Book Sales Down 6.5% in Q1: AAP (GalleyCat)

Though sales in Trade Books for the quarter were $1.53 billion, down only 2.2 percent from the same quarter in 2014. Adult book sales helped the category, with book sales up 12 percent in March, and 3.4 percent for the first quarter. Children’s & Young Adults and Religious presses, on the other hand, both saw sales decline during the quarter, down by 15.9 percent and 5.5 percent respectively.

The TeleRead Take: Overall sales were $2.22 billion, as opposed to $2.38 billion for the same period in 2014. It’s hard to know what to make of a load of statistics this dry. The GalleyCat piece doesn’t make any effort to try to explain or put the change in context; it just tells that it happened. Though an earlier piece in Publishing Technology links a strong 1Q2014 sale of e-books to “a one-off spike in sales of religious non-fiction,” and that is one of the categories of books overall that fell this year. Maybe it’s just a fluctuation?


Make sure your phone is never lost again with Wear Aware (Android Central)

Wear Aware is here to save those of us who constantly are losing our phones. Whether it’s putting down your phone and walking away, leaving it in the car and heading into the house, or forgetting you put it down in public, nobody likes the feeling of not being able to find their phone. That’s where Wear Aware comes in, it’s here to make sure you never walk away from your phone — and it doesn’t walk away from you.

The TeleRead Take: It does make sense to have a smartwatch app that alerts you if your phone and watch should start getting further apart. Even my Pebble has some rudimentary features in that direction. This one seems to have some more nuanced alarm options, though I don’t think my Pebble would support those.


Missing all the signs: Desperately seeking a Watch flop (Macworld)

The Macalope has been amused lately at the bar that’s been set for Apple. Everything they sell must “become a cultural phenomenon” or it’s a “flop.”

These are not reasonable expectations. These are impossible goals designed solely to create faux controversy when Apple fails to meet them.

The TeleRead Take: This rather barbed editorial opines that everyone who declaims the Apple Watch to be a flop is doing so largely because it hasn’t set the world on fire, whereas by the standards of success Apple is judging by, it seems to be going pretty well. The Macalope compares the Watch to real flops like the Kindle Fire Phone, and finds sales seem to be chugging along just fine. The company can’t release an iPhone every time—yet it’s gotten to the point where people actually seem to expect it to. Which is kind of interesting when you consider how far onto the ropes Apple had gotten before it came up with the original iPod.


Kickasstorrents disappears from Google after penalty (Torrentfreak)

Following what appears to be a severe penalty, popular torrent site KickassTorrents has become pretty much unfindable in Google. Meanwhile, the top search result in many locations points to a scam site that’s serving malware to its visitors. For now, only DuckDuckGo presents the real site as a main result.

The TeleRead Take: From one perspective, it’s hard to get too upset about this. Although BitTorrent does have legitimate uses, they tend to be far outweighed by illicit piracy on sites such as KAT. But from another perspective, it’s a bit disturbing how readily major search engines can make content disappear if they want to. Small wonder activist organizations are constantly after them to do just that.


How to Install the Kindle Bookerly Font on your Kobo (GoodEreader)

A few months ago Amazon released a new font called Bookerly and it is a big step towards better typography. It is the first typeface designed for the Kindle for scratch and solves a longstanding problems with text justification, kerning, drop caps, image positioning, and more. The big problem though, its only on limited devices, such as the Kindle Paperwhite. So how do you get the font file and install it on your Kobo?

The TeleRead Take: My Kobo no longer functions, so I can’t really say whether this works or not. But it’s nice for people who do still use them that there’s apparently a way to put this new font on them.

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