The gist of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and five major book publishers: The publishers, assisted by Apple, conspired to fight back against Amazon’s pricing power in the growing e-book market.

The Wall Street Journal, which has been on the story for some time, has plenty of background here. And there’s some great, baroque detail in the DOJ’s complaint, which you can read over here. (New York venues of choice for alleged antitrust meetings: The “Chef’s Wine Cellar” at Picholene, and Alto, a now-defunct Italian restaurant.)

But there’s also this odd, scintillating, throwaway line in the middle of the complaint, where the DOJ casually mentions that before Apple thought about fighting with Amazon, it thought about a different strategy: Ruling the world in concert.

From the complaint:

In addition to considering competitive entry at that time, though, Apple also contemplated illegally dividing the digital content world with Amazon, allowing each to “own the category” of its choice — audio/video to Apple and e-books to Amazon.

Really? So how would that work? And why didn’t Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos end up conspiring to work together? The DOJ doesn’t explain any of this — it simply moves on to the rest of its argument.

And here’s where we need to point out that it’s not uncommon for lawsuit complaints to contain big helpings of theatrics, with accusations and context that won’t end up having any bearing in court, if it gets that far.

Indeed, several of the publishers that the DOJ is suing this morning are expected to settle with the government this afternoon — can’t get more theatrical than that. (Actually, they’ve already settled, says Bloomberg.)

Still, that’s an especially juicy bit of red meat to dangle in front of the public, so if the DOJ has more to say about the alleged would-be conspiracy, we’d love to hear about it. Apple declined to comment, but I’ll update if that changes.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

During an interview with Radio Litopia’s “The Naked Book” Wednesday afternoon, Redmayne said Pottermore sold more than $1.5 million worth of Harry Potter books in the store’s first three days online.

Which sounds pretty good considering how long the books have been available in stores and via torrent. Indeed, PaidContent, which has done the math (and was first to note Redmayne’s remarks), figures that at an average selling price of $9.13, some 164,000 Potter books were sold over those three days.

Which was far more than Redmayne or anyone at Pottermore had expected. “We had budgeted for a much lower figure,” Redmayne said. “I had looked at the physical sales of the books, and tried to anticipate what digital sales might be like, figuring that there was a certain amount of pent-up demand. But it surpassed anything we anticipated.”

And even now, a week after Pottermore’s debut, sales continue to astound. “They’re still running at a much higher rate than I was anticipating,” Redmayne explained. “They’re still surpassing anything I’ve ever seen for e-book sales. … Everything that Harry Potter does surpasses expectations.”

“Volume,” says McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, which is the usual answer for this kind of digital question. But there’s an important asterisk here, too. Normally, McGraw-Hill would sell its books directly to public schools, which would keep the texts for an average of five years.

Under Apple’s new textbooks plan, though, McGraw-Hill will try something different: It will sell its books directly to each student (the student could either pay out of pocket, or the school could fund the purchase via a voucher/code), who will use the book for a year, then move on. They’ll be able to keep the digital text, but won’t be able to resell it or pass it along to another student, and McGraw-Hill anticipates that another set of students will buy new books the following year.

So Terry McGraw figures that over five years he’ll generate the same total sales selling $15 e-books as he would selling $75 books. It’s not a total push, because in this model, Apple will take an undisclosed cut of sales — McGraw-Hill execs wouldn’t go into details, so let’s assume for now that it’s Apple’s standard 30 percent — but presumably McGraw-Hill can make some of that up by forgoing the costs of print and distribution.

(It’s important to note that all of this is about the high school textbook market, for now. While McGraw-Hill and other publishers sell college texts through other digital platforms, they still haven’t announced plans to do so with Apple.)

All of that assumes that the book pricing stays at $15. After Apple’s event, McGraw-Hill executives repeatedly used the phrase “pilot pricing” to describe their near-term plans. And they told me that they have the ability to change the price when and if they want.

