Nate Hoffelder

There’s a story going around that Sony is working on an E-ink laptop, but if you double check the original source you’ll see that the usual disreputable blog is telling tall tales again.

According to the Taipei Times, Sony is working with E-ink to develop a laptop that uses E-ink screens:

There are growth opportunities in the company’s new product lines, such as e-notebooks, Ko said.

“We have been actively developing e-notebooks over the past one to two years together with our key customer,” Ko said

E-ink has teamed up with Sony Corp in a joint venture to develop a laptop product integrating its technology.

“This year is an important year for us to pitch this product to the market,” Ko said. “We are seeing replacement demand from the healthcare sector to the financing and education sectors,” Ko said.

This sounds very exciting, and it has been spun into meaning more than it says, but before you start saving up for an e-ink laptop I am going to have to deflate the hype.

At first glance it sounds like Sony is developing an e-ink laptop, but that’s not what the article says. It said the companies would "develop a laptop product integrating its technology", which  for all we know they could have a design that uses an E-ink screen on the lid as a secondary screen – or uses tie E-ink screen in place of a keyboard.

We’ve seen a number of similar ideas over the years from Microsoft and other companies, and so fr none have been a true E-ink laptop. (I also can’t recall that any have hit the market, but that’s another issue.)

And more importantly, E-ink CEO Frank Ko didn’t make this statement about the laptop. It’s mentioned in the article, but doesn’t say that this detail came from E-ink. Also, the word laptop is not mentioned anywhere in the original announcement of the joint venture, so it’s not clear where the TT got this idea.

While I think an E-ink laptop like the prototype Onyx Boox Typewriter would be very cool, we really cannot say with any certainty that Sony is working on one.

If you really want this type of device, you should go ask Onyx to hurry up.  They have the hardware skills, and they already have a prototype with a 9.7″ screen.

Sony, on the other hand, outsourced the development of its DPT-RP1 writing slate. That was designed by Marvel, not Sony, raising doubts that Sony could even produce a new E-ink device.

Earlier this week Barnes & Noble stunned many when it started spontaneously terminating the Nook Press accounts of indie authors. B&N claimed that the accounts had been terminated for violating its content policies concerning erotica, but many of the authors disputed the allegation, insisting that they hadn’t broken any rules.

It was impossible to say exactly what was going on when this story first broke (my suspicion was that B&N was clearing erotica authors out of Nook Press in anticipation of selling Nook to Kobo) but as Wednesday wore on it became clear that the termination were simply a misguided overreaction to perceived policy violations.

Many of the authors have since had their accounts restored after the negative press coverage forced B&N to rein in it puritanical impulses. Several authors, including  Georgette St Clair and Bobbi Holmes, have confirmed the restoration.

The accounts had been terminated under a part of the content policy which had technically banned all erotica:

Please be advised that submitting or posting any of the following content in your eBook file, cover image or product data may, in the exercise of Barnes & Noble’s sole and unfettered discretion, result in the removal of said content and/or termination of your account. …

• Obscene or Pornographic material: This may include content that graphically portrays sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.

A problem with enforcing this rule is that B&N has had this rule and ignored it for years. Also, a number of authors, including Bobbi Holmes, had said they had stopped publishing erotica years back and so could not possibly be in violation.

And let’s not forget that B&N was and is still selling 50 Shades, Lolita and the works of VC Andrews, all of which would clearly have violated this or other parts of the content policy.

In any case, this incident has been revealed to be an aberration.

Any author who finds their account still frozen should complain to Nook Press, and on social media.

This assumes, of course, that they want to continue selling ebooks through Nook Press. Now that Barnes & Noble has begun playing Russian roulette with author accounts Nook Press might no longer be worth the headache.

image by aeroix

Over at PW Andrew Albanese is asking the wrong question about used ebooks. He looks at ReDigi’s ongoing appeals of the copyright infringement suit it "lost" in 2013 and asks whether:

Should there be a legal market for reselling “used” digital files, like the secondary market that currently exists for books or CDs in the analog world? That’s the heart of the question now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, after a lively hearing on Tuesday in the case of Capitol Records vs. ReDigi.

