now, and said he’s providing it as a service to readers. He also said he’s gotten feedback and input from Amazon, which runs Kindle Singles, and Apple, which has a “Quick Reads” section of the iBookstore.

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The European Union has cleared the merger of publishers Random House and Penguin, saying it does not pose a risk to competition.

The EU said the merger “does not raise competition concerns, in particular because the merged entity will continue to face several strong competitors,” according to the AP.

As I reported last month, Random House and Penguin announced their merger last October and the U.S. Department of Justice approved it in February, followed by Australia and New Zealand. Random House’s parent company Bertelsmann would own 53 percent of the combined company, and Penguin parent company Pearson would hold 47 percent. Random House Penguin’s goal is to enter emerging markets and expand its digital business.

The merger awaits approval by Canada and China.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested in Henry Blodget’s website Business Insider, according to a report first published by Bloomberg and then confirmed with an internal memo at Business Insider. Bezos led a $5 million series E round that also included participation from RRE Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners.

The new investment brings the total amount of money that Business Insider has raised to $18.3 million. In the memo to staff, Business Insider CEO and editor-in-chief Henry Blodget writes, “This capital will allow us to continue to invest aggressively in many areas of the business, including editorial, tech/product, sales and marketing, subscriptions, and events. As we mentioned last night, it will also allow us to expand our office.”

Blodget tells AllThingsD that “the new deal values the company above the $50 million valuation it earned during its last round in 2011.”

Business Insider reportedly lost about $3 million, or a quarter of its revenue, in 2012, though Blodget says the site turned a small profit in the first quarter of this year. Business Insider is known for its short news pieces and slideshows. According to the BI memo, Jeff Bezos said that he “sees some parallels with Amazon.” Blodget said the site will now include a disclosure statement whenever it writes about Amazon.

 

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Longreads and The Atlantic have created a partnership that will feature Longreads content across The Atlantic‘s digital properties, the companies announced Friday.

Longreads, founded by former Time Inc. editor Mark Armstrong in 2009, features daily links to long-form journalism and fiction around the web. It started out as a Twitter hashtag and has grown into a website that includes paid memberships for $3 a month or $30 a year, giving members access to exclusive content.

Longreads remains an independent company, and Armstrong — who is also the editorial director of consume-it-later service Pocket — will retain control over the content featured on the site. The Atlantic will provide support on the business and operations side and will feature Longreads content across its digital properties — The Atlantic.com, TheAtlanticWire.com and The AtlanticCities.com — as well as on its mobile apps. Armstrong told me that the move is a way for Longreads to build up its membership model and “explore new models for supporting long-form journalism.”

“I’ve watched with interest as Mark Armstrong and the Longreads team have built a socially engaged community that is passionate about great journalism,” Atlantic president M. Scott Havens said in a statement, “and I’m excited to work with them to bring these kinds of stories to our more than 20 million digital readers.”

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When Macmillan, the lone publisher holdout in the Department of Justice’s ebook pricing antitrust lawsuit, settled with the DOJ in February, ebook retailers were supposed to be allowed to discount Macmillan titles within three days of the settlement. It ended up taking nearly two months: Publishers Lunch noted Thursday (paywall) that retailers have finally begun discounting select Macmillan titles.

Here are a few examples of ebooks and the discounts they are receiving at various retailers. Note that Kindle, Nook and the iBookstore are matching each other’s discounts, while in most cases Kobo and Google hadn’t begun discounting as of Thursday afternoon.