But when I posed the same question to Apple media boss Eddy Cue just now, I got a much different response. “This isn’t pilot pricing,” he said. “All of our books will be $14.99.”

9:34 am: We’ve arrived. Here’s the scene outside the Guggenheim Museum.

9:43 am: As we wait for the event to get started, here are some “CliffsNotes” on what we might see from Apple today.

9:45 am: Hi there, from Peter! Lauren Goode and I, along with a couple hundred other people, are still stuck in the stairwell of the museum, waiting to be seated.

9:50 am: Line is moving slowly now.

9:52 am: Hello there. Apple has let us into the Guggenheim’s basement auditorium.

Just spotted McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw in the audience. Not sure if he’s sitting with us, or will be popping up onstage.

9:54 am: Ah. I see that the American corporate mandate to play Adele at every event has continued into 2012. So we are still rolling in the deep.

We could have had it all, you know.

9:57 am: Lights down. Adele still belting.

9:58 am: First up: Apple marketing head Phil Schiller.

“Education is deep in our DNA, and it has been from the very beginning.”

Apple has a unique understanding of learning, student achievement. “We’re so proud to take part in anything we can do to help students learn.”

New change in schools via iPad is “profound and remarkable.”

Shot of toddler watching Dora on iPad, which looks very familiar.

But education has challenges, “which are pretty profound.”

Life is tough for high school kids in the U.S. Freshmen have a 70 percent chance of graduating. In “hard-hit urban areas,” that’s 60 percent.

Even if you do graduate, you probably won’t be prepared to compete internationally. List of poor showing by U.S. in world education rankings.

Now a video reel of teachers bemoaning the state of affairs, backed up by swelling music track.

Basic message: Schools are in lousy shape. “We need a reset. We need a way to find out what’s wrong, and fix it,” says last teacher, in a nice sweater.

Schiller is back. “No one person or company can try to fix it all.” But Apple can help. Specifically with “student engagement.”

Of course, kids like iPads, Schiller says. Extolls virtues of iPad, which we don’t need to tell you about here. “Affordable, not only for families but for schools.”

20,000+ education apps built specifically for iPad.

And lots of iBooks would work very nicely in schools, too.

1.5 million iPads in use in “education institutions.” We want to accelerate that. So we’re announcing two initiatives:

10:06 am: 1) “Reinventing textbooks.”

Books are awesome. They’ve transformed society and will always be with us. But they’re not an ideal learning tool for kids. Cumbersome, get dog-eared, “written-in, worn, just not the ideal teaching tool.” Image of badly-beaten book.

Books aren’t portable enough. Not durable enough. Not interactive. Not searchable. Can’t be updated. “The content is great,” though.

10:07 am: But the iPad? That’s awesome. It’s all of those things that a lowly book is not.

But “can you get amazing content turned into a new generation of digital books?”

10:08 am: So here is iBooks 2 — a “new textbook experience for the iPad.”

“These are beautiful books.” Here’s a demo, with Roger Rosner, who has helped build the new product.

Biologist E.O. Wilson introduces a new digital textbook, which features multitouch, video, navigation via thumbnails, etc. “These are gorgeous, gorgeous books. They’re really in a class by themselves.”

“Clearly, no printed textbook could compete with this.”

Lots of pinchy-zoomy. “Again, nothing like that on the printed page.”

So here I will point out that the most obvious issue is the same one that magazine publishers faced during the initial iPad launch — someone needs to figure out how to pay for a system where you can build all this new cool digital stuff, while you continue to publish your old paper-and-ink products. After some initial experiments, most magazine guys have retreated to more or less republishing the existing product, with a few bells and whistles.

Okay, back to Rosner, still demoing cool stuff like interactive text that lets you access a glossary by highlighting a word. “That is so much better than a paper glossary could ever hope to be.”

10:14 am: Hopefully, the pictures that Lauren Goode is taking give you a good idea of what Rosner is showing off. This stuff does look gorgeous, of course.

Half the crowd applauds.

