Tablo is now moving into the publishing business, at least into the distribution side. Click here to check out the details of that. In essence, you pay $99 per year/ per book, to have your stuff published on iBooks, Amazon, Booktopia, Barnes & Noble, and the rest of the 10 largest ebook retailers. Tablo gives you an ISBN and everything. For $149 per year/ per book, you get that plus the remaining 10% or so of the online market, and digital libraries. For $299 per year/per book, you get paperback distribution to about $40,000 retailers.

That per book/per year seems somewhat daunting to me, and I’d really have to test it out and run some numbers before I could commit to it. But it would save time and trouble.

One of the things I like about Tablo is how responsive they are to their users. So when I ask about the details of their plans, I get immediate feedback. After asking for verification that the publishing plans are per year/per book, I share some thoughts vis-a-vis cost registration. Here’s the response I get:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this Andrew! It is a different model to publishing independently, and for some authors this still may be the preferred path.

For us, the model we’ve tried to create is similar to the model of a blogging or website service, like SquareSpace or WordPress, where there are no servers, no domains, no DNS etc, and the owner can pay $8 per month or $100 per year to have a live and fully hosted website.

We hope that for authors, the value of reaching all of the world’s bookshops at once, without thinking about assets or ISBNs, and even having a paperback version available, is akin to hosting a blog without having to think about your own server or domains. In a scenario like this, the value of the service might outweigh the costs of publishing independently.

Worth considering.