A few months ago, I did some groundwork with a large European distribution company to see if it was possible to set up an alternative to Amazon. Despite some initial intermediate-level interest, the project foundered for two reasons: a) the high-level decision makers weren’t willing to get sufficiently aggressive on the pricing and b) virtually none of the very authors the project was intended to save were interested in being saved.
Since I don’t believe in attempt to save people from themselves, and I’m perfectly content to permit every author and publisher who is dumb enough to rely upon Amazon see their revenues continue to decline, I abandoned my efforts. However, now that Amazon has turned ebooks into a walled-garden service by eliminating the ability to move books that one has purchased outside of Kindle, it’s necessary for Castalia to give people a means of actually purchasing our ebooks as a product.
Which is precisely what we have done courtesy of NDM Express. All of Castalia’s books, including the Library, History, and Cathedra books for which we control the digital rights, will be available via NDM Express. The books are in EPUB format, DRM-free, and will have a minimum price of $4.99. Other authors and publishers are welcome to sell their books there; at 25 percent, NDM will take a smaller percentage of the revenue than Amazon or Apple do.
Library, History, and Cathedra ebooks will sell for $9.99, but will be free to the appropriate subscribers. A code will be provided in the next few weeks, so don’t expect to download them today. Currently, there are two sections being set up, one with JDA’s ebooks, the other with the Castalia Library books. This is a brand new project, so although it is functional, please give it a few weeks to become fully operational. Eventually, we’ll get the digital Arkhaven books up there as well.
Authors and publishers who would like to make their books available there should contact NDM, not me. Below is an example of the standard cover we’ve developed for the Library books.
UPDATE: The first Castalia Library books are now up at NDM Express.