The Kobo Plus ebook and audiobook subscription scheme is opening up in Portugal in a partnership with LeYa and other Portuguese publishers.
This is the third territory for Kobo Plus following Canada and the Netherlands. Kobo says since the scheme was launched in the Netherlands in 2017 the company has seen rapid subscription growth as well as double-digit year-over-year sales growth for a-la-carte ebooks, which is a fancy way of saying ebook sales rather than borrows.
Kobo Plus pays indie authors on the basis of the amount of time that subscribers spent reading your titles in a given month. Each month, it takes the total revenue earned from Kobo Plus subscriptions and the total minutes that all subscribers spent reading that month. Kobo divides the monthly revenue by the minutes read to assign a monetary value to each minute of reading.
Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn says, ‘We are a company built by booklovers, for booklovers and our mission is to ensure readers can read and listen to whatever they want, wherever they want and whenever they want, on any device. Kobo Plus e_LeYa marks an important milestone in that mission, with unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks and thousands of audiobooks.’
The monthly cost for the new scheme in Portugal for access to all ebooks is €5.99, while access to all audiobooks is also €5.99, and access to all ebooks and audiobooks is €7.99.
LeYa is one of the world’s major Portuguese language publishing groups and has been publishing all its books in paper and digital formats since 2010.
You can enrol your ebooks in Kobo Plus through Kobo Writing Life or through distributors such as Draft2digital or PublishDrive.
Kobo Plus ebook subscription service switches to paying authors on the basis of ‘minutes consumed’