10:15 am: Still demoing. Quizzes and review questions built into book. “The bottom line is immediate feedback.”

Can highlight text with finger, change color, etc. Add notes.

10:17 am: Turn notes into study cards. Can turn glossary terms into study cards. “No more ever having to make paper flash cards, right?”

More applause for card demo. “I don’t think there’s a textbook that’s ever made it this easy to be a good student.”

New textbook category in iBookstore.

10:20 am: Demo over, Schiller back up. Summarizes selling points.

10:20 am: Now on to creation. “That’s just as important.”

iBooks Author (i.e., what people have been calling “GarageBand for books”).

“Easy to use, feature-rich,” will work for any kind of book, not just textbooks. But “focused most of all” on textbooks.

10:21 am: Rosner back up. “Traditionally, creating electronic interactive books has been really hard.” We can fix that.

Uses some familiar iWork workflow. Drag and drop. Can type into editor or bring in Word files, etc.

More applause after program reformats and flows Word doc.

This looks very slick and easy. No surprise there.

Ah. I can now see that McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw is in the audience, soaking it in with the rest of us.

Can integrate Keynote into text. More applause for that.

Rosner still demoing. If you’ve ever been involved in making e-books before, “you know that this is a total miracle in terms of time savings.”

More applause for fast turnaround between creation and working book showing up on iPad. “I just think that’s totally awesome, right? In just five minutes flat, we created a totally interactive book.”

More applause, and some excited hoots.

10:29 am: Schiller back. “Anyone can create stunning, interactive books.”

Authoring tools “often cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.” But we want to make sure that anyone can use this — even teachers. New iBooks Author will be free.

Available today on Mac App Store. More applause.

Reminder that iBookstore will have new textbooks category.

Partners (this is key part).

High school textbooks. Will launch at $14.99 or less.

Names of publishers? Have yet to hear from Schiller.

Here we go: “We have had some phenomenal companies really work with us”: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “They have been great partners with us.”

McGraw-Hill, for instance, wil be providing algebra, biology, chemistry books, etc. “They are incredible.”

“Can’t overemphasize” how important it is for publishers to work with us.

Also working with DK Publishing. Four new kids’ books.

Another partner: E.O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. “If you don’t know E.O. Wilson, you should.” More applause.

First chapters of “Life on Earth” are available now, for free. Future chapters will be available at low price.

And now, a video. “We couldn’t help ourselves … I hope you enjoy it.”

More hopeful teachers and music this time out.

So while video is rolling, let’s review: By far the most important announcement today is that Apple has partnered with three of the big textbook publishers. Don’t have details on that, but the fact that this isn’t a flat-out end run around the textbook industry is crucial. Obvious parallel here is iTunes music launch in 2003, when Apple worked with the big labels instead.

Eddy Cue, who many of us thought would be at event, shows up in video, instead.

And Terry McGraw is in the video, as well.

So is Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino.

John Deasy, superintendent for Los Angeles Unified School District.

10:44 am: Video over, more applause. Ah. Schiller has more. Here comes Eddy Cue.

10:45 am: As John Paczkowski noted early this month, Apple is overhauling iTunes U.

700 million downloads of iTunes U content in the last four years. So far, mostly used to download college lectures. (I’m responsible for one of them! A Robert Shiller talk I keep meaning to listen to.)

“We want to let teachers do a whole lot more.” Create entire classes online. Via all-new iTunes U app.

Jeff Robbin, VP of iTunes, for demo.

Not just books, but “new complete, online courses.” Here’s a chemistry course from Duke University.

Some of this is gunning at Blackboard, the college standard for online education software, which lots of people (users and would-be competitors) would like to disrupt.

Ability for teachers to post notes for students, download videos to iPad or stream, etc.

Demo over, more applause. Hard to explain/see how this will work unless you’re actively using it within the context of school, I think.

Cue rattles off list of colleges using iTunes U already. Six of them have used the new software — Duke, Stanford, Yale — and have created more than 100 courses already. “All of it for free.”