The appeal hearing comes more than four years after district court judge Richard Sullivan effectively shut down ReDigi, an upstart online service that enabled consumers to resell their legally purchased iTunes files. Users could upload their files to ReDigi; ReDigi’s technology then removed the files from the seller’s device, and transferred them to a buyer’s device, keeping a 60% cut of the sale price.

The problem with asking whether there should there be a legal market for reselling “used” digital files is that it already exists. This ruling won’t reopen the door to such a market because that door never closed.

ReDigi has probably fallen off most people’s radars, so let me give you a quick recap.

ReDigi is a failed startup that launched in 2011 with the idea that it could host a marketplace for reselling digital music. Music labels sued in 2012, and "won" the case in 2013. I am using quotes here because the ruling left loopholes that allowed ReDigi to continue operating.

I explained it in detail in 2013, but the tl;dr version is that the ruling said that you can’t resell the digital file, but you can sell the medium it is sitting on. So it was entirely legal for ReDigi to structure its business so it was technically reselling individual copies sitting on its servers.

ReDigi then got a patent on their business model in early 2014, thus cementing their hold on the idea.

So no, there’s no need to worry about the sale of used digital content "becoming" legal – it already is.

What everyone should be hoping for is that the appeals court will look at the loophole, realize how ridiculous it is, and decide to close it.

Really, though, this is not a huge issue. The biggest roadblock in the way of a used ebook market in the US is that ebook tech is so dysfunctional that it effectively makes it impossible to launch an ebook market that worked like ReDigi’s.

Amazon is about the only company who could pull it off. They even have a patent, but so far they have shown no interest in following through.

Be very happy about that.

image by weiss_paarz_photos

There’s a story breaking this morning which – if confirmed as true – would mark a troubling return to a period where erotica was removed from ebook retailers simply for being risque.

Edit: it’s really happening.

Author Bobbi Holmes reported on her blog yesterday that she had received the following email from Nook Press:

Dear Publisher,

We have determined that many of your titles available for sale are in violation of our Content Policy. Accordingly, the offending titles have been removed from sale and your account is being terminated. We will pay out any and all outstanding royalties during the next payment period. If you attempt to publish similar content under a different account, we will terminate that account as well and withhold royalties from those sales.

The NOOK Press Team

Holmes’s publisher, Roberth, has posted a similar noticed on its site while at the same time denying that it currently published erotica in the Nook Store.

At first glance this reminds me of 2013, when Amazon and other ebook retailers pulled self-published erotica as a response to negative news coverage. (Kobo went even further, pulling all self-published titles of all genres and categories from all of its ebook retail partner sites).

But one key difference between that story and this one is that we have no confirmation that this was an intentional act by Nook Press and not some fool making a mistake.

This might be the start of a purge, but I have not found any sign that is the case. There are no other first-hand reports on KBoards, Twitter, or in Google search results from authors whose titles have been pulled. (I have a second-hand report, but that is not the same thing.)

I can confirm that nearly all Bobbi Holmes titles have been removed from the Nook section of the B&N website. (The print editions remain, however, rendering the ban pointless.) Nothing in the print titles suggest erotica, and I don’t see any erotica titles from Bobbi Holmes in the Kindle Store.

If you find out something new, please let us know in the comments.

Edit: The story has been confirmed by Georgette St Clair, who wrote on her blog that her Nook Press account was closed:

About 5 years ago I had published a few erotic romance books with a higher heat level than my shifter books, and B&N was one of the places that I published those books. These were published under a different pen name. I have never gotten a single warning or complaint from B&N about any of these titles; if I had, I would have taken it down immediately.

All of a sudden I get a notice yesterday that my account is suspended, and none of my books are on sale. I emailed B&N; no response. I started checking author forums and find that this has happened to NUMEROUS other authors of erotic romance, and most of them are getting follow up letters saying their accounts are suspended, forever.

Third Edit: St Clair now says that her account was restored.

PW has a second confirmation from erotica author Selena Kitt:

Selena Kitt, another author who complained publicly about the situation, said B&N acted "without warning" in canceling her account, and the accounts of other authors. She added that B&N’s claims that she and others had violated Nook’s content guidelines rung hollow as those guidelines were "non-existent until August 16 or so. We’ve had the same content published on their site for years."

So yes, B&N is apparently now purging erotica titles that they were happy to publish last month.

