Barnes & Noble Annouces PubIT! Digital Publishing Platform

Barnes & Noble, Inc. announced its intentions to open up a self-publishing portal this summer called PubIt! The easy-to-use digital publishing and distribution platform is designed to offer qualified independent publishers and authors of self-published works expanded distribution, visibility, and protection. The announcement marks Barnes & Noble's latest move to continue to build one of the world's largest digital catalogs, spanning ebooks, journals, periodicals, and other types of reading material. PubIt! titles will be distributed through BN.com and Barnes & Noble's eBookstore, which currently offers more than one million digital titles to millions of dedicated customers in-store and online. Independent publishers and writers will appreciate PubIt!'s simple and competitive royalty model and compensation process, the details of which will be available in the coming weeks. Content owners' intellectual property will be well-protected with Barnes & Noble's digital rights management technology and offered in the industry standard EPUB format that allows publishers' works to be enjoyed by millions of Barnes & Noble customers on hundreds of the most popular computing, mobile, and ebook reading devices. Whether online or on-the-go, Barnes & Noble customers will have access to PubIt! titles with the opportunity to browse, sample, buy, and download the digital content in seconds to their devices with free BN reader software. Using Barnes & Noble's Read In Store technology, nook customers can also browse the complete contents of PubIt! titles while in Barnes & Noble stores.