So far, mostly used for higher education. But now available for K-12. More applause.

10:54 am: Cue off, Schiller back.

Love of education “has been instilled in Apple since the very beginning. And it’s as true today as it ever was before.”

“We hope that educators will look back on today’s announcements just as fondly” as past Apple education initiatives.

“I hope you’re as excited about these announcements as we are.” Schiller finishes up, event over.

Thanks for tuning in. We’ll now get a chance to play with some of this stuff hands-on, and I’m going to talk to at least one of the publisher partners Apple talked about today. More in a bit.

A new survey by the investment banking firm concluded that each Kindle Fire generates well over $100 in additional income, which more than makes up for the $2 to $3 Amazon reportedly loses on each sale.

“Kindle Fire unit economics are likely to be more favorable than consensus expectations, based primarily on frequency of digital goods purchases,” RBC Capital analyst Ross Sandler said in a research note to clients. “Our assumption is that Amazon could sell 3-4 million Kindle Fire units in Q4, and that those units are accretive to company-average operating margin within the first six months of ownership. Our analysis assigns a cumulative lifetime operating income per unit of $136, with a cumulative operating margin of over 20 percent.”

So: an additional $136 over the lifetime of the device.

How are Fire owners spending that money? Mostly on e-books. According to Sandler’s survey, 80 percent of Fire owners have purchased e-books, and 58 percent of those bought more than three of them within the first 60 days of ownership. Sandler figures that means the typical Fire owner will buy five e-books per quarter, generating about $15 net per quarter for Amazon (assuming an e-book ASP of $10).

Making up the remainder of that $136 sum? Apps, mostly. Two-thirds of the Fire owners Sandler surveyed had purchased at least one app. And 41 percent of those claimed to have purchased three or more. Sandler estimates that the typical Fire owner will purchase three apps per quarter, generating another $9 for Amazon.

Add to that video-on-demand buys and incremental purchases of physical goods, and you reach $136. Which isn’t bad at all, particularly if you’re multiplying it by the three million to four million Fires that Sandler expects Amazon to sell in its fourth quarter.

Back in college, there was this trick to buying used books for class: If you were smart, you’d flip through and look in the margins to see how good the notes were.

The idea was, why not get good help, even if it’s anonymous? (Even Harry Potter did it.)

Openmargin, a start-up based in the Netherlands, is employing the old used-textbook trick to bring a similar experience to just about any e-book around.

The company of three co-founders has built an iPad app, also called Openmargin, which allows users to create marginalia in their e-books, by indexing notes they take and comments they share to a highlighted area.

Anyone else using the Openmargin app to read the same e-book will see the highlights and be able to drill down into the comments.

“We started the company with the goal of helping users interact with people of similar interests,” co-founder Marc Köhlbrugge said. “And we chose the margins of a book as the place where people can connect.”

At scale, that could mean downloading an e-book, opening it inside the Openmargin app, and discovering all kinds of shared thoughts, debates and conversations that had been “hidden” in the e-book you’d had all along.

But scale is a long way off.

What Openmargin is reaching for is what social networking types call the “interest graph,” which is a buzzwordy way of saying stuff people like enough to talk about.”

Openmargin’s bet is that books are a natural fit for this emerging generation of topic-based, ad hoc social interactions, because books are full of ideas that can be discussed.

“I really don’t want to bring up the comparison to Color,” Köhlbrugge said, referencing the failed social image-sharing app, “but part of what they were trying to do was link people who don’t know each other around an experience. For us, that’s the book.”

But Openmargin, like many companies attempting to create in copyright-heavy industries, faces a hard reality — there are big rights-holders who want big profits, and it’s a long road to partnership.

Today, Openmargin is avoiding the issue by only offering its services around e-texts that don’t have any rights management restrictions — known as DRM-free. That means it will work for any texts in the public domain, and most books published under the various Creative Commons licenses.