Second Edit: They claim that they changed their policies on 16 August, but from what I can see Nook Press has nearly the same content policy today is it did in February 2017  (Wayback Machine).

The only real change that I can see is that a few words were added here:

 but not limited to works portraying or encouraging incest, rape, bestiality, necrophilia, paedophilia or content that encourages hate or violence.

That’s all the new stuff, which is kinda weird. I was under the impression that content was already banned from most bookstores. Also, it doesn’t explain why Bobbi Holmes’s account was terminated when she wasn’t selling any erotica.

image by paparutz

Speaking of copying old ideas, Barnes & Noble is ending out emails to indie authors, asking them to participate in a new marketing service called Nook First Look.

Authors on KBoards report that they’ve received emails from B&N which said:

The NOOK First Look program highlights new releases from independent authors and publishers making these titles available to Barnes & Noble readers two weeks before wide release. NOOK First Look titles must be available through the NOOK Press platform and must be new releases in order to be considered.

To submit your eBook for consideration in the NOOK First Look program, please fill out this form with the following information. Please be advised that we can only accommodate one title per author approximately every 4-6 months so please choose your best title to nominate. As well, your title will be considered for the NOOK First Look program at the sole discretion of the NOOK Press team. We will contact you via email within a month if your title has been selected.

**When submitting this form, please note that your title must be no less than 8 weeks out from publication and all final files must be available 2 weeks before the wide release of the title. Final files must also be loaded to your portal no less than 72 hours before publication.

According to the authors who got the email, it links to a form on Google Docs.

Several authors have expressed disbelief that this is real, however a few minutes of Googling uncovered the Nook First Look page on the B&N website. The page promotes two books, with one offered at a discount.

This is an interesting idea, but there are a couple huge problems that are going to keep it from amounting to much.

The first problem is that B&N doesn’t sell a whole lot of ebooks anymore.  Their Nook revenues in the last fiscal year totaled $192 million (in comparison, Amazon paid out more to authors whose books are in Kindle Unlimited).

The second problem is that Barnes & Noble has yet to tell their customers about Nook First Look. I only heard because I know an author who got the email (thanks, Bill!); I did not read about it in the marketing emails I receive as a B&N customer.

And that is why like most B&N ideas, this one is DOA.

July is the last month before the new KENPC changes take affect, and it went out with a bang. Amazon reported yesterday that the funding pool rose by $1 million in July 2017, to $19 million.

At the same time, data collected by Self-Publisher Bibel shows that the per-page rate decreased significantly from June 2017, from 42 thousandths of a dollar to 40 thousandths.

That is a drop of 20% in the per-page rate so far this year (January’s rate was 00.4754 cents), leading some authors to announce they are quitting KU.

• US: $0.0040 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0027 (EUR)
• UK: £0.0031 (GBP)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0040 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.0040 (CAD)
• India: 0.0785 (INR)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0098 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5001 (JPY)
• Australia: $0.0035 (AUD)

P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million
• March 2017: $17.7 million
• April 2017: $17.8 million
• May 2017 :$17.9 million
• June 2017: $18 million
• July 2017: $19 million

Self-Publisher Bibel

In February 2016 I broke the news on Eleven, an ebook service from Breakaway Media that wanted to let users read for free in exchange for being bombarded by adverts.

That service is back in the news again, only now it is called Inara, and it is about to launch a beta test in September.

Breakaway Media CEO Glenn McCreedy sent an email this week to authors who had signed up to be beta testers. (thanks, source!) One hundred authors have been selected for the private beta, which is scheduled to begin next month. McCreedy told authors that " J. Carson Black, Scott Nicholson, Will Graham, and Michael Prescott" had already signed up, and:

There are roughly 5,000 readers eagerly waiting for access to our private beta, yearning to discover books like yours. If you are interested in joining the first platform that enables authors to monetize their free eBooks and strategically expand their audience, please reply to this email and we can get started.

I had already written extensively on this topic last spring, so I won’t repeat myself here.

I didn’t think this was a viable idea then, and I still don’t. Advert-funded reading has to compete with free ebooks in the Kindle Store and elsewhere, and since Inara’s ads are only shown in its own app it is at a distinct disadvantage.

