Lendle is back in the public eye again and luckily for them it’s under much better circumstances than before. According to an announcement on their blog, the site is up for sale. The 3 co-founders are looking to bow out after little over a year, so they are looking for a buyer.

“We love being part of an industry on the move and taking on some of the tough issues surrounding ownership and digital content, but our primary goal has always been to create the best social-lending site we could build,” they wrote on the blog. “We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built, and we think Lendle has been an amazing success. “

In just over a year this community shared 70 thousand ebooks from among 50,000 unique titles. That’s really just a drop in the bucket compared to the 330 thousand ebooks that Lendle members are currently offering to share.

Lendle means a lot to us. We’ve put over a year of our lives into growing a great community and implementing new features and we’ve done our best to put a unique spin on social-lending to ensure that Lendle stands out amongst the competition.

Even so, there’s still a vast untapped market for social-lending that is millions of potential Lendlers strong, and we think a nimble and innovative home for Lendle can only lead to great things.

There’s no mention of price or the income the site has generated (the site does have an Amazon affiliate account), but the Lendle staff believe there’s room for growth.

But I’m not sure where it will come from. After a year they have only lent 70 thousand titles – even though there are millions of Kindle owners in the US. What’s more, there are a lot of titles that you cannot lend (it blocked by the publishers). And of the ones you can lend, you’re limited to a single loan per copy. There doesn’t seem to be much growth potential here.

eBook Lending Site Lendle is Up For Sale is post from The Digital Reader

Damn.

Desperate straits and flagging sales, anyone?

Ebay

Nook Tablet Now $150 on Ebay is post from The Digital Reader

This startup first caught the world’s attention with the Que, a large screen ereader which was launched in the US market mere weeks before the iPad. For obvious reasons that device didn’t go anywhere, and now it looks like Plastic Logic thinks they wouldn’t be able to release any successful follow on devices, but they are open to the idea of potential partners using Plastic Logic’s screen tech on new devices.

They’re even going so far as to drop the PL 100, the academic ereader which was launched in Russia last fall. The PL 100 was released in time for a pilot program in Russian schools, but it won’t be getting a wide distribution in Russian schools. I’e been told that the current model will still be supported, but I wasn’t told that it will stay in production.

Instead Plastic Logic is going to look for industrial and commercial uses for their flexible screen tech. There are any number of  situations where a flexible, durable, and low power display would be worth the extra cost.

Unfortunately for Plastic Logic, E-ink beat them to it. As you can see from this booth visit video from FPD 2011, E-ink’s screen tech is used on all sorts of devices including several that would strike you as unlikely.

So what does that leave for Plastic Logic? Not sure, but there is always the chance that they could license their work to other manufacturers to use rather than use it themselves. Plastic Logic is a leading researcher in plastic based transistors, and I’m sure they will find any number of uses for that technology.

Plastic Logic: There’s More to Screen Tech Than eReaders & Tablets is post from The Digital Reader

But a little digging reveals that B&N scored high in just the one category; when you look at the general satisfaction category, guess who won?

Amazon – just like they do every year.

Earlier this morning Rich Adin posted about his experiences with B&N, so it was a little surprising to find out that the piss-poor procedure the B&N staff  used to resolve his issue came from a company that supposedly topped the CS ranking for the Books category. So I went looking for the answer, and with a minimal amount of effort I found Foresee’s own press release on the new rankings.

B&N barely made it into the top 10, in fact. They lost to such retail wonders as LLBean, Avon, and Keurig. They also tied with such great retailers like 1800Contacts, Oriental Trading, Scholastic, Vistaprint, and Walmart.

Yay!

Okay, I’ll admit that I’m not being fare to the other retailers, but I’m irked at the way B&N corporate lied selectively told the truth in the press release. Do you want to know why B&N won the Books category?

It’s not that they beat Amazon but because Amazon wasn’t even listed as a media seller. Foresee only lists a retailer in a single category and that means Amazon was listed as a mass merchant, even though they sell a heck of a lot of books.

I would ignore the categories. Given how it distorts the appearance of the rankings, I would say that the categories are bad data.

B&N Website Tops Customer Satisfaction Survey (Except it Didn’t) is post from The Digital Reader

Here’s a funny way to start your morning. Ever wonder how a book goes from idea to manuscript to a collection of electrons sitting on a virtual store shelf? The following infographic, which was made by Weldon Owen Press, will lay out all the steps of a process which doesn’t make nearly as much sense as you might think.

How a Book is Born (Infographic) is post from The Digital Reader

Alas, B&N seems to be doing its darndest to give the ebook world to Amazon on a silver platter.

In recent weeks, I was given a Nook Tablet as a gift. It is an excellent device and works smoothly with the B&N ebookstore. I think B&N’s hardware is excellent and even many of the critics rate the B&N devices as the better devices.