That’s still a very small subset of books — especially on big e-book sites such as Amazon and Apple — which makes it a very large problem for Openmargin moving forward.

Köhlbrugge and crew are all based in Amsterdam, where the three-year road to start-up life has looked a little different than it might had they lived in Silicon Valley.

The company was initially funded not by angel investors, but by a national government grant for companies making innovations that were “culturally relevant,” Köhlbrugge said.

The company still hasn’t taken any private investment, but is now seeking another grant to make its first full-time engineering hires.

As it grows, Köhlbrugge’s hope is that Openmargin can avoid being “just another service that plugs into Facebook and shows you those friends.”

“The real hope is to show you not just opinions of people you know and agree with,” he said, “but to connect you with people who care about the same things, even if they don’t share your views.”

Here is a video interview I did with Openmargin’s co-founder, Marc Köhlbrugge:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111118/openmargin-hopes-to-be-more-than-social-e-reading/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111108/kobo-e-reader-acquired-for-315-million-by-rakuten/ http://allthingsd.com/20111108/kobo-e-reader-acquired-for-315-million-by-rakuten/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:09:12 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=141954 Kobo, the runner-up e-reader after Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook, has been acquired by Rakuten for $315 million in cash.

Rakuten is a dominant e-commerce company in Japan, but also operates internationally through other brands, including Buy.com in the U.S. It said the acquisition of Kobo will assist the company in its move to provide downloadable media to consumers, starting with e-books.

More details were revealed this afternoon in a conference call with Hiroshi Mikitani, chairman and CEO of Rakuten, and Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis.

In response to my question on the call, Serbinis said Rakuten will give Kobo the financial backing and market reach to grow internationally, as well as compete in the U.S., where he says the device has achieved high single-digit market share.

“The U.S. is absolutely important. It’s fundamental. We have millions of U.S. users today, and we plan to grow that substantially, and internationally represents a big opportunity as well,” Serbinis said.

Upon closing the acquisition, Kobo said it will continue to maintain its headquarters, management team and employees based in Toronto, Canada.

Kobo, which turns two next month, had recently raised $50 million in capital from investors, including Indigo Books & Music and Cheung Kong Holdings. Indigo says it will take home about $140 million from the transaction, which represents a return of more than 300 percent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111108/kobo-e-reader-acquired-for-315-million-by-rakuten/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111025/subtext-livens-up-ebooks-with-author-commentary-and-social-reading/ http://allthingsd.com/20111025/subtext-livens-up-ebooks-with-author-commentary-and-social-reading/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:19:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=136366 A new social reading app called Subtext launches today on the iPad, with a selection of books laden with annotations from authors and researchers.

What you’ll find on Subtext is a lot like the special features you’d find on a DVD, but for e-books. And you can create your own annotations.

Subtext’s founders come from the gaming industry and their hope is that readers will comment, endorse and share notes on the books themselves. For that participation they will be rewarded with in-app points to be spent on additional author and expert content.

Subtext works most seamlessly with Google Books but it also supports reading and annotations across editions of the same book on various platforms. “To be social we must be open,” said co-founder Rachel Thomas in an interview last week. Subtext doesn’t yet support proprietary books from distributors like Amazon and Apple.

Thomas was previously at Playdom; co-founder Andrew Goldman was CEO at Pandemic Studios.

At launch, Subtext offers 18 enhanced books, including commentary from George R.R. Martin’s editor and researcher on “A Game of Thrones,” character updates by Frances Mayes for her “Under the Tuscan Sun” and movie scenes and interviews for Lisa See’s “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.”

Readers mark up books with comments, questions, polls and links to Web pages; they can dictate instead of typing; and they can mark anything with a “spoiler alert” tag. They can navigate books page-by-page like normal, hop around through annotations, and see what page their friends are on.

Subtext is iPad-only for now, and is next working on a Web version. The 14-month-old company has 12 employees and raised $3 million in funding from Google Ventures, Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates and Omidyar Network.

