The best retailers and lenders of ebooks…
I’m sometimes (albeit rarely now) asked what are the best retailers and lenders of ebooks. Readers (and authors!) all too often just assume it’s Amazon. It’s not…and there are many. Amazon has its hands in too many cookie jars now (the jars are full of money, not cookies, of course), going far beyond being a simple online retailer of ebooks (or being a lender in several programs that scam authors and publishers), so it dominates the world of retail sales so much that you have to wonder if the retail world will soon be controlled by the Bezos bots. I want to correct that misconception.
I can heartily recommend any of the affiliated retailers and lenders of Smashwords and Draft2Digital for your ebook purchases. As you may know, the two have merged (although their catalogs haven’t), so I’ll list them all together. The affiliated retailers include Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Gardners, and Kobo (and Kobo Plus, although I don’t know what that subtle distinction is…and don’t really care!); the affiliated library and lending services include Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Hoopla, Library Direct, Overdrive, Scribd, and Vivlio. Amazon distributes to no one! (They think they’re the be-all and end-all of the publishing universe!)
Those two “aggregating services” (technical term meaning they group reading material together and distribute it to retailers) also do a lot more for authors and publishers than Amazon, including distribution to those affiliates, which continue the service to authors and public at large. B&N, for example, groups books in a series together automatically. (An author or publisher has to ask Amazon to do that most of the time because it’s run by stupid bots—but they usually have no luck in accomplishing that…for the same reason!) Amazon’s bots are also very efficient at discarding qualified, valid reviews!
Many of the Draft2Digital and Smashwords affiliates allow readers to find authors and publishers’ ebooks in unusual places they themselves distribute to—Kobo to Walmart and the lending services to public libraries who often lend ebooks, for example. Moreover, they don’t discriminate between Prime and non-Prime customers—there is no damn Amazon Prime! (That “Anazon service” costs the consumer over $100 per year now.) Draft2Digital and Smashwords also don’t discriminate between traditionally and self-published ebooks. (Amazon pimps the traditionally published ebooks more, especially those from their own subsidiary traditional publishers. So much for supporting self-publishing! The reason is obvious: Most traditional publishers charge almost as much for the ebook versions as the print version, so Amazon makes more money from selling their ebooks!)
One of the worst things about Amazon is, in fact, its KDP for authors of ebooks (this is an acronym for “Kindle Direct Publishing”—the words “direct publishing” form an oxymoron, of course). Long ago, they (meaning the big Bezos bot, I suppose) layered KDP on top of the normal Amazon sales site that consumers love (or, like me, love to hate). That means the username and password used at the Amazon retail site by authors for their own book purchases are the same ones they log-on to KDP with for their publishing activities. Huh? Moreover, in their pond-scum-like wisdom, Amazon’s two-factor authentication on the main retail site, with its email or cellphone options, can only be used with a cellphone option on KDP! Because older authors (or even very tech-aware ones, young or old!) don’t use cellphones (I only use mine in the car for emergency situations, never for internet business), they can’t get their tax info like they used to. (Recently, I spent a lot of time trying to get a work-around to that roadblock.) This is a recent “feature” of two-factor authentication for KDP that even the guy on the help-line I talked to admitted was a major gaffe. Bottom line: Amazon doesn’t give a damn about authors!
All these problems motivated my decision to not offer any of my recent ebooks on Amazon—and I’m definitely boycotting KDP! Sure, Amazon offers some products buyers can’t find elsewhere. I’ve found this especially true of ebooks produced overseas (e.g., Joffe imprint’s Brit-style mysteries that I love to read). Like everyone else, I have to grimace, cave in, and buy those products on Amazon. Otherwise, I recommend you do what I’m doing: Boycott Amazon entirely, whether it’s the main retail site or KDP.
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Menace from Moscow. For your consideration and enjoyment: The end of Penny Castro’s post-apocalyptic adventures. In this third novel of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy “The Last Human,” the critical and difficult management of geopolitics in a post-apocalyptic world caused by a worldwide bioengineered virus continues: Survivor Penny Castro and her friends’ new task is to recover nuclear-armed missiles aboard a US submarine that sunk off Cuba’s coast at the beginning of the pandemic. As if the train trip from Colorado to Florida across a dangerous, desolate, and devasted US isn’t enough, what awaits them in the Caribbean and beyond will put any fan of sci-fi thrillers on the edge of their seats. From SoCal to Cheyenne Mountain and on to Florida, Cuba, and what remains of the Russian Federation, Penny’s adventures are full of mystery, thrills, and suspense. This novel will soon be available at most online retailers (but not Amazon!) and at most library and lending services.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
