Bookbaby is one of the leading self-publishing companies in the world that authors employ to distribute their books to many different platforms. It leads the charge in the sheer number of electronic book stores that you can opt into when you submit your books. Today the company is even more appealing because of new agreements with eBookPie, Baker & Taylor, and Gardners.
Currently Bookbaby submits published books to all of the mainstream stores, such as Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Amazon, and Sony. The real benefit is the sheer number of indie and alternative stores that could account for an author’s overall sales. Let’s take a look at some of these new companies Bookbaby is dealing with and give you some introspective on what they’re all about.
Baker & Taylor has been in business for over 200 years and is a leading distributor of books, videos, and music products to more than 36,000 libraries, institutions, and retailers in over 120 countries. B&T currently has more than 1.5 million books in their database. One of the lesser known facts about this company is that it is responsible for the Bilo software suite, which is heralded as the world’s most advanced, flexible, and engaging e-reader software application. Built on state-of-the-art video gaming technology, Blio is a three-dimensional, interactive application that will bring your eBook to life.
Gardners Books is Britain’s leading book, DVD, Blu-ray, and music CD wholesaler, with over 4.5 million books and 150,000 ebooks available in their catalog. When you submit your book to the online database, your eBook will also be available in Gardners’ wholesale catalog for independent bookstores, online venders, and other 3rd party retailers. Gardners also provides an ebook lending model for a number of libraries, under which library members are restricted to one concurrent loan per purchased ebook. When your book is sold through this company, you will garner 60% of each sale you make.
eBookPie is the newest company that Bookbaby started to deal with and it has a respectable 300,000 books in its catalog. It has an innovative tool for publishers and content partners called eBookSlicer. This enables publishers to quickly and affordably split ebooks and other documents of any length into stand-alone, fully packaged content chunks, including eChapters, eSections and eArticles. Publishers can instantly extract valuable content from both frontlist and backlist titles to create new, fully formatted, and packaged stand-alone eContent. Like buying a slice of a CD from iTunes, consumers want the option of purchasing just a slice of a book, and the Chapterizer simplifies the process of creating that slice.
For example, with just a click the Chapterizer can instantly turn a 15-chapter ebook into 15 or more fully packaged eChapters. Each eChapter can include a cover, customized front and back matter, and a customized marketing page. This is great because you can sell content by the chapter instead of buying the whole book. This is especially interesting for science, math, and history books when you might be interested in a specific chapter for a report.
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.