Title	Pub Date	Ebook list price	Kindle	Nook	iBookstore	Kobo	Google
Killing Lincoln (O’Reilly, Dugard)	9/2011	$12.99	$9.99	$9.99	$9.99	$12.99	$12.99
The Silver Linings Playbook (Quick)	10/2012	$9.99	$7.99	$7.99	$7.99	$9.99	$9.99
A Memory of Light (Jordan, Sanderson)	4/2013	$14.99	$13.49	$13.49	$14.99	$14.99	$13.49
Ender’s Game (Card)	1st ebook ed. 4/2010	$6.99	$4.98	$5.99	$5.99	$6.99	$6.99

According to the terms of the settlement, Macmillan — like the other settling publishers — can’t restrict retailers like Amazon from setting, changing, or lowering ebook prices for two years. Though Macmillan only settled in February, its settlement gave it a back-dated head start on the two-year period, running from December 18, 2012 — the same date that Penguin agreed to settle.

Speaking of Penguin: Retailers still have not begun discounting its ebooks, Publishers Lunch notes, even though it settled nearly four months ago. Amazon still lists Penguin’s ebook prices as being set by the publisher.

Discounts on ebooks from Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins — who settled with the DOJ back in April 2012 — have been in effect for several months. In most cases, retailers haven’t offered steep discounts on any of the settling publishers’ titles, and to my knowledge, we haven’t yet seen any of the bundling promotions or ebook giveaways that are largely allowed by the settlement.

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Google acquired Frommer’s Travel Guides from Wiley in 2012 — and then, last month, reportedly decided to stop publishing them as print editions. Now Arthur Frommer, the 83-year-old founder of the brand, has bought Frommer’s back from Google and will continue publishing the travel guides in print and digital editions.

The AP reported the news Wednesday night and quoted Frommer saying, “It’s a very happy time for me. We will be publishing the Frommer travel guides in ebook and print formats and will also be operating the travel site Frommers.com.” Google confirmed the news to Engadget, saying, “We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.”

The purchase price was undisclosed. Google had purchased Frommer’s from Wiley for a reported $22 million. The travel site Skift first reported that Google would stop publishing the Frommer’s guides in print.

Frommer’s had published over 300 guidebooks since its founding in 1957.

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Trapit, a discovery engine for web content from the team behind Siri, is rolling out a set of publisher tools on Wednesday. The tools allow publishers to serve up their content through white-label iOS and web apps and offer personalized recommendations for readers around specific topics. The first client is Here Media, a media company that targets the LGBT community with magazines like The Advocate and Out, websites like Gay.com and Out.com, and the Alyson Books publishing division.

With Trapit’s existing web and iPad apps, users search for a subject or URL and save it as a “trap.” Trapit then uses artificial intelligence to surface relevant web content from a pool of around 140,000 sources. Users can improve their recommendations by tapping a thumbs-up or thumbs-down and selecting the reason they don’t like a piece of content. There are now over 10 million people “inside the service,” Trapit cofounder Hank Nothhaft told me, though the company wouldn’t disclose the number of registered users.

Trapit’s new Publisher Suite lets publishers deliver content from their own publications and from across the web. They can also add their own sources to Trapit’s pool and can push out all of their content to readers in a somewhat Google Reader-like fashion. They get access to analytics and can see how users are engaging with content. And publishers control the advertising within their app. Pricing starts at $1,000 a month.

Why Here Media chose Trapit: Control over ads and sources

Some of Trapit’s new publisher offerings sound similar to the new publisher services offered by Flipboard. The new features, rolled out at the end of March, let users create custom magazines using content pulled in from anywhere. From the beginning, Trapit has differentiated itself from Flipboard by emphasizing both the fact that it digs up content readers wouldn’t find on their own and that it doesn’t scrape content from publishers’ sites. (Trapit serves web pages within its app but shows their original design, videos, comments and ads.)

Paul Colichman, CEO of Here Media, told me that’s what attracted him to Trapit. Most discovery apps “literally lift the content from publishers and don’t compensate them at all,” he said. “When an app takes all of your content and delivers the whole story without any need to link and [without] showing any of your ads, it is not helpful for publishers.” Trapit, he said, is “more fair and appropriate for the publisher” because Trapit users see the same ads that they’d see on a publisher’s site.