See also: my coverage of another social reading start-up called Readmill.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111025/subtext-livens-up-ebooks-with-author-commentary-and-social-reading/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110802/thanks-netflix-you-too-amazon-why-cbs-loves-the-digital-rerun-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20110802/thanks-netflix-you-too-amazon-why-cbs-loves-the-digital-rerun-business/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:20:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=105523 Another data point for the “digital can be a really good thing for big media” argument: CBS says one reason it just posted a very nice second quarter is because of a Netflix deal which brings it new money for old shows.

CBS, which saw revenues jump up 8 percent, said the increase was “driven by” a 21 percent increase in licensing and distributing dollars, “which benefited from a new licensing agreement for the digital streaming of select library titles.”

Translation: “That $200 million Netflix deal we announced back in February, which lets us resell stuff we’re no longer putting on the air, is kicking in and paying off.”

There is more good news for CBS coming down the pike, as the results don’t include a similar Amazon deal, and another Netflix deal (for international), both announced last month.

Again, this is the best-case digital scenario for Big Media titans like CBS: The one where technology doesn’t carve up their existing business, but gives them a chance to sell old stuff (in some cases, really old stuff, like the original “Star Trek”) “over and over again,” in the words of CEO Les Moonves during today’s earnings call.

Asked who else might be willing to pay up for his re-runs, Moonves got more effusive. “[Satellite TV operator] Dish just announced today that they’re going to spend a significant amount of money buying content and libraries,” he said, adding that “we hear about Apple wanting to buy content, and Google. Et cetera, et cetera. And Microsoft.”

A slightly less enthusiastic version of the same story comes from CBS’ book division at Simon & Schuster: Revenue dropped 3 percent, as a boom in digital sales couldn’t outweigh a drop in print revenue. But because digital sales are more profitable than print, earnings moved up 12 percent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110802/thanks-netflix-you-too-amazon-why-cbs-loves-the-digital-rerun-business/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110718/amazon-tries-taking-the-kindle-to-school-again-with-textbook-rentals/ http://allthingsd.com/20110718/amazon-tries-taking-the-kindle-to-school-again-with-textbook-rentals/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:33:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=99132 Amazon, which dominates the e-book market, has stayed out of the electronic textbook market. Until now: The company has opened up a textbook store for its Kindle platform, where it is renting “tens of thousands” of titles for the upcoming school year.

Amazon will let students (or anyone) buy textbooks at a steep discount to their print list prices, and will charge them based on the amount of time they plan to hang on to the book.

The bookseller says it will generally require a minimum rental period of 30 days, and it will allow students to extend that period at their discretion. Renters will continue to be able to access notes and highlights they’ve made in their texts even after they’ve “returned” the books.

The only surprise here is that it took Amazon this long to get into the business. It introduced the Kindle in the fall of 2007, and since then a flood of start-ups, like Chegg, Kno and Inkling, have targeted the market. Barnes and Noble already has its own e-textbook store.

But while Amazon introduced the high-end Kindle DX, aimed at the college market, in 2009, it has yet to make much headway there.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110718/amazon-tries-taking-the-kindle-to-school-again-with-textbook-rentals/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110222/overdrive-new-way-to-check-out-ebooks/ http://allthingsd.com/20110222/overdrive-new-way-to-check-out-ebooks/#comments Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:21:49 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1662 Get out your library cards: Now you can wirelessly download electronic books from your local library using the Apple iPad or an Android tablet.

Last week, OverDrive Inc. released OverDrive Media Console for the iPad, a free app from Apple’s App Store. With the app, you can now borrow eBooks for reading on the go with a tablet.

You can already borrow an eBook from a library using an eReader, including the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, but you’ll need a PC and a USB cable for downloading and synching. Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t allow borrowing eBooks from libraries.

For the past week, I borrowed and wirelessly downloaded digital books onto tablets primarily using OverDrive, the largest distributor of eBooks for libraries. I tested the OverDrive Media Console for the iPad. I also used the Dell Streak 7 tablet to test the app on the Android operating system; this app also works on Android smartphones. An iPhone app is available.

