Draft2Digital vs Kindle Direct Publishing
February 04, 2026 | Author: Laura Candler
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Self-publishing platform that distributes books through its online platforms Books2Read and Smashwords, all major online bookstores, as well as through hundreds of offline stores worldwide. Draft2Digital takes a 10% commission on e-book sales, and with its print-on-demand (POD) service, you can publish a print book as quickly and easily as an e-book. In the control panel, authors can set prices, select channels to distribute through, track sales and monitor the effectiveness of marketing efforts. The platform offers a variety of tools for book preparation (such as adding metadata and error detection), marketing tools (universal book links, B2R author pages, B2R book tabs, Draft2Digital promotions, where you can set up price or free promos, and merchandising projects in offline stores).
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Platform for publishing own books in Amazon Kindle - the largest bookstore, which accepts wide range of categories (fiction, business, children's books, comics, romance, etc.). Amazon takes a 30% commission on book sales, or 65% if the book is not within the recommended price range. For paperback books, the commission of KDP is approximately 40% of the price after deducting printing costs. Publishing a book is quite simple and takes only a few minutes - for formatting the file and adding metadata/pricing. KDP provides authors with free and simple self-publishing tools, giving them control over their book's content, design, price, audience and advertising. Authors retain ownership of their content and can make changes to their book at any time. Authors can also participate in the Kindle Unlimited subscription server and receive royalties for every page read.
Draft2Digital vs Kindle Direct Publishing in our news:
2026. Bookshop.org to sell Draft2Digital's indie author e-books
Draft2Digital and Bookshop.org announced a new partnership that makes hundreds of thousands of independent ebooks from indie authors distributed through Draft2Digital now available on Bookshop.org's rapidly growing ebook platform, with the partnership expected to grow to over a million titles as it expands. For the first time, the fastest-growing segment of publishing is directly providing a sustainable digital revenue stream for local bookstores. Draft2Digital supports over 330,000 authors worldwide and has helped generate over $500 million in ebook sales. Some experts believe this ecosystem is home to low-quality books (including those written by AI) that are impossible to publish with any major publisher and could significantly pollute Bookshop.org.
2021. Amazon stops accepting MOBI books from authors
For years, Amazon has had specific formats accepted for upload on Kindle Direct Publishing—namely MOBI files, PDFs and Word documents. PDFs can be problematic, as the conversion to a reflowable ebook format can become distorted. Now, for similar reasons, Amazon will no longer accept MOBI files starting June 28th. Instead, authors can still upload their Word documents in both .doc and .docx formats, or an EPUB version of their file. For some authors, this is not an issue. Many authors don't bother with file conversion and simply upload their manuscripts as Word documents. However, some authors who have relied on this process will need to adjust to this new requirement.
