#Kindle publishing free#

#Kindle publishing free#

Fast forward to 1998, and four important events happened: 1) the first dedicated eBook readers were launched: Rocket Ebook and Softbook 2) the first ISBN issued to an eBook was obtained 3) US Libraries began providing free eBooks to the public through their web sites and associated services and 4) Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. offered the first 50 digital books on floppy disk.

“In 1985, the Voyager Company, a pioneer in CD-ROMs, was founded and published ‘expanded books’ on CD-ROM including Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and in 1993, Digital Book, Inc. Digital books had been available prior to the first Kindle sale but not as cheaply or in such a vast quantity. You can check out Kindle Direct Publishing here: Ebooks: A History Eventually (in 2019), CreateSpace was folded into KDP Print, moving the CreateSpace authors to the KDP platform for a unified ebook and paperback (print-on-demand) dashboard. KDP Print was in direct competition with CreateSpace, a paperback print-on-demand company Amazon had acquired. KDP produced only ebooks until 2016 when it began offering a print option called KDP Print. The KDP system (both ebook and now print) allows independent publishers (aka authors) to easily upload and distribute their books, bypassing traditional publishers or expensive/predatory vanity publishers and allowing them to reach an ever increasing audience of readers. In November 2007, Amazon launched the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform along with the first Kindle ereader, which I think we can all agree changed independent publishing forever. Kindle Direct Publishing and the Kindle Device There’s an expansive list of Amazon’s corporate acquisitions here: AMAZON AND PUBLISHINGĪs Amazon grew in many other directions it continued to serve (and expand) as a retailer of physical books before revolutionizing the independent publishing world with the arrival of the Kindle and the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. 2002 saw the birth of Amazon Web Services (a provider of web stats for marketers and developers) followed by their computing cloud and storage services in 2006. By 1999, they were also selling video games software, toys, games, consumer electronics and home-improvement products. In 1998, they began selling music and videos as well as acquiring online book selling operation in the UK and Germany.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in Bellevue, Washington in July 1994 as an online marketplace for books. This alone causes much confusion, which I will sort out for you here. In the publishing world, Amazon is both a traditional publisher and the parent company of Kindle Direct Publishing-the most prolific of all independent publishing platforms. In addition to e-commerce, Amazon also focuses on cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing are NOT the same thing.įrom the consumer perspective, everyone knows about Amazon and its vast array of products available to you with a few simple clicks.