Before you go hunting for your library card, there are a few factors to consider. While there are positives to borrowing eBooks from a library, the process has significant limitations that can be frustrating.

The biggest upside, of course: They’re free. In comparison, digital bookstore apps like Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iBooks and the Barnes & Noble Nook app charge around $10 a book. Local libraries pay for licenses to each eBook just like they pay for each physical book. Lending periods vary among libraries, from seven to 21 days, and some libraries let patrons set due dates. Fines or late fees are nonexistent because digital access to the books expires on a set due date, at which point titles lock up and users are prompted to delete the titles.

There’s a major downside to borrowing digital books. If the book you want is checked out, you still have to wait until someone returns it to borrow it. OverDrive’s licenses allow one book copy per person, so several people can’t simultaneously borrow the same eBook. Libraries can buy several licenses for a title so they can have multiple copies of popular books for borrowing. I found seven eBook copies of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in my Washington, D.C., public library system.

The OverDrive app, running on an iPad, shows how many copies of each book are available and how many people are waiting for each book.

But the OverDrive interface showed me that most of the books I wanted to read were checked out, and in several cases, there were other patrons on a waiting list for the copies. While “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” had seven copies, it also had seven patrons waiting for copies of the book. The idea of waiting for a book with many people lined up to borrow it is enough to inspire even some of the most frugal readers to cough up the dough to buy digital books. Just like with “real” library books, checked-out eBooks shouldn’t impact sales of eBooks.

An OverDrive spokesman says, “Libraries set the number of titles that can be checked out by each cardholder at any one time. That number varies from library to library, and the average is about five titles across our network.”

Book selection is also a challenge. According to fiscal records, my library’s physical book collection numbers well over two million books, while its OverDrive titles total about 11,000 eBooks. And only a portion of those were in the EPUB format, which is the only format that works with the Android, iPhone and the iPad apps. That meant the selection for me is pretty small. Smaller libraries have even fewer eBooks from which to choose. Users can’t borrow digital content from libraries where they don’t have library cards.

Many of my book searches showed the that my library didn’t have a digital copy of the incredibly popular “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, or even anything by the popular mystery novelist, Mary Higgins Clark. I tried entering broader terms into the OverDrive search box and didn’t have much luck then either: The term “London” only returned two results.

According to a spokesman, the D.C. library system has more than 25,000 eBook titles, including the OverDrive offerings, and “will be adding new titles in EPUB format weekly as new titles are released and to meet demand.”

Part of the selection problem, of course, is that many libraries are new to the eBook borrowing experience and are in the midst of building up digital collections.

Since availability is a problem, it would make sense that users could view books by seeing just those books that are available for borrowing. But OverDrive lacks this feature, so users are stuck searching for—or scrolling through—titles over and over again only to find that they’re already checked out by other people. After a dozen searches like this, I was ready to give up.

The OverDrive spokesman said a feature that sorts books to display only those available will be out sometime this year. He noted that several libraries are increasing their eBook catalogs to adjust to increasing demand from tablet users.

But the process for selecting and downloading books is clumsy. After choosing the correct local library, the OverDrive app sends the user out into the tablet’s Web browser to find books in the library’s system. OverDrive’s spokesman said this preserves library branding but that, in the future, this selection process will be in the app.

To download and read the EPUB formatted book, you must sign in with an Adobe ID. This is in addition to entering your library card number. I had one of these IDs from past use of Adobe products, but many people won’t and will groan over this extra registration step.

Actually checking out a book, takes very little time. After all, these files contain only text, not large video or audio files. Since I had trouble finding books to download, I settled on a romance novel featured on OverDrive’s homepage titled “Hawk’s Way: Rebels” by Joan Johnston. It took less than 30 seconds to download to my iPad.