Between the Amazon and B&N ebookstores, I prefer the layout of the B&N store. Whenever I visit the Amazon store, I feel like I am being assaulted by an infomercial for some unneeded and undesired product that shows at 2 a.m. on local TV. I know that Amazoners praise the one-click buying system at Amazon, but I don’t find the two-click system at B&N overtaxing.

The bottom line is that I think B&N has a lot going for it, yet it is handing over to Amazon a little bit more of the ebook world daily. B&N has a significant flaw, one that it appears unwilling to address, or perhaps it is simply unable to address. That flaw is customer service.

As I reported in an earlier post (see The Tablet and Me: The Nook Tablet), the impetus for giving me the Nook Tablet was the deal combining a New York Times subscription with a discounted Tablet. Those of us who read the Times know that it is a morning newspaper — it is meant to be read at the start of the day, not at the end. When I had the print subscription, the paper was usually delivered by 4 a.m. and no later than 5:30 a.m., allowing me to read the Times at breakfast (I am an early riser). This delivery schedule was met day after day, year after year, the exceptions generally being when Mother Nature intervened and prevented timely delivery. If the Times was not delivered on time, a quick telephone call resulted in a credit to my account. No-hassle customer service.

What I get now from B&N is the electronic version – bits and bytes sent over the Internet — that is, when I get it. Some days it arrives by 5:30 a.m., but never earlier; some days it arrives by noon or later; some days, it doesn’t arrive in a timely way at all. So when it doesn’t arrive by 5:30 a.m., which is already late as far as I am concerned, what can I do? Turns out: nothing.

You can’t contact B&N customer service because it isn’t open; it has banker’s hours. When it does open and you do get someone, as helpful as the initial reps may want to be, they are hamstrung by B&N policies, at least as communicated by the customer service representatives.

On one occasion, when the Times hadn’t arrived by noon, I called and asked for a credit. The customer service rep tried to give me one but couldn’t, and so very politely passed me to a supervisor. At first, the supervisor told me I’d have to take the matter up with the Times. I replied that it was B&N that sold me the Times, it is B&N that I pay every month for the subscription, and it is B&N that delivers the Times to me, so why would I contact the Times?

The supervisor then told me that it was my problem, not B&N’s; that B&N doesn’t give refunds even when it doesn’t deliver the purchased item; that there would be no credit of any kind; and I “had to eat it.” I suggested that not only was this theft, but more importantly to B&N, it was giving paying customers another reason to abandon B&N for its arch-rival Amazon.

I understand that we are not talking a lot of money – about 40¢ – but it is the idea that B&N simply doesn’t care that matters (and I’d be less concerned if this happened once rather than several times over the course of a few weeks). After the incident, B&N sent me a satisfaction survey. I wrote of my dissatisfaction and even gave my telephone number so B&N could followup. I’m still waiting for that followup. In my business, if I get a hint of dissatisfaction, I’m on the telephone trying to do damage control. It doesn’t always work, but I try. B&N seems impervious to the idea of customer satisfaction.

(This disinterest in customer satisfaction goes back to the beginning of B&N’s latest foray into ebooks. You may remember my complaints about how B&N treated its club members when it introduced the original Nook. B&N refused to give members the 10% discount on the Nook, claiming that, even at $259 per Nook, it was losing money. Not long thereafter, the price dropped to $150 before going even lower. I had wanted to buy two Nooks and ended up buying none.)

Is Amazon better? I only know what I read and what I read is that had I had the same problem with Amazon, something would have been done. I also suspect that Amazon would deliver the newspaper on time. But it really begs the question to ask if Amazon’s customer service is better — it can’t be worse! And this is what B&N doesn’t seem to understand. Customers will put up with a lot if they think they are being fairly treated; if they think they are not being fairly treated, they will put up with little to nothing — and will let others know of their dissatisfaction.

The point is that it is these little slights to customers that build into major frustrations, and it is these little things that should be taken care of immediately. You are better off putting out the fire while it is still in the BBQ than waiting for it to ignite the forest – a lesson that B&N sorely needs to learn.

I am happy with my Nook Tablet; I really cannot say enough good things about the device to express my pleasure with it (I like it so much that it has been a month since I last used my Sony 950). I enjoy shopping at B&N’s ebookstore (although I dread what customer service I will get should I buy the wrong ebook or an ebook that is missing material). I especially like that I can automatically download ebook purchases to my Nook Tablet, as well as download those purchases to my desktop computer for storage (and that it is easy to strip the DRM from B&N ebooks so they can also be read on my Sony 505 or 950). All of this is to the positive.

