Hummingbird is not a household name, but it was a service that allowed users to sell audiobooks and ebooks in their online store and earn a commission whenever something was sold. If you wanted to do business with the company, you had to be a US resident. Hummingbird was sold to 360 Media Direct, the marketing and fulfillment agency with roots in the magazine publishing world. 360 Media Direct was founded more than 30 years ago and has expanded to include a range of digital services, including lead generation tools, customer loyalty platforms and targeted advertising media programs.
The Hummingbird catalog was hosted on Papertrell’s servers, and Papertrell handled the tech and dev operations. 360 has its own dev team, so the Hummingbird catalog is now on our their servers.
Hummingbird has emailed all of their users in the past 24 hours, letting them know that all of their old links will be 301 redirected to the new service, automatically. They are encouraging their old users to login with BookstoreName.MyMustReads.com. If you have the old URL in your own content, promotional or other material, Hummingbird is recommending updating the URL there, but rest assured that your old URL will still work until you have time to make any updates.
It seems that My Must Reads is not aimed at users who want to earn some extra money selling digital content, but established bookstores. The website is utterly terrible, it looks like it was designed in 2001. The FAQ and brand messaging is next to nil and does not give any details away, such as royalty rates, commissions or the number of titles in the catalog.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
