No this isn't something that we'll do. As a company we'll always work with the author/publisher and if they don't want to offer the bundled ebook then we won't do anything nefarious or in the nether regions of copyright law to circumvent their wishes.

The bookplate copyright page photos typically require human verification since the name recognition algorithms aren't turned to look for them... so it's a human validation. If a user suddenly claims 10 ebooks within a few hours using a bookplate, then it probably warrants me (or somebody at BitLit) sending him/her an email asking if there's something fishy going on. We haven't seen much cheating to be honest... I think if people want to get free ebooks by cheating/pirating there are much easier ways.

Thanks for being there early and supporting us. Getting more content is very much a chicken and egg problem that we've got to bootstrap... publisher don't want to waste their time signing up for platforms that don't have many readers, and readers aren't interested in platforms that don't have any content. Honestly, the more users we have who've taken shelfies, the easier it is for us (me) to walk into a big five publisher and show social proof that readers want bundling.

Yes, they also make BitTorrent clients...

Hmmm... if you can run an Android simulator on your Linux box and have a good webcam and a powerful headlamp, I could send you the app APK and you could submit shelfie photos that way.

If I remember right, the designers argument was that having pagination and counts and next buttons made the design "far too utilitarian"... I guess that's a synonym for "useful". It is funny to look at a sorted list of the things visitor search for on the books page. Number 1-5 are: Harry Potter, Stephen King, Asimov, Tolkien, Neal Stephenson... We have Neal Stephenson... but I guess I know where to focus my efforts going forward.

Quite right... I don't exist. Much like my glass of scotch no longer exists :)

I agree. When I saw your comment it just reminded me of that article in the NYTimes magazine, so I thought I'd post a link to it. Sorry. I didn't want to seem preachy.

Ahh yeah, sorry this was a design decision that I was against. There's a good search function in the app itself under the discover section.

LOL... nothing. If I'd paid them then I'd have paid them not to post it on Xmas eve.

That's correct. Often publishers (at the request of authors) will sell the print or digital rights to a book to another publisher in another country. The reason for this is that a local publisher will have better connections and resources for marketing that book in a local market. This is obviously way less true in digital, but it still happens a lot.

Brazil is a very good target market for us... It's number 2 after German when we look at target markets with English language reading (but not speaking as a primary language) populations.

Sorry "books in print" is actually a product/brand name for Bowker's database of book metadata. It's a database of about 15 million records. Although it's expensive for us to license it, they do a lot of work hand cleaning up the records to ensure that spellings are consistent and duplicates are merged.

I can't bash that.

I agree that this isn't for the true bibliophile and it's not for beautiful leather bound first editions. But for mass market paperbacks, it's not as bad. Also for people who don't want their messy penmanship in the book, you can use a bookplate sticker or stamp and the app will accept that as you having "marked" the book. Post-it-notes do not count.