RoyaltyShare Announces Availability of Digital Advantage for eBooks

NEW YORK, May 18 /PRNewswire/ -- RoyaltyShare, Inc., a leading provider of digital revenue management and reporting solutions, today announced the launch of Digital Advantage™ for eBooks, a new version of its patent-pending platform customized for the needs of book publishers.  This new service, which is available today, gives publishers a proven solution for dealing with large, complex digital revenue streams from dozens of eBook retailers. In a related announcement, RoyaltyShare noted that Hachette Livre, the world's second largest book publisher, is the first publisher to adopt the new service to process all of its rapidly expanding eBook, downloadable audio book, and print-on-demand transactions on a worldwide basis (see accompanying release).

The Digital Advantage service delivers substantial cost savings while increasing the accuracy and transparency of digital revenue data. The platform currently supports the revenue data feeds from over 30 digital retailers and distributors worldwide, supporting both the agency model and retail model, including Amazon (Kindle, Audible, Create Space and AmazonMP3), Apple (iBookStore, AppStore, and iTunes), Barnes & Noble, Sony, Ingram Digital, Ingram Lightning Source, Overdrive, and others.

"It's no secret that the book publishing industry is experiencing a major transition, not only to digital sales but to new sales models," said Bob Kohn, Chairman and CEO of RoyaltyShare.  Kohn, who was also the founder of eMusic.com, the first MP3 music download service, added, "We know from experience with the music industry that one of the major challenges for book publishers will be to quickly enhance their information technology to deal with the exponential growth in the number and complexity of transactions.  RoyaltyShare's solution, which has been managing billions of transactions for the music industry for several years, provides domestic and international book publishers with a proven and cost effective means of meeting the scalability challenges of the digital market."

RoyaltyShare's Digital Advantage for eBooks builds upon the company's years of experience serving record labels and distributors in the music industry.  The Digital Advantage platform is currently in use by hundreds of record labels processing billions of music downloads, streaming transactions, and press-on-demand transactions wherever in the world they take place.

The service automates and tracks the import and normalization of revenue transaction data received from e-retailers, provides sophisticated tools for clearing transaction errors, aggregates the transactions into an output feed that can be customized for downstream royalty and ERP systems, and provides Web-based analytics to examine sales trends.  The result is a highly scalable solution for book publishers now faced with processing and managing sales data from dozens, and potentially hundreds, of electronic retailers, book services, and distributors worldwide.

Digital Advantage for eBooks offers:

• Scalability: Able to process billions of eBook and other digital transactions
• Accuracy: Provides sophisticated web-based tools to help clear errors in transaction data
• Transparency: Web based interface allows for 24/7 access by users across the organization and around the globe to view the status of sales reports
• Flexibility: Contract with new retailers without the increase of downstream support costs, regardless of business model (e.g., agency, retail, download, subscription, advertising-based)
• Ease-of-use: Alerts and views into the sales transaction management process
• Proven reliability: Used by hundreds of record labels and media distributors, and now one of the largest book publishers in the world
• Accounting & Audit Controls: Automated reconciliation reports provide complete visibility into revenue and suspense transaction accounting
• International Scope: Handles transactions produced by eBook, downloadable audiobook, and print-on-demand services located anywhere in the world, supporting transactions of any type, on any scale, in any currency
• Web-based access:
  • No hardware to buy or maintain
  • No software to install or update
  • No backup management
  • No data importers to build or maintain
  • No management of ongoing development process
  • No risk of cost over-runs, project delay, or failure

Pricing and Availability

RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage for eBooks is available immediately worldwide, supported from its offices in the United States and Europe.  For more details on the service and pricing information, contact [email protected].

About RoyaltyShare

RoyaltyShare, Inc. is the leading provider of global digital revenue management and reporting solutions for the music and book publishing industries.  Utilizing an innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application delivery model, RoyaltyShare provides a suite of on-demand services dedicated to simplifying the increasingly complex digital sales channel. RoyaltyShare's technology is used by hundreds of companies around the world.  RoyaltyShare is based in San Diego with offices in New York and London. More information on the company can be found at http://www.royaltyshare.com.

SOURCE RoyaltyShare, Inc.