Furthermore, the ad market is split into Google and Facebook, leaving a few crumbs to be divided between everyone else. There’s just not a lot of money in ads, which is why so many sites also generate revenue from affiliate links, promo posts, and user memberships.

And really, if ad-funded ebooks were a workable idea then Amazon would already be doing it.

Despite of hopes to the contrary,  Amazon has largely ignored the Polish ebook market. It has no local Kindle Store there, and doesn’t even support Polish as a language option in KDP.

A new survey suggests that may have been a mistake.

The research institute ARC Rynek i Opinia revealed earlier this year that 2/3 of ebook users in Poland use the Amazon Kindle., with Pocketbook and Poland’s own InkBook brand coming in distant second and third place (11% and 7%, respectively).

Kindle was by far the most popular hardware, but when it came to apps, iBooks tied with the Kindle app for first place, with Adobe DE finishing out the top 3 (21%, 21%, 17%).

The most common way to get an ebook was free from official sources (67%), followed by purchased (55%) and borrowed from a friend (40%). Those who do buy ebooks report that they mainly(90%) buy for themselves.

Mystery and crime novels were the most popular genre among Polish ebook readers, followed by fantasy, horror, and how-to books.

These survey results are based on a survey of 1107 Polish readers who had read at least three books in the past year. Around half (576) had read ebooks, and a quarter (306) had listened to an audiobook.

The survey was commissioned by Polish media retailer Virtualo, and can be downloaded from its website. This company sells Kindle format ebooks, and is one of several local retailers that moved into the Polish ebook market years ago when Amazon declined to do so.

For nearly a decade now news publishers have stared greedily at Google’s growing profits from its search engine and demanded that they be paid for their articles showing up in the search results.

This demand was ridiculous both because they wanted to be paid for the free advertising Google was giving them and that previous attempts to force the issue, either through legal battles (Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere), new copyright laws (Germany, Spain), or antitrust complaints (Germany), generally backfired when Google responded by choosing to remove the snippets rather than pay for them.

Any future attempts (like EU’s proposed snippet tax) are bound to fail. They are inevitably doomed, and anyone who doesn’t see that coming is a fool. But to make matters worse, there was never any money to be got in the first place.

Thomas Baekdal crunched some data earlier this week and he found that Google is making hardly anything from each search made by a user.

Baekdal made a couple goofs in his calculations (he thought Google would be paying for clicks rather than for impressions) but

First of all, Google is big, in fact, the current estimate is that Google is serving up between 1.5 to 2 trillion searches per year.

…

I have no idea. But let’s estimate that 75% of Google’s own ad revenue is from Google Search and the rest is for YouTube.

This means that Google Search has a revenue of $4.65 billion per month, of which about $700 million (not billion)is profit per month.

Now, we can take the $700 million in profit and divide that by the 125 billion searches to get the profit per search query.

The result is that Google makes… $0.0056 per search query.

…

But, "wait-a-minute", you say. That’s because I’m talking about profits. Google should do a revenue split instead.

Okay, so if we do the same calculations based on revenue, we get this:

• 125 billion searches
• $4,65 billion in revenue

This gives us a 'per search' revenue of $0.037

Google is making under 4 cents per search, and turning a profit of around a half a cent per search.

Of course, that is an average across all of Google’s search results, and it includes search terms and even whole verticals which are not monetized (Google News, for example). And that is also a global average and not based on EU revenues, so it is not 100% applicable. (And those calculations are based on a bunch of unsupported assumptions.)

Leaving those caveats aside, the point that matters is that news publishers want Google to pay for the use of their links and snippets. This means that Google would need to take that 3.7 cents and divide it between all of the relevant links returned with each click of the search button (after taking a cut for itself).

That money is not going to go nearly as far as the news publishers think.

Even a small blog such as this one will show up in Google’s search results nearly 3 million times in a given month, and if the news publishers got their way then each of those 3 million impressions would (in principle) have to be paid for by Google.

I can’t find any estimate of the number of impressions generated each month, but it is safe to say that the news publishers might as well be squeezing blood from a turnip.

Not only was the idea of a snippet tax never going to fly, there’s just no money to be had in the first place.

Is anyone else suddenly reminded of that apocryphal definition of inanity?

image by reynermedia

Have you visited your "My Books" page on the Kobo website lately? Me neither, but someone on Mobileread has noticed that Kobo has added a notice to that page telling users that PDFs are going away.

