Business

Sony Opens Up eBook Platform to Self Publishers

Sony announced a partnership with Smashwords and Author Solutions Tuesday which will allow any author to upload a book to their eBook Store, giving self-published writers unprecedented access to the ubiquitous point-of-sale marketplace that is the e-reader. Sony’s eReader division — which runs second in the market to Amazon Kindle — will only vet content […]

smashwords

Sony announced a partnership with Smashwords and Author Solutions Tuesday which will allow any author to upload a book to their eBook Store, giving self-published writers unprecedented access to the ubiquitous point-of-sale marketplace that is the e-reader.

Sony's eReader division — which runs second in the market to Amazon Kindle — will only vet content for hate speech, plagiarism, improper formatting or public-domain books offered by another other than the legitimate author. Other than that, they deny nothing.

When paper and store shelves are scarce, it makes sense to have some sort of gatekeeper decide which books should or should not be published. But it's an art, not a science: William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Sylvia Plath are just a handful of legends whose work was rejected by publishers

When books and shelves are digital, rules about scarcity go out the window, allowing unheralded scribes to bubble to the surface based only on the crowd's reaction — just as many self-motivated bloggers have become old media mainstays and video entrepreneurs have become YouTube phenomenons.

To publish your own book (or other people's books if you're a publisher) through Smashwords, one uploads the manuscript in a specified Microsoft Word format, sets a price, and selects affiliates: Stanza on iPhone, Aldiko on Androi, Barnes & Nobles' website, and now the Sony eBook Store. After that, there are no editors, publishers, copyeditors or other gatekeepers to worry about — or, for that matter, to improve your work — just readers.

Amazon offers a similar service that lets authors to self-publish to the Kindle platform, called Digital Text Platform, so authors can now sell their wares on both major e-book platforms without going through a publisher. However, only Sony and its new partners permit authors from anywhere to submit books; Amazon's program only accepts submissions from within the United States. Other differences: Smashwords says it pays "much higher royalties" than Amazon, distributes to multiple outlets, and does not apply DRM to the eBooks the way Amazon does.

In addition, Sony does not yet match Amazon's wireless "Whispernet" functionality for downloading books wirelessly, but its next-generation device, the Sony Reader Daily Edition expected in stores in December, will add wireless 3G connectivity from AT&T.

To Sony, the reason for the deal is obvious — since digital shelf space is infinite, for practical purposes, there simply isn't much of a downside. "We're committed to providing our customers access to the broadest range of eBook content available and believe these collaborations will allow us to expand the store selection with a host of compelling works from independent sources," said Sony eBook Store director Chris Smythe. "Additionally, we recognize that it is important to provide independent authors and publishers the opportunity to quickly and easily bring their ideas and content to a wide audience of readers."

Authors on Smashwords' backlist who have already published through Smashwords will have to wait a couple of months for their titles to show up in Sony's eBook Store, as Sony migrates its platform to the standard EPUB format. Meanwhile, new authors can expect their books to show up in a matter of days. Smashwords CEO Mark Coker told Wired.com that "if [authors] wanted to game [the system], they could," but that would mean unpublishing and republishing their work, thereby losing whatever visibility their book had accrued to date.

Insofar as the big picture goes, this deal disintermediates the publishing world another degree. But as one gatekeeper (publishers) is surpassed, another appears: an overabundance of choice on the part of the reader. When there's more hay in the stack, the needles have to be all the shinier if anyone's going to find them.

See Also: