The Globe and Mail article characterizes this as a “setback” for Amazon, and quotes the Wall Street Journal that this is “sending a signal” to authors, agents, and publishers who might have been considering signing such agreements. It refers to authors “whose upcoming work will become inaccessible to the majority of North American book buyers.”

Say what? “Inaccessible”? “Majority”? I don’t think that those words mean what you think they mean. Going by Foner Books’s sales statistics, Amazon did more book, music, and DVD business in 2011 than Barnes & Noble, the late Borders, and BN.com put together. Seems like the “majority” of North American book buyers shop Amazon.

Anybody who has “access” to the Internet has access to Amazon. (Or, for that matter, BN.com, where Barnes & Noble will carry Amazon’s books.) And those who don’t should still be able to check the books out from the local library, which might lead to liking them enough to order them.

(Granted, there are some people who don’t—every so often in my day job I run across the proverbial little old man or lady who doesn’t have a computer or the Internet and so can’t download the manuals for our TVs from our website. But they’re considerably in the minority by now—and even if they don’t have Internet at home, they could place orders from a library or Internet café if they wanted it badly enough.)

Of course, there is something to be said for being able to run across the books while physically browsing a store. Losing that will be a disadvantage for Amazon, which might be part of why it’s rumored to be considering its own chain of brick and mortar stores. But on the other hand, the high-profile authors Amazon is courting will have a high level of demand independent of accidental browsing discoveries, which could help render that loss irrelevant.

(Found via The Digital Reader.)

Will that be enough to let Kobo catch up with Amazon, or even maintain its lead in international areas Amazon doesn’t service yet? That remains to be seen. But if there was ever any doubt how popular e-books are becoming now, the way that a huge corporation like Rakuten so quickly snatched up Kobo should more than lay them to rest.

The key to a library’s success, said Guy Berthiaume, director of the Grande Bibliotheque, is to adapt with the times.

The Montreal library now has 200,000 ebook titles available with plans for more on the way.

The big bonus? They’re automatically returned so there’s no late fees. And the digital version of tomes like, say, War and Peace are a whole lot lighter.

They can also be downloaded from home with the click of a mouse, though many choose to visit the library for the atmosphere, Berthiaume said in an interview.

Membership in the Grande Bibliotheque is up 17% over the last five years, with 286,000 active members and 3 million annual visits, making it the busiest library in the French-speaking world.

From Quill & Quire:

With e-books opening up more opportunities for authors looking to self-publish, a newly revived Toronto firm hopes to offer some of the convenience of self-publishing while maintaining the quality associated with traditionally published books.

The brainchild of Editors’ Association of Canada president Greg Ioannou (who also runs the editing and copywriting company Colborne Communications), Iguana Books charges authors fees for design and editorial work in advance of publication. However, Ioannou says the start-up, which focuses on e-books, is more selective than many online self-publishing platforms.

“When you go shopping for e-books, there’s an awful lot of self-published stuff out there that’s just terrible,” Ioannou says. “We’re not going to put our name on [a book] unless it’s been professionally edited [and] professionally designed, [and] is the sort of thing one of the major publishers would put out.

You can find Iguana Books here.

It’s not clear from the article whether this service just covers e-books, or is like Amazon’s new publishing division in offering both electronic and print publication services. Either way, it’s one more way e-book-based firms are competing with traditional publishers, though traditional publishers don’t necessarily seem to be worried just yet.

"It will be good for writers to have more choices," said Louise Dennys of Random House. "I’m just confident we’ll continue to do what we do best; the more the merrier."

Will the publishing operation be successful given Kobo’s third-place position in the US e-book market? Will it help it solidify its hold on the international market that the other sellers haven’t been concentrating on as much? We’ll have to see how it goes.

Meanwhile, the Bookseller reports that UK bookstore chain W H Smith’s CEO Nigel Newton is enthusiastic about the deal the store recently announced to sell Kobo e-readers, saying:

“It is a terrific move for Smith’s and Kobo and I think it will grow the market because their demographic won’t necessarily be the same as for Kindle devices."

The timing is pretty good—it’s just in time for the start of the Christmas shopping season. Hopefully it works out better for W H Smith than it did for the American bookstore that banked on the Kobo e-reader.

On Singularity Hub Aaron Saenz points to the recent Kindle library news, and the rise of e-book sales as printed book sales decline. He suggests that digital downloads could become the majority of the market as early as 2015 or as late as 2025, though it’s unclear at what percent of overall sales volume paper books will level out in the end.

