OverDrive And WH Smith Updates

OverDrive

While not all of the promised 200,000+ Smashwords titles are showing in the public OverDrive catalogue, some 157,000 are, so if you are with Smashwords and opted in to the OverDrive distribution channel there’s a good chance some or all of your titles will be available.

OverDrive is the world’s biggest library supplier for digital content, not just in the US but across Europe and the UK, in Australia and New Zealand, and in places as improbable as China.

Check the site (LINK) to see if your titles are showing. And if they are, copy the links to your websites, promo packages, etc, and make sure people know! Digital libraries are big business. OverDrive alone saw over one hundred million digital downloads in 2013.

NB The Smashwords-OverDrive deal only covers OverDrive libraries, not OverDrive’s retail outlets.

W H Smith

WH Smith is the Kobo partner outlet that famously kicked out all indies last year following a scandal in the UK over some unsavoury titles appearing in the ebook store.

WH Smith is the second biggest b&m book store and the biggest newsagent and stationer in the UK. Kobo devices and the Kobo ebook store are prominently displayed in the bigger WH Smith stores, so losing the Kobo-WH Smith outlet was a blow to indies selling in Britain.

A year on and indies are back, but still filtering through. We can say with confidence more and more titles are appearing.

We still cannot say with confidence that all indie aggregators are getting titles in.

So far – and this may be pure coincidence based on our limited survey pool – we are not seeing any titles in WH Smith uploaded via Draft2Digital. Titles via Smashwords, Ebook Partnership and Kobo Writing Life are there.

Currently about 30,000 Smashwords titles are back in WH Smith. No idea how many Smashwords titles are opted in to Kobo, but guessing a lot more than that, so probably lots more to filter through.

Are D2D titles being allowed back in too? We can’t imagine why not, but as yet we have no evidence that they are. Hopefully someone out there can allay our fears and report their D2D titles are in WH Smith.

You can visit the W H Smith ebook site from outside the UK (unlike the Kobo UK site) to check if you are there. (LINK)

Ebook Bargains UK

Far more than just an ebook promo newsletter.

Far more than just the UK.