Once downloaded, books looked fine on the iPad and Dell Streak. The screen’s brightness can be adjusted using an on-screen slider and a handy navigation strip at the bottom of each page shows where you are in a book and how many pages remain in the currently opened chapter. Publishers can set the number of font sizes to which text can be adjusted. And with the app, text can’t be displayed like pages in a real book (with two columns of text on two pages opened in front of you) when the tablet is held horizontally.

OverDrive doesn’t enable synchronizing of material across multiple devices, like Amazon’s Kindle app does with Whispersync. So if I download a book on my iPad in the OverDrive app, I can’t open that book on an Android phone or desktop using OverDrive.

OverDrive serves more than 13,000 libraries with a catalog of 400,000 titles from 1,000 publishers, but it’s possible your library may not use this system (check OverDrive.com for participating libraries). The spokesman said the company plans an app for the BlackBerry by June and hopes to enable wireless downloads on other devices in the future.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110222/overdrive-new-way-to-check-out-ebooks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101206/another-ebook-store-yep-but-this-ones-from-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20101206/another-ebook-store-yep-but-this-ones-from-google/#comments Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:00:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26638 Don’t want to buy your ebooks from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble or Borders? Google is happy to help: The search giant has launched its own e-book store, along with its own ebook reader software.

Lots of today’s Google eBook launch has already been covered in the past (this Wall Street Journal piece from last week got a lot of it). And since I haven’t been able to actually take the store and software out for a run, I can’t vouch for any of it so far.

But here’s what you need to know at the start:

• Google is opening its own store, but the big goal is to set up an ecosystem and e-commerce channel that works across the Web.
• That means you can buy ebooks directly from Google, and you can also buy books from the sites of independent book shops, like Powell’s Books.
• That also means you can read the books on multiple platforms: There’s an Android app, of course. But there’s also an Apple-approved app in the iTunes store. And since the system is Web-based, you can read the books you buy on PCs and tablets, too. As well as e-readers from Sony, Barnes & Noble and Borders. The only place you can’t read Google-purchased titles–Amazon’s Kindle.
• Google says its catalog will be competitive with everyone else’s, though it’s hard to assess that without really digging in. It says it will have some three million books available in the store, “hundreds of thousands” of which which are commercial titles. Amazon, by comparison, boasts of 750,000 titles, but it’s including periodicals in that total.
• One distinct advantage Google has over a particular rival: Unlike Apple, it has access to Random House titles, which aren’t available on the iBooks platform due to a dispute about pricing.
• Speaking of pricing: Google says it supports both the traditional wholesale/retail model, as well as the new “agency” model that Apple has been pushing.
• Where’s all this going? Good question! Google executives argue that this is just a natural extension of its ongoing books project, which is supposed to make as many books available to as many people, period–it’s just that they happen to be selling some of them now. But view it from a different lens, and it looks like yet another attempt by Google to move from pointing to stuff, and selling ads along the way, to selling stuff, period. It hasn’t worked yet, but the company seems dead set on making a go of it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101206/another-ebook-store-yep-but-this-ones-from-google/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100223/bn-nook-single-best-selling-product-ceo-rebuffs-ipad-fears/ http://allthingsd.com/20100223/bn-nook-single-best-selling-product-ceo-rebuffs-ipad-fears/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:18:46 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=21630 Calling the “Nook,” eBook reader its “single best-selling product,” Barnes & Noble (BKS) CEO Steve Riggio this morning argued the gadget is helping lure customers to its stores and boosting online traffic.

On a conference call with analysts following a disappointing outlook from the company this morning, Riggio said sales of Nook, which it described as “strong,” helped boost online sales for the company by 67 percent in the January ending fiscal Q3. Had the company had more units in stock, that 67 percent increase would have been higher, argued Riggio.

However, the Nook helped to drag down gross profit by one percentage point in the quarter.

Nook sales should somewhat offset the trend to lower same-store sales this quarter, the company said.

Much as with Amazon.com (AMZN) and its “Kindle” eReader, Riggio declined to give sales figures.

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