Here’s the notice:

Beginning November 1st, Kobo will no longer make your eBooks in PDF format available for download.

We’ll do our best to replace your PDF books with their equivalent EPUBs, but it is possible that some cannot be replaced.

We’ll let you know by email which books we can’t replace. You’ll need to download these books before November 1st to continue enjoying them.

I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell didn’t know about this change until I heard on Mobileread. Kobo did not send me an email with the news, and I didn’t want anyone to find out the hard way.

If you have an account with Kobo you should absolutely check your library to see if you have ebooks at risk. You will only see the notice if you have a PDF in your Kobo library, so if yousee nothing then you don’t have to worry about losing access to any of your ebooks.

image by andsleonardo

There are a hundred and one different ways to make a Kindle ebook.  many start with Microsoft Word, and now there’s an option that both begins and ends there.

Amazon has released a Kindle Create add-in for MSWord that can be used to make a Kindle ebook. I don’t have Word (Libre Office for the win) so I cannot test it. But according to the download page:

• Format your manuscript by specifying styles like Chapter Title, Chapter Subtitle and others.
• Save time by using pre-formatted sample pages like book title, copyright, dedication to complete your book.
• Preview your book any time on as it would look to customers reading on Tablets, Phones and Kindle E-readers before publishing.
• Work in Microsoft Word and publish your .doc/.docx manuscript with Kindle Direct Publishing.

The install file requires a PC with Word 2007 or newer, just not a PC that runs macOS.

If you install the add-on, please do let us know how well it works.

Amazon

P.S. There’s no Kindle-making extension for Libre Office, but Writer2Epub fills a similar role.

Here’s a story that sounds like a 1 April joke, but it really is not.

When Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007, they used a primitive and limited ebook format to sell ebooks in the Kindle Store. (It didn’t even support CSS, much less basic formatting like fonts and word wrapped around images.)

Amazon tried to make up for the shortcomings by adding in 2010 the ability to embed audio and video, improving the formatting in late 2011 (KF8), adding animated covers and page backgrounds last year (Kindle in Motion), and adding advanced typography in 2015 (KFX, which brought with it a whole host of DRM and other problems).

Only the formatting and typography improvements were widely adopted (to be fair, Kindle in Motion is still in beta), but now Amazon has moved on to the next enhancement to the Kindle.

JellyBooks founder Andrew Rhomberg found a job listing yesterday on Amazon.Jobs that drops clues about Amazon’s future plans for its ebook platform.

Amazon"s Kindle team is looking for "an innovative and results-oriented Software Development Engineer" who has experience with the one or more of the following:

• Graphics software compositing, video, images with hardware assist.
• Graphical User Interface toolkit with widget libraries adopting the MVC paradigm for event handling.
• Animation and Interactivity software for creating effects.
• Multi platform programming languages for 2D and 3D graphics rendering such as Core Graphics, Skia, OpenGL, Direct3D, Metal, Others.
• Application Execution Framework interfacing to multiple platforms.
• Animation and physics engines like Unity, Turbulenz, Others.

Andrew pointed out, and I agree, that the Kindle team would only need an expert in 3D graphics and physics engines if they were planning to add either

or Virtual Reality to the Kindle platform. (Click the links for more info.)

(Coincidentally, Amazon still hasn’t found the expert they were looking for; the job was initially posted at the beginning of 2016, and then reposted a couple weeks back.)

I’m sure some are wondering how Amazon could add AR or VR to a Kindle with an E-ink screen. The answer is they can’t, and weren’t planning to.

Generally speaking, the Kindle media features only work in the Kindle apps. Kindle Audio/video, for example, was initially released in the Kindle iOS app and then the Android app and Fire tablet.

The Kindle AR and Kindle VR features, if and when they are released, would most likely a require a decent CPU and GPU. The features will be built with Amazon’s own Fire tablets in mind, so they may not be as sophisticated or gee-whiz as what we are now seeing on the Oculus or what Apple has teased with ARkit.

But it would still be better than what we have seen before in ebooks.

Augmented reality and virtual reality have been used in enhanced ebooks several times over the past decade, with little success. In many cases the tech simply wasn’t ready – for example, Wondla relied on AR tech that had to be installed in your web browser and tied to a website, and its features died when the site stopped working.

