There's Good News and Bad ...

Okay, I'll get straight to the point. As you can read in this here post, Kobo is alive and working on an international self-publishing platform to compete with the Devil Amazon.

This could be some serious shit, because (to quote the company press release):

Unlike competitive self-publishing tools [which we won't name], Kobo allows authors to set their book price to “FREE” at any time without restrictive exclusive agreements, in addition Kobo pays 10% higher royalties on sales in many growing international markets and allows authors much more freedom on pricing.

This is a win-win for indie authors and bookstores, because between having more online publishers for our ebooks and using Internet crowdsourcing to fund and distribute our print books, we'll all benefit.

And Amazon won't rule the Internet be the only publisher/retailer/bookseller in the world.

The bad news is that we lost one.