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Barnes & Noble PubIt DIY eBook Platform Lets You Take on J.K. Rowling

by Terrence O'Brien on October 6, 2010 at 07:20 AM

PubIt
Barnes & Noble is continuing to improve its e-book offerings and, with the launch of its PubIt! platform, is now offering writers and small-scale publishers the ability to make their works available through BN.com. You'll need a Barnes & Noble account to start, and then you'll need to register with PubIt!, which entails providing your tax and banking information. Once you're all signed up, it's easy to upload your book, and add important meta data like author, title, blurb, genre and cover. You can upload books directly in ePub format, but you can also upload them in HTML, RTF, TXT, DOC or DOCX. PubIt! will then automatically convert your book to ePub.

The cross-device ePub format should attract some publishers and writers, but the 65-percent of royalties Barnes & Noble offers to authors can't quite match the 70-percent offered by Amazon. (These rates only apply to books priced between $2.99 and $9.99.) At the same time, though, Amazon offers less pricing flexibility. Barnes & Noble allows books to be priced from $0.99 to $199.99. We were impressed by the dual promise of automatic conversion and the Nook emulator, which allows you to preview how your digital text will appear. However, in our brief testing, we had trouble getting either to work. If Barnes & Noble can improve the stability of the service, PubIt! could prove popular with authors and small publishing companies who don't want to be locked into the Kindle format.

Tags: BarnesAndNoble, books, e-reader, ebook, ereaders, media, pubit, publishing, top

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