Here Media customized its white-label Trapit iPad app, “Advocate Discovery,” for its users. “With all of these [discovery] platforms, the gay and lesbian community are often terribly underrepresented,” Colichman said. Trapit’s sources “didn’t pull from the hundreds or thousands of sources that are LGBT-specific.” So Here Media added about 1,500 custom sources to its app, and plans to add around 2,500 more in the next 60 days. “In my opinion,” Colichman said, “Advocate Discovery will be the only gay app any gay person ever needs.”

Trapit’s Nothhaft said that the company is in discussions with other publishers and expects to announce new partners soon. Non-publishers are signing on, too; consulting firm Deloitte used Trapit’s tools to create an internally available app that surfaces knowledge and information about the industries Deloitte covers.

Trapit is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and is backed by Horizons Ventures and SRI International.

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The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which aims to “make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans,” will launch on April 18. The project is three years in the making.

In an article at the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University library and a member of the DPLA’s committee, writes:

“To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.”

The DPLA will interoperate with Europeana, a similar initiative in the European Union. At launch, the DPLA will contain two to three million items, Darnton writes, and describes some of them:

“For example, in serving as a hub, Harvard plans to make available to the DPLA by the time of its launch 243 medieval manuscripts; 5,741 rare Latin American pamphlets; 3,628 daguerreotypes, along with the first photographs of the moon and of African-born slaves; 502 chapbooks and “penny dreadfuls” about sensational crimes, a popular genre of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and 420 trial narratives from cases involving marriage and sexuality. Harvard expects to provide a great deal more in the following months, notably in fields such as music, cartography, zoology, and colonial history. Other libraries, archives, and museums will contribute still more material from their collections.”

Many more details here.

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Kobo has begun selling its devices directly through its website in the U.S. and Canada instead of making customers in those countries go to third-party retailers, the Toronto-based company announced Tuesday.

Kobo makes four devices: The 5-inch Kobo Mini e-reader, for $79.99; the touchscreen Kobo Touch e-reader, for $99.99; the front-lit Kobo Glo e-reader, for $129.99; and the Kobo Arc Android tablet, for $199.99. Until now, they were only sold through chains like Target and Best Buy as well as the independent bookstores that Kobo partners with through the American Booksellers Association.

“Pre-Christmas we focused on in-store availability and we’ve now pushed sales online,” the company told Digital Book World. It’s not clear why direct sales haven’t been a priority until now, but worldwide Kobo focuses on partnering with independent bookstores and selling its devices through them.

Kobo says it has 13 million readers worldwide. The company launched in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Africa and the Netherlands in 2012 and plans to head to Russia, India and China in 2013. In the United States, its share of the ebook market is small and lags behind Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.

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Reeder, a popular RSS reading app for iOS, relies on Google Reader for its backend. But the service will continue after Google Reader shutters on July 1, Reeder creator Silvio Rizzi said Monday. Reeder’s iPhone app is $2.99, and Rizzi is making the Mac and iPad apps free for now, down from $4.99.

The iPhone app is remaining paid because it already supports services other than Google Reader, Rizzi wrote: “I’m currently working on integrating Feedbin and adding support for standalone/local RSS (still experimental). You’ll get these features with the next update (3.1) which should be ready soon. That’s just the beginning, the plan is to add more services you can choose from in the next weeks and months.”

The Mac and iPad apps don’t support other RSS services yet, so they’ll be free until they get an update and “add all the features of the iPhone version, including all sharing and syncing services.”

I use Reeder to read RSS feeds on my iPad, and I recommend checking it out.

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Hugh Howey’s self-published sci-fi thriller, Wool, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies as an ebook. Last fall, Howey signed a seven-figure, print-only deal with traditional publisher Simon & Schuster, and Fox and Ridley Scott have acquired the film rights.

Our upcoming paidContent Live conference will highlight the changes in the book publishing business, and Howey exemplifies many of these trends. In this podcast, the second in a series featuring digital media creators who are successfully building their own independent empires, we talk to him about his success and what’s next.

paidContent Live takes place in New York on April 17.

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With Google set to kill off Google Reader as of July 1, Feedly has emerged as a popular alternative for those in search of a new RSS reader. Feedly announced Monday that it’s picked up 3 million new users since Google announced the end of Reader on March 13. (500,000 of those came in the first two days following the announcement.) That brings the company’s total number of active users to 7 million. And the company’s cofounder Cyril Moutran tells me that the company is planning to launch a paid premium version for power users.

Mobile updates

Today Feedly is rolling out a new version of Feedly Mobile, with improved discovery, search and sharing features, for iOS and Android devices. Users can search over 50 million feeds and can browse by topic. “The more you use Feedly to search, categorize and follow your favorite feeds, the better our search and discovery will become,” the company writes in its blog post announcing the changes. There’s also a new Must-Reads section. These same search and discovery features will be added to Feedly’s Chrome, Firefox and Safari apps later today.

For former Google Reader users, Feedly has added a new title-only view to its mobile apps “to make scanning of headlines more efficient” (and more similar to Google Reader’s condensed view). The company had already added that list view to its web apps.

Finally, there are some new sharing options on mobile: In addition to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, mobile users can now share to Google+ and Buffer (a site that manages sharing to multiple social networking services) and can save articles to Pocket and Instapaper. Those features were already available on Feedly’s web versions.

What’s next: A paid premium version and a service for publishers

Cofounder Moutran told me in an email that “a significant proportion” of its users say they’d be willing to pay for Feedly. The company plans to launch a premium, subscription-based version of the service later this year. It will include features like better Evernote and Dropbox integration.

In addition, Moutran said, the company sees Feedly as a “marketplace that facilitates the discovery, consumption and sharing of great content…We have been working with publishers, and intend to offer an easy way for our users to discover, purchase and access premium content.”

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Amazon announced Thursday afternoon that it has acquired the popular book-related social networking site Goodreads for an undisclosed sum. I spoke with Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler and Amazon’s VP of Kindle content Russ Grandinetti on what’s next for Goodreads and its 16 million members.

Questions and answers have been edited slightly for clarity.

What does the acquisition mean for Goodreads’ reputation as a neutral hub for readers, authors and publishers?

Otis Chandler [OC]: “One of the extremely important things to us is for readers to share what they’re reading, no matter how they’re reading. We have no plans to change that. We want Goodreads to be a place for readers of all types to share their favorite books. You can expect to see customizations and better integrations for people who do use Kindle. For everyone else, Goodreads will remain largely as it is.”

Will Goodreads remain a standalone site, and is its entire team staying on? Is the site getting a redesign?

Grandinetti says Goodreads will be an independent subsidiary of Amazon, like Zappos or IMDB. The site will remain based in San Francisco. Chandler remains CEO, reporting to Grandinetti. Chandler said that Goodreads’ entire team is staying on (and that the company is hiring). To the question of a redesign, he said there is “nothing specific to mention in relation to the acquisition.”

Will Amazon have access to all of the Goodreads users’ data?

OC: “Goodreads is or will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, so on one level, yes. Are things going to happen in the background without customers understanding it? I think the answer to that is no….We’ll make it very easy for someone to say, ‘Yeah, I’d love it if you could import all of my Amazon or Kindle purchases into my Goodreads shelf.’ We’ll make it very easy for people to do, but they’ll be aware of what’s happening.”

Users already have the ability to export their data from Goodreads, and they’ll continue to be able to do so.

Will Amazon use Goodreads reviews on its own retail site, or will Amazon reader reviews migrate over to Goodreads? In general, how much content will cross between the sites?

OC: “We’re going to think about this in terms of what’s best for our members. Maybe if we find books that don’t have any Goodreads reviews we might consider that, but I don’t think there’s any specific plans to do that at this time.”

Russ Grandinetti [RG]: “Our mentality here is to first do no harm, and make sure that if we’re going to do integrations, users genuinely find it to be a big benefit.”

