On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway covers three stories pointing in the same direction: books are everywhere. He reports on AI search engine Perplexity launching an ebook store, adding yet another major platform to the growing list selling books directly to readers. He examines the Library of Congress's initiative to acquire indie and self-published titles — and explains why copyright registration and deposit matter more than ever in the age of AI lawsuits. And he closes with Spotify's announcement that it has passed 100 million audiobook listeners, now dwarfing Audible in audience size.
Listen to the Podcast: Perplexity Launches an Ebook Store
Show Notes
- Library of Congress self-published books collections policy
- US Copyright Office mandatory deposit
- PrePub Book Link (apply for an LCCN)
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News. We've been talking a lot lately about AI platforms adding books to their services, and this week that story continues. Perplexity — the AI search engine that competes with Google in the AI-first search space — has announced it is opening an ebook store. This is significant because Perplexity is already used by hundreds of millions of people as a search tool, and adding an ebook store means it's now trying to monetize the traffic it generates by keeping those users on platform rather than sending them elsewhere.
The question for indie authors, as always, is whether they can get their books into this new store. The initial announcement is light on specifics, but Perplexity has said it will be working with publishers and distributors to build its catalog, which suggests the aggregator route — Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, IngramSpark — is likely to be how indie books get in. ALLi will monitor this and update members as more information becomes available.
What's interesting here is the direction of travel. A year or two ago, Spotify was just an audio platform. Now it's selling ebooks and print books. Perplexity was just a search engine. Now it's selling ebooks. Every major digital platform is beginning to look at books as a category to monetize. That's generally good news for authors — more places to sell. The complication, as ever, is that more platforms also means more places to maintain your metadata, more relationships to manage, and more channels through which AI-generated and AI-assisted content can flood the market.
The Library of Congress Acquires Independent Books — Including Indie
From new platforms to the world's oldest and most venerable book archive: the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has announced an initiative to acquire more independent books — and the word independent here covers not just small press and literary independent publishing, but self-published titles as well. They want to ensure that the Library of Congress represents the full breadth of what is being written and published in America, including books that may never go through traditional publishing channels.
For self-published authors, this is significant in a couple of ways. First, having your book in the Library of Congress is a form of cultural legitimacy — your book becomes part of the permanent record. Second, it opens up what has previously been a fairly obscure and complicated route: getting your book into the Copyright Office is one of the requirements that has come up repeatedly in the context of the AI copyright lawsuits, and it turns out that deposit with the Library of Congress and copyright registration are related processes. Authors who want to protect their copyright in AI cases would do well to look into this.
The process for getting a self-published book deposited in the Library of Congress is through the Copyright Acquisition and Deposit program. You would register your copyright with the US Copyright Office — which is the step that has come up most recently in relation to the Anthropic and Meta lawsuits — and as part of that process, deposit copies of your book. As an indie author there are some complications around whether print-on-demand books are eligible or whether you need a physical print run, but the Library of Congress is working to expand its parameters for what it accepts. Howard will put a link to more information in the show notes.
Spotify Passes 100 Million Audiobook Listeners
Finally, some numbers from Spotify. Spotify has announced that it has passed 100 million audiobook listeners — which is a staggering figure when you consider it launched audiobooks only in 2022. For context, Audible, which has been in the market for decades, has around 40 million subscribers. That comparison isn't entirely apples-to-apples — Spotify's model is inclusion in existing subscriptions rather than an audiobook-specific subscription — but the sheer scale of reach is remarkable.
What this means for indie authors is that Spotify is no longer a nice-to-have distribution channel. At 100 million listeners, it is a major market. The question is whether those listeners are actually discovering and listening to indie titles, or whether the listening is concentrated in a relatively small number of very well-known books and bestsellers — which is often the pattern on subscription platforms. But the numbers suggest that if your audiobook is available on Spotify and it finds its audience, the potential reach is now comparable to or greater than Audible.
Distribution to Spotify remains available through Findaway Voices — now called Voices — and a number of other distributors. If you haven't already made your audiobooks available on Spotify, this milestone is probably the most compelling reason yet to do so. I'll look forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
