Thursday, August 20, 2015

Hummingbird Aims to 'Democratize E-Book Retailing'

Shelf Awareness
American West Books, Sanger, Calif., a major book supplier to Costco, Sam's Club, Whole Foods and other retailers, has founded Hummingbird Digital Media, which will supply organizations and individuals, including independent bookstores, with a turnkey program that allows them to offer clients and customers a catalogue of the most popular e-books and audiobooks. The program is also available for nonprofits, print and online media, book publishers, professional associations, chain retailers, conferences, book clubs, speakers, bloggers and authors.

The company slogan is "We're democratizing e-book retailing," and it wrote, "Imagine a world where e-book sales were not dominated by three huge companies. Imagine a world where thousands of individuals and organizations could compete with Apple's iBooks, Amazon's Kindle, and Barnes & Noble's Nook."

"What we've developed is a program where anyone and everyone can get into the e-book and audiobook business with a few mouse clicks," Stephen Blake Mettee, Hummingbird Digital Media president and chief visionary officer. "We like to say we are unleashing the power of the many."

The HDM platform will launch in the fall; anyone interesting in joining its merchant network may register at HummingbirdDM.com. There is no charge to become a merchant.

The program includes an app for reading and listening and a web-based storefront for the discovery, purchasing and downloading of digital media. The app is operating-system agnostic, meaning it works on iPhone, iPad, Android devices such as Nook and Samsung, and the Kindle Fire. Both the app and the storefront carry the brand identity of the organization or individual.

The e-book and audiobook catalogue will include "hundreds of thousands" of titles from thousands of publishers, including Workman, Sourcebooks, Macmillan and HarperCollins.

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