Compared September 2026
Books.by is a direct-sales bookstore with print-on-demand.
The closest thing to this product that exists, and the honest split is by format: they print, we do not. Ebooks sit behind their $299 tier while their $99 one is print-only — but they take the payment and pay you out, which is the one thing here that is arranged differently on purpose.
Their flat fee buys a print operation as well as a store, which is a fair thing to charge for and not a comparison this product can win. The number that matters here is the ebook one: $299 a year on Pro against $0 until you are selling and $19 a month after.
Printed because a headline rate is not the whole bill, and because what a competitor charges for is the clearest statement of what it thinks it is selling.
| Inkwharf | Books.by | |
|---|---|---|
| Sells ebooks | That is the whole product | On the $299 tier only |
| Sells paperbacks | No | Print-on-demand, ISBNs included |
| What ebooks cost you | $0 to $19 a month | $299 a year |
| Free tier | Yes, to $500 of sales a month | None. $99 a year to start |
| Cut of each sale | Nothing, on every plan including free | None — plus 2.9% + 30¢ card fees |
| Who takes the payment | Your own Stripe account. We never hold a cent | They do, and pay out daily |
| Merchant of record | You are the merchant of record | Their platform processes the sale |
| Buyer email addresses | Every buyer's email address is yours | Given to the author |
| EPUB handling | Spec-checked uploads, real chapter samples | An instant digital download |
| Reading experience | In-browser reader and send-to-Kindle on every book | The file, and good luck |
| Bitcoin | Optional, to your own wallet | No |
| Track record | New, and small | 50,000 authors, $4.4M paid |
A dot marks the side a row genuinely favours. Rows without one are a draw, and the ones marked against us are why the rest is worth reading.
Paperback print-on-demand with free ISBNs, printing and shipping handled, sold from the same page as the ebook. 97% of indie authors sell paperbacks. If a physical book is any part of what you sell, that is not a feature gap here — it is the whole product, and this one does not have it.
A reader who wants the paperback and a reader who wants the file are the same order on the same listing. Selling ebooks here and print there means two storefronts and two links in your back matter, and you should count that cost honestly before moving anything.
They say 50,000 authors and $4.4M paid out. This is a young product with no such number to quote, and no amount of architecture makes up for that on the day you are deciding who to trust with a launch.
Their Core tier is $99 a year. If you want a paperback storefront and the ebook is an afterthought, nothing here competes with that — we cannot sell the paperback at any price.
Their ebook publishing is a Pro feature at $299 a year; Core at $99 sells paperbacks only. Here the ebook is the entire point: free while you are small, $19 a month at the top. If you sell ebooks and no print, you are paying their print platform for a format it added on.
They process the sale and pay you out daily, which means their 0% is a policy on a balance they hold. Cards here are charged on your own Stripe key and bitcoin settles to your own wallet, so there is no balance of ours for a cut to be taken from later. Same promise, different mechanism — one of them can be revised in a pricing update.
Uploads are checked against the EPUB spec before they can be sold, the sample is a real first chapter cut into its own file, and the buyer gets an in-browser reader and send-to-Kindle. On a print-first platform the ebook is an instant download and the rest is the reader's problem.
Their floor is $99 a year, paid up front: signing up reserves your books.by handle and goes straight to a card form, so the first thing you do is buy a year of it. The free tier here runs to $500 of sales a month with no card on file — which answers the question of whether your list buys direct, rather than betting $99 on it.
Upload a corrected file and every past buyer's permanent link serves it. A typo fix reaches someone who bought two years ago, without an email asking them to come and fetch it.
Every figure quoted for Books.by above, and the page it was read from, checked September 7, 2026. These pages are re-read against those claims rather than trusted — if one of them changes, this comparison is wrong until it is updated, and you should be able to tell that for yourself.