And this leads Saenz to point out that piracy is going to be an increasing problem the more popular e-books get. It’s fast and easy, not to mention free, to download the entire works of many of the more popular authors. Writes Saenz:

The only thing, that I can tell, that has held off the flood of intellectual property piracy from hitting literature has been reader’s preference for physical books. Clearly, however, the popularity of e-readers and ebooks shows that preference is changing. If most of us own an e-reader by 2015, then most of us are going to be susceptible to the temptation of piracy. Already digitization has dropped the price of books from $15 to $9. Piracy could bring it down to $0.

Sure, printed books are dying, but the bigger news is that traditional publishers are probably going to die with them.

Though Saenz points out this may not necessarily be the end of the world for writers and readers, given the ability to self-publish through the Kindle or other means. And since Amazon pays considerably more per book sold in royalties than traditional publishers, the end of a traditional publishing model could lead to not necessarily more, but at least a greater percentage of  money going to the people who actually write the books.

I think that even if traditional publishers do go down, there will still be a market for stories, and people who will be willing to pay what a story is worth to them. So the market will find some way to make it work.

But the Big Six may not be off to the glue factory just yet. On the Huffington Post, Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., suggests that traditional publishers might find ways to reinvent themselves in the wake of the digital revolution instead. They could develop their own self-publishing arms to compete with Amazon, for example, and could also start marketing direct to consumers and bypass middlemen such as Amazon. (Baen already does this, after all.) Literary agents might reinvent themselves as general-purpose book and publishing consultants, and bookstore placement will become less important from an overall marketing point of view.

On the National Post, a Canadian publication, Robert Fulford ponders the “death” of the printed book and finds that e-books are engaging enough that he won’t miss it. A septuagenarian himself, he relates his own experiences and also quotes an 80-year-old German literature professor who has been reading since the age of six and has also come to love the Kindle. 

Electronic reading on the Internet has been available for a long time but, as Klüger says, it has begun to interest book readers only in recent years. She’s no longer anxious to buy traditional books but “I am impulsively snapping up ever more electronic reading material.”

I recognize that instinct. Since getting an e-book, I’ve found myself spending more money on books than I did a year ago, and spending it faster. Each e-book costs less (around $9 for a new novel), which tempts me to be more of an impulse buyer. Moreover, there’s an undeniable pleasure in the ability to obtain a book instantly.

Meanwhile, India News’s site Rediff.com is carrying a report on e-books that seems oddly ambivalent. The article notes that people who own Kindles or other e-readers tend to buy more books than those who don’t, though it’s not clear whether that’s because people who buy Kindles are likely to buy more books, or because people who buy more books are likely to buy Kindles.

But it also points out that “Since time immemorial, printed books have been seen as the preferred way of keeping a permanent record of our civilisation. This is not going to change for many years to come.” And it suggests that people who buy e-books might decide they want to buy a printed copy as well for “serious” reading.

Many customers, who purchased eBooks on Kindle or iPad, have later on decided to buy the same book in printed format. Roshni Khanna, a Delhi University student, and an avid book reader says, "Fluff one can read in digital form, but the works of real importance have to be enjoyed the print only." (sic)

And it suggests that “high quality works should always be printed.” Clearly, the p-vs-e advocacy flamewar is still alive.

He had hoped to be able to get the New Yorker magazine on his device—it’s available in America for $2.99 per month. However, Amazon was not able to make it available in Canada because “editions of newspapers and magazines available to customers living outside the United States may not contain associated images, tables or graphics.” He said Amazon was going to “look into it.”

But a bigger problem he sees is the lack of availability of French-language titles in the Kindle store. A year after Amazon opened its Digital Text Platform to publishers all over the world, only 6,000 Kindle titles (mostly public-domain books) are available in French on Amazon.com. Other e-bookstores do carry French titles, but they tend to be expensive and EPUB- or PDF-only.

Joanna has already done a great job of pointing out the problems that Canadians have getting a lot of English books, but I hadn’t considered that French books would present an even greater problem. It’s clear that Amazon’s Kindle e-book selection still has a way to go outside of the United States.

Speaking of Kobo

Links follow, for the benefit of Canadian readers:

1. So You Want To Be A Wizard (eISBN 9780547545110)
2. Deep Wizardry(eISBN 9780547538662)
3. High Wizardry (eISBN 9780547540306)
4. A Wizard Abroad (eISBN 9780547546797)
5. The Wizard’s Dilemma (eISBN 9780547546827)
6. A Wizard Alone (eISBN 9780547546803)
7. Wizard’s Holiday (eISBN  9780547546834)
8. Wizards at War (eISBN  9780547546810)
9. A Wizard of Mars (eISBN 9780547487953)

While this may not help those specifically tied to Amazon or Nook readers, readers who are able to make use of Kobo files now have a new Canadian option. Kudos to Kobo for being so quick off the mark!

