Barnes & Noble Pub It!

As the Amazon Kindle has grown in popularity and opened the doors for competitive offerings from other book distributors, Barnes & Noble wisely released their Nook color tablet. It's a great device at a great price point and has a sharp HD quality color screen and a fast and powerful Android operating system.

Like Amazon's Kindle, the Nook is a proprietary ebook reader for Barnes & Noble's Pub It ebook publishing system. Compared to Amazon's KDP publishing system, I think authors will find it faster and easier to use.

One of the main differences I discovered in comparing the two publishing processes is that I could upload my original Microsoft Word manuscript directly to the Pub It system. This saved me a lot of time with reformatting the manuscript for the Nook.

I tested the manuscript on a real Nook. Not the easiest process as I needed to first download and install Calibre on my PC before I could add my test ebook to a folder and synch it with my Nook through a USB port.

To their credit, the converted ebook resembled my original Word document very well. While some minor things formatted incorrectly (like embedded tables), by and large, the converted file on the Nook was much better than on the Kindle.

The Pub It system took about the same amount of time as the Amazon ebook store to go live in their ebook store. The royalties are a flat 65% vs. multiple royalty levels available on Amazon. To learn more, please click here.