So my books generally publish to Google Play, Kobo, iTunes, and Scribd.
Draft2Digital can (recently) publish to Amazon, and this solves my problems with Amazon's thing-like-a-contract and wire-payment-requires-a-chartered-bank-and-we-won't-cut-you-a-cheque policy. It doesn't solve my issues with Amazon's labour practices. When I used The Human Dress as an experiment to see how much market there was for my books on Amazon, there wasn't much; fewer sales than iTunes, which in turn is fewer than Kobo, which runs about a quarter to a third of the Google sales. Putting the Commonweal on a platform with an internal flesh-robot business model is something I don't want to do, and it's not the case that I'm ignoring half the market; I might be ignoring ten percent of the market as it exists for me. The Google Play version is DRM-free and readily cross-loaded, so liking your kindle shouldn't be too much disadvantage.
I don't publish to Nook. Nook is a Draft2Digital publication target, but Nook as a platform cannot cope with the EPUB3 standard without introducing some highly specific workarounds. These workarounds break everybody else, and the whole point of Draft2Digital is you give them one instance of the epub file and they publish the same thing everywhere you want to send it. (I've been getting the same "EPUB3? that's very advanced and our marketing tools may not cope!" message from Draft2Digital since the first time I used them in 2015, too.) I like my EPUB3 toolchain; it's nicely debugged. It validates readily. It takes a couple of seconds to generate a new version. I don't want to change it if I don't have to, and "have to" is not how I view "get books on Nook".
Tangible book publishing is outside my skillset and beyond my means, so there are no present plans to do so.
That's the current state of the means by which my books might wend their merry way to you, and I hope if there was any confusion there is now less.
I work in public library and deal with ebooks all the time. We get lots of Android devices and iThings. There are lots of Kindles, and half of those are Fires that are functionally Android tablets. I can't remember the last time I saw a Nook, even the Nook HD.
ReplyDeleteI bought Nook HDs a few years ago for my kids. They were pretty good tablets, until their internal components wore out (yes, really) and first memory, then power died.
ReplyDeleteB&N never actually replaced them; instead they half-assed a Nook book store app for Android and got Samsung to sell a version of a not-great tablet with Nook branding. I don't know if you can even get that, anymore.
I'm perfectly fine with buying no-DRM Epubs from Google.
+Slybrarian +-dsr- Glad to know my presumption that Nook is a fading platform can be justified!
ReplyDeleteStandard public formats for archivable content, dammit.
I clicked the links in your post on Charlie Stross' blog and got to a "Not supported in your country" error page on Google Play.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't do Amazon, maybe make a landing page for each book with a link to these various other ebook services?
+Dotan Dimet The "my books" tag here doesn't get you _only_ book release notices, but it will get you all the book release notices: http://dubiousprospects.blogspot.com/search/label/my%20books
ReplyDeleteThose have links.
Draft2Ditial has universal links via books2read but it turns out -- I had not thought to check! -- they're hard to search for. So I'll put up a post with the list.