Yet the problems with customer service, the limited hours of operation, and the attitude that the customer is to blame is irritating. I’m gradually getting closer to leaving B&N in the dust; each time I call customer service and am told I need to “deal with it,” and am displayed B&N’s indifference to customer satisfaction, I get closer to saying “Enough already!” What holds me back is my unwillingness to give the ebook market over to a single gorilla ebookstore. But what I want may be of no matter as B&N seems to be working diligently to turn another customer into an ex-customer.

Ultimately, whether B&N survives the ebook wars will rest on its customer service. So far, it is losing.

And Then There Was One: Barnes & Noble’s Lack of Customer Service is post from The Digital Reader

• Many authors are able to make a living with their writing with Harlequin (The Passive Voice)
• Judge comes down hard on publishers, Apple in e-book case (paidContent)
• Now Flipboard Does Audio, Too (TIME)
• When publishing goes wrong…Starring Undead Press (Mandy DeGeit)
• Who Says Your Writing Dreams Have To Be Sensible Or Realistic? (The Creative Penn)

The Morning Coffee – 16 May 2012 is post from The Digital Reader

Just for my own personal amusement, I’m calling it the Amazon Blaze.

The source then goes on to speculate that the Blaze is going to feature a 4.3″ Sharp  screen with qHD resolution (960×540). It’s going to be running on a 1GHz dual core CPU. The OS isn’t mentioned, but I think there’s a better than even chance it could be running Windows Phone, and if that doesn’t work out then it might run iOS.

There’s no manufacturer mentioned other than vague hints that a Shenzhen OEM is involved, but Ericsson is being tossed around as the development partner. That is certainly  not impossible, and it is no less implausible than any other part of this rumor.

P.S. The Blaze is the name of a fictional Amazon phone that Android Police invented last year.  I find it doubly amusing that life imitates art.

source

New Rumor: Amazon is Working on a Smartphone is post from The Digital Reader

The subscription will cost £20 per month, or £200 for the calendar year. The textbooks will be accessible online via most web browsers. It’s not clear yet how much annotation ability the Flooved platform will have but I would expect it to at least cover the basics (or it won’t be of much use to students).

Flooved has named several of their partners, including Business Expert Press, Bloomsbury, Momentum Press, Manson, and ITN News Source. They’re also hinting about a deal in the works with one of the major publishers.

You know, this could be a good deal for students, but that’s going to depend on the title selection. At the very least this will be better than most of the digital textbook rental services like Coursesmart, which charged around 70% of the retail price in exchange for 3 or 6 months access. I know that renting textbooks is not the same as a subscription, but given that access is cut off if you stop paying for either I would say that they are more similar than different.

Flooved

source

Flooved to Launch Digital Textbook Subscription This Fall is post from The Digital Reader

Inkling’s the hot new digital textbook story,with an iPad app, a recently launched digital textbook creation tool, and new features coming in the future including a browser based reading app. yadda yadda yadda. (I’m skipping the boring stuff.)

At first glance this story is fairly mundane. A textbook supplier signed a deal with a bookstore operator. This kind of news is barely of interest to industry insiders, and is really not worth the time of the general public – unless you’re obsessed with ebooks like I am. But the context of the announcement is more important than it first appears.

Inkling is now going to get the chance to be the first to grab the attention of students at over 900 colleges. Students aren’t buying as many textbooks as they used to, but when they do buy they generally start from the bookstore website. Now they will see Inkling’s logo while browsing, and that means they will be more likely to buy their textbooks via Inkling. Of course, Inkling doesn’t offer much in the way of selection yet, so this might not help boost their sales.

Again, that’s not that big of a deal, but consider what it might mean with respect to the rest of the market. For example, Kno doesn’t have any bookstore deals like this so they are at something of a disadvantage. Newco, B&N’s new spinoff, is set to dominate the 600+ bookstores that B&N college now operates. I don’t know yet what Newco will be doing with respect to digital textbooks, but chances are that ti will be disruptive of paper textbook sales and thus increase the sale of digital textbooks via Newco.

Newco’s 600 stores is what makes Inkling’s announcement today such a big deal. The campus bookstore no longer has the schoolwide exclusivity that it used to, but it is still at the core of student’s textbook buying. Inkling is now going to be at that core experience in nearly a thousand college bookstores supplying nearly 5 million students. That might give them an advantage over the digital textbook platforms that don’t have the same level of access.

This might be an stretch, but I think we are going to see a format war break out in the digital textbook market. Inkling just made themselves (at the very least) a stronger player in that fight.

P.S. I don’t think Inkling’s format will win; it’s too cost intensive and outside the reach of the independent author. But it is one of the majors now.

Inkling is Getting Ready to Fight Format War in Digital Textbooks – Signs Deal with Follett is post from The Digital Reader