The great bluff of digital eBook and audiobook stores

For years, we at La Novella Orchidea have been witnessing a digital circus that promises epoch-making revolutions for authors and readers, but which is increasingly proving to be a house of cards. This is clearly the case with stores such as Barnes & Noble and Draft2Digital, huge platforms that, on paper, should have opened the doors to self-publishing and given independent authors wide visibility. And instead? Intermittent distribution, continuous disservices and a total lack of support worthy of the name.

Barnes & Noble and Draft2Digital

Take Barnes & Noble. Despite its fame, registering on their platform is a nightmare for those unfamiliar with American tax forms. Missing signature, invalid signature, outdated file… any excuse is good enough not to proceed with profile validation. It’s a bureaucratic wall that authors (at least foreign ones) cannot break down even with the help of support.

Draft2Digital, for its part, promises ‘quick and easy distribution across multiple stores’. But the facts tell a different story. Titles that don’t appear, missed royalty payments and non-existent communication. Except when your account is deleted. In that case, support sends a string of pre-written emails labelling you a war criminal, banning you from their systems forever (often without any real explanation) and… of course, not paying you the royalties you’ve earned. The insult on top of the injury? The ban is just for show, because you can still access your profile as if nothing had happened. Clearly, the publications remain on standby forever, but the data is all there, at the mercy of Draft2Digital. It’s enough to make you regret Amazon, a phrase we don’t say lightly.

The censorship

Then there is the unresolved issue of censorship, which particularly affects authors of erotic fiction, with all its endless contradictions. Barnes & Noble, through its distributor StreetLib, categorically rejects erotic eBooks, while through its proprietary publishing system it accepts them regularly. Kobo, on the other hand, does not accept erotic titles on its platform, but allows their indirect distribution through aggregators such as StreetLib. So, how should an independent author proceed? How can they categorise their works in the most effective way possible, to have a chance of selling in the endless jungle of independent eBooks and audiobooks? It is a question to which, after ten years, we have still not found a valid answer.

The smaller stores

But it’s not just a problem for the giants. In recent years, several smaller subscription-based stores have emerged in the digital landscape, offering an alternative to the giants of digital publishing. Take 24symbols, a pioneer of the “all you can read” model for eBooks, which started out with great ambitions and investments, only to end up drastically downsizing due to problems of economic sustainability and poor market penetration. Or services such as Oyster, which seemed to be the future of subscription audiobooks, but disappeared into thin air, leaving thousands of users and authors empty-handed. And even if these stores manage to make ends meet, they leave very little in the hands of independent authors, who are paid a ridiculous fee based on the number of pages read in a month.

An unsolvable problem?

On the self-publishing front, all this translates into a real bottleneck. Self-publishing, which was supposed to be a great cultural revolution to democratise writing and publishing distribution, is restricted to a very small circle of platforms (read Amazon and Audible) where almost all visibility and real profitability is concentrated. The rest is a digital desert of inactive, obsolete stores that do not update their catalogues and rarely promote independent titles.

The promise of a fair and open market remains a distant goal. And perhaps unattainable.