Duane also responded to a question that has been raised about the matter of whether the OCR-induced errors in the e-books had or would be fixed. Reminding readers that the e-book vendors are actually forbidden from changing the content of e-books, even to fix typos, she explains that people who complain to her about them are barking up the wrong tree:

Seriously — and it seems I have to keep saying this, since there are a surprising number of people who’ve been writing me in a “tone of voice” that suggests they expect me to fix these problems personally — my influence in these matters is minimal. Maybe that’s annoying, but it’s the way things are. While I personally supervise the quality of ebooks that come out of Badfort Press and Errantry Press, I have no direct quality control over ebooks produced inside Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As consumers, if you find that the presentation of the product you’re being sold falls below your expectations of quality, you need to be contacting the publisher yourselves and making your opinions known. If enough people do this, there’s a chance of something happening.

I expect Duane has made her opinions known as well, but as she points out, there are limits to how much influence authors have on publishers. At least she was able to fix the errors for the “Author’s Cut” versions of the first four books she will be releasing herself in the next few months.

The problem comes in two pieces. I get reports that:

(a) Canadian would-be purchasers of the YW books from Amazon.com cannot purchase Kindle / .mobi versions of the books from either Amazon.com or Amazon.ca. Is this the case?

(b) B&N.com (which is apparently the only seller of .epub versions of the books)  will not sell Young Wizards .epub books to readers with Canadian addresses. The question I need answered is: does B&N sell any ebooks to readers with addresses outside the USA? If they don’t, fine. HMH needs to find another distributor for ePubs. But if they do, why won’t they sell YW books?

I would be seriously grateful if the Canadian contingent of YW fans would attempt such purchases (don’t complete them, just proceed until they fail — or alternately are about to succeed) and report back in the comments under this message, telling me what happens, so that I have data to take to HMH when I talk to them about this. Please feel free to send screengrabs to verify your experiences. You can send these to our Web lady at lee.enfield.burke@googlemail.com :  please put CANADA in the subject line.

The links to the Amazon.com US-and-theoretically-Canadian Young Wizards ebooks are here:  http://www.dianeduane.com/ebooks-by-Diane-Duane#youngwizards

It will be interesting to see how well this goes. I’ve said before that territorial restrictions are a blight on the e-publishing industry, and Joanna has reported encountering considerable apathy when trying to get ahold of some e-books unavailable in Canada. Hopefully other authors will follow Duane’s example.

After emergency surgery, he is now stuck in the hospital recovering, with no prospect of going home any time soon. To make matters worse, the hospital does not have Internet access. (I’m not making light here. When I was in the hospital for a week or so a couple of years ago with a broken leg, I would have gone bughouse nuts if I hadn’t had access to the ‘net via my iPod Touch and laptop. I don’t like to think about going netless for long enough to grow back about 20 square inches of missing skin.)

Watts has posted pictures of his new body cavity in this entry in his blog. I will warn you, they are not for the faint of heart, and if there is any possibility that your lunch might want to exit the wrong way, best not to look.

Best wishes to Dr. Watts for a speedy recovery.

“Education and innovation depends on fair access to copyrighted works,” said Dave Molenhuis, National Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. “A few simple amendments would ensure fair copyright for all Canadians.”

The recommendations center around the need for a “fair use” policy similar to that in U.S. copyright law, and laws that accept the concept of fair use and decriminalize those who would use copyrighted materials in ways that would be covered by fair use.

One of the targets of these recommendations is the softening of “digital locks,” their term for DRM, on copyrighted works.  Though they do not demand their removal (except on all documents provided by libraries, museums and archives), they do demand that circumventing those digital locks for fair use purposes should be decriminalized.  Further, they want all technologies that can be used to remove those digital locks to be made legal, and they want copyright owners to provide assistance in circumventing those locks for fair use.

The document further suggests that the C-32 bill is poorly-written by those who do not understand the realities and ramifications of digital documents.  It also states that such softening of the bill would not lead to increased litigation, because the “bounds of fair dealing have been well established by the courts, the principles of which will not be changed by this expansion.”  It does not address how documents so easily de-DRM’d will avoid being shared by students, a clear violation of current copyright law.

The full text of the recommendations can be viewed in the first link.