And a lot of the time creators had trouble finding a use for AR that improved a story rather than gilding a lily. The experience was in fact so frustrating that I am averse to the idea.

That said, I can’t wait to see what Amazon is going to do.

image by WIKITUDE

Amazon has made another periodic change to the payment terms for Kindle Unlimited in the name of fraud prevention, but it’s not clear what they changed.

When Kindle Unlimited launched in 2014, Amazon paid out each time a reader finished a certain percentage of a title. Scammers soon learned how to game the system by releasing very short works, thus getting paid after only a few pages were read.

Amazon responded by switching to paying authors for the number of pages read. They announced the Kindle Equivalent Normalized Page Count (KENPC) and launched it in July 2015.

By the end of 2015, scammers had figured out how to game that as well: they made their scam books incredibly long and then tricked readers into clicking to the back of the book.

This took advantage of a design in the Kindle software; Amazon can track a location in an ebook, but not what was actually read.

Amazon’s next move in this game of cat and mouse was to crack down on Kindle ebooks with links leading to the back. Amazon also developed a new way to measure KENPC (2.0), and in February 2016 Amazon imposed a cap of only paying for up to 3,000 pages in an ebook in Kindle Unlimited.

As you may know from reading David Gaughran, that only slowed down the scammers, it did not stop them. Instead, they got creative in coming up with ways to trick readers into clicking to the end of an ebook.

Now Amazon has responded yet again, this time with the release of KENPC 3.0, only it’s not clear what Amazon has changed.

All they have told us is that:

To determine a book’s page count in a way that works across genres and devices, we developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). KENPC is calculated using standard formatting settings (font, line height, line spacing, etc.). We use KENPC to measure the number of pages customers read in your book, starting with the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of your book. Amazon typically sets SRL at chapter 1 so readers can start reading the core content of your book as soon as they open it. Non-text elements within books including images, charts and graphs will count toward a book’s KENPC.

KENPC v3.0
We released KENPC v3.0 to improve the way we measure how many pages of each book Kindle Unlimited and KOLL customers read. We’re constantly working to improve our programs and increase fairness of how we allocate the KDP Select Global Fund. These changes continue to improve the program and reward authors whose books are being borrowed and read the most by customers.

The most we can say at this time is that this is _probably_ an anti-fraud measure, but that is just a guess on my part.

I have my ear to the ground, and will report again if I find anything new.

Stay tuned.

Update: Over at KBoards someone has posted a version of the KENPC 3.0 announcement that mentions a fix for the bloated ebook scams:

We released KENPC v3.0 to improve the way we measure how many pages of each book Kindle Unlimited and KOLL customers read. This update makes a number of improvements, including improving our ability to measure pages read for such cases as non-linear reading. We’re constantly working to improve our programs and increase fairness of how we allocate the KDP Select Global Fund.

That was removed before I saw the notice, so apparently it doesn’t quite work yet. But it is coming, which is great news.

image by plaisanter~

Draft2Digital has just announced that they can now distribute ebooks to OverDrive:

We’re pleased to announce that, starting today, Draft2Digital now distributes to OverDrive, enabling our authors to place their books into one of the most trusted and far-reaching library distribution services on the planet.

OverDrive currently serves to more than 38,000 libraries and schools, in 70+ countries, including public, college and corporate libraries.

As a D2D author, you’ll be able to distribute your books through OverDrive and receive benefits you won’t find elsewhere:

• Lower minimum pricing—Set your price as low as 99 cents
• Better royalties—Earn 46.75% of your list price
• No contracts or limitations—Distribution with OverDrive is opt-in, and you can choose to include or exclude your books right from your Author Dashboard

The next time you log in to Draft2Digital, you’ll see a pop-up that will let you include all your books at once, making it easy to start distributing right away! If you’d prefer to wait, you can opt in one book at a time, any time.

Draft2Digital distributes to all the major ebookstores as well as Findaway (for audiobooks) and Kobo Plus.

This is great news, but perhaps not the best way for indie authors to get their books into libraries. Over at The Passive Voice, one author has remarked that his library would prefer to buy a POD copy rather than the ebook because it is easier for the librarians and less expensive in the long run.

Just an FYI.