Right now, Goodreads includes links to many retailers (like Barnes & Noble and Indiebound) on its book pages. Will that practice continue?

OC: ”It’s incredibly important to us that Goodreads remain a platform for all kinds of readers to use, whether they’re reading paper or on their Nook or Kindle or whatever. We always want Goodreads to be a place for people to share and talk about books…As for specific design of [the links], we’ll see, but we really think about it from the user perspective. If users really want those links [to other retailers], then those links will probably still be there.”

Will Goodreads now include a retail component — for instance, selling print or Kindle books from its site?

RG: “The design they have works incredibly well for users. You see that in the number of users who join that service.”

OC: “I think, short-term, the thing we’re most excited about is actually bringing the book into Goodreads and enabling people to just start reading right there from the Kindle Cloud Reader. We’ve never had a good book preview feature.”

Will Goodreads expand internationally?

RG: ”As you’ve seen in the last couple of years, one thing we’ve been working hard on at Kindle is [globalizing] the business…Goodreads has many users around the world. In terms of new languages and other countries, I think that’s an area of opportunity for both of us to work on.”

OC: ”Amazon has done a fabulous job of curating databases of international metadata.”

Speaking of metadata, Goodreads stopped sourcing its metadata from Amazon in early 2012, switching to Ingram’s metadata instead. What happens now?

OC: ”We’re going to determine what makes the most sense, but we’ll have access to Amazon’s metadata and certainly will probably be using it.”

Are the Kindle and Goodreads apps combining?

RG: ”Our goal would be…[for] the Kindle experience as it exists both on devices and apps, [to put] putting the connection [users] have on Goodreads as close to their fingertips as possible. When and how we do that, I’ll ask you to stay tuned.”

Will Goodreads retain its public API? Does Kobo get to keep its Goodreads review feed?

OC: “Yes [on the API],” and “we’re not going to shut [the Kobo feed] off.”

Why did Amazon buy Shelfari? Was that a failed acquisition?

RG: ”We’ve used [Shelfari] to generate quite a bit of incremental data about books. It’s powered features we’ve launched over time, such as book extras and X-Ray. But, of course, Goodreads has been much more of a social connection site and a larger social network. So when it comes to the graph we’ll use to connect people on Kindle, Goodreads will power that.”

Will Goodreads keep sharing data about its readers at conferences and so on?

OC: “Yeah, as far as I know, I think we’re still excited to share readers’ behavior…and create lots more 50 Shades of Grey infographics.”

Disclosure: Goodreads is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge

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Amazon announced Thursday that it is acquiring Goodreads, the book-based social network founded by Otis Chandler in 2006. The purchase price was undisclosed.

Goodreads, which is based in San Francisco and launched in 2007, has 16 million members. The site lets readers keep track of the books they’ve read and want to read; rate and review books; and discover reading recommendations.

Goodreads has served as a fairly “neutral” hub for readers until now — a place where publishers and authors can market and promote their books without being tied to a specific retailer. Until 2012, Goodreads sourced all of its book data from Amazon, but it then decided that the company’s API had become too restrictive and switched its data provider to the book wholesaler Ingram. “Our goal is to be an open place for all readers to discover and buy books from all retailers, both online and offline,” Goodreads told me at the time of the switch. While being an “open place for all readers” may still be Goodreads’ goal, it’s now clearly tied to promoting books for sale on Amazon.

Goodreads is also likely to be less open with access to its data now that it has been acquired by Goodreads. In the past, the company has shared information about how its readers discover and buy books and about their digital reading habits, presenting the data at conferences and in blog posts. This past February, for instance, CEO Chandler noted that ebook readers experiment with platforms — a significant percentage of Kindle users, for example, also buy ebooks from Apple’s iBookstore. All of this data is certainly useful for Amazon to have, but the retailer is not likely to see a reason for Goodreads to share the data with others (and with Amazon’s competitors).

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