"I look after rights and contracts…" — your 20 questions, answered.

Royalties on direct sales are governed by your author contracts, not by us — but the platform is built so that the accounting is never the obstacle. Every direct sale is recorded with title, price paid, buyer territory and date, and exports cleanly to your royalty system. Two things are worth knowing. First, most standard contracts pay royalties on net receipts — and your net receipts on a direct sale are far higher than on the same sale through a retailer, so authors typically earn more per copy from your direct channel even at unchanged royalty rates. Second, many publishers choose to share the direct-channel margin further — some agents now expect it — and a higher direct royalty rate is one of the strongest cards you hold in the next contract negotiation: it aligns your authors with the channel's success. We'd encourage you to decide your direct-royalty policy before launch and communicate it to authors and agents proactively; see 2.5 for what to tell agents.

By actual reading. The platform records which titles each subscriber opened and how much of each they consumed, so subscription revenue can be allocated per title on a consumption basis — the same principle streaming services use, but with the ledger in your hands rather than a black box. That gives your royalty team an auditable basis for paying authors on subscription income, and gives agents a straight answer instead of a shrug. Before launching any subscription tier, check your contracts permit subscription exploitation (see 2.2) and decide the allocation basis in writing; we'll give you the data to operate whichever basis you choose.

Thirty days' notice, no long-term lock-in. If you leave, you keep the app (it's on your developer account), your reader data (full export), and your content; see 8.3 for exactly what offboarding involves. We think notice periods are a test of confidence: a vendor that needs to lock you in for three years is telling you something about how it expects you to feel in year two.

Most modern trade contracts do — the grant of rights typically covers sale of electronic editions "through any channel" or "by any means" — but you should verify before launch rather than after, and three clause families deserve attention. Grant of rights: confirm electronic/verbatim rights are granted to you without channel restriction; older contracts occasionally name specific retailers or "third-party retail channels" in ways a cautious reading might not stretch to direct sales. Royalty basis: direct sales pay on net receipts in most contracts — confirm the definition of net receipts doesn't produce anomalies when the receipt is 100% of cover price (see 2.4). Approval and consultation clauses: some contracts require consultation on "new forms of exploitation." The practical approach taken by publishers launching direct channels: audit a sample of contract vintages, fix forward (new contracts explicitly cover direct and subscription), and communicate openly with agents for the backlist (see 2.5). We provide a checklist of the clauses to review — but your own lawyers make the call.

This is the one to check hardest, because subscription is the newest form of exploitation and the least likely to be explicit in older contracts. Newer contracts increasingly include subscription/streaming language with a defined revenue-allocation basis; older ones may be silent, which is not the same as permissive. Before enrolling backlist titles in any subscription tier: confirm the grant covers it, agree the allocation basis (see 1.7), and consider an opt-in approach for older contracts — agents respond far better to being asked than being notified. The platform lets you include or exclude titles from subscription tiers individually, precisely so rights caution never has to block the whole programme.

Per title, by buyer territory. Your rights metadata governs where each title can be sold: a reader whose store territory (and payment/billing country on your checkout) falls outside a title's rights territories doesn't see it offered for sale. This mirrors how retailers enforce territoriality, with one advantage: the ledger of where each sale happened is yours, so a rights query from a co-publisher or agent can be answered with data rather than assurances. Note the usual boundary: territorial enforcement governs sale; a reader who legitimately bought a title while resident in-territory doesn't lose their library when they travel.

Your contracts set the floor; the market is setting expectations above it. At standard net-receipts rates, authors already earn more per direct sale than per retail sale, because your receipts are higher — that's the mechanical answer, and for many lists it's sufficient. But agents increasingly argue that if the publisher keeps 85–100% of a direct sale instead of 35–70%, the author should share the uplift — and several publishers with successful direct channels have made a higher direct royalty part of the pitch to authors, treating it as an acquisition and retention tool rather than a cost. Our guidance: decide a policy deliberately (standard rate, uplifted rate, or uplift above a volume threshold), document it, and lead with it in agent conversations. A direct channel with author buy-in markets itself; one that looks like margin hoarding invites contract friction. The platform's reporting supports whichever policy you set.

Lead with the three things agents actually care about: more money per copy (higher net receipts flow through to royalties — bring the per-unit arithmetic), better data (real reading and sales figures per title, visible on demand, instead of opaque retailer aggregates), and a publisher investing in the author's long-term audience (a reader relationship that follows the author's next book, instead of being re-rented from a retailer every launch). Be ready for two questions: the royalty-rate question (see 2.4 — have a policy) and the subscription-allocation question (see 1.7 — have a basis). Publishers who bring agents a one-page direct-channel policy before being asked report the conversation becomes an asset — it signals professionalism in a market where most publishers still can't answer.

That's your choice, at the granularity you choose. The platform's dashboards show sales, revenue and reading engagement per title in real time; you decide what to expose to whom. Some publishers give authors live read-only access to their own titles' figures (launch-day sales visible hour by hour is, in our experience, the single most-loved feature among authors); others fold direct-channel lines into their existing royalty statements. Either way, the underlying ledger exports to your royalty system, and every number an agent might challenge is auditable back to individual transactions.

Title by title. Content where you don't control direct-sale rights simply stays out of the direct channel (or out of specific territories or tiers) — inclusion is a per-title, per-channel decision, not all-or-nothing. For anthologies and multi-rights-holder works, the same consumption and sales ledger that supports author royalties (see 1.7) supports multi-party allocation. The practical rule: your direct channel should launch with the catalogue you're sure about and expand as rights are confirmed — the platform doesn't force you to solve your hardest rights questions before selling your simplest ones.

They're different legal animals. Public-library lending runs through library suppliers under licence terms you set, and (in the UK and some other territories) triggers PLR payments from the state — none of which changes with your direct channel. An in-app "library-style" subscription (e.g., any three titles at a time) is simply a commercial subscription with a borrowing mechanic: it's a sale under your subscription terms, allocated to authors like any subscription revenue (see 1.7), with no PLR involvement. The naming similarity confuses; the accounting shouldn't. If you sell to actual libraries or institutions, access codes and bulk licences are handled separately (see 5.6).

Yes — the DPA, sub-processor list, and security summary are available before you sign anything, not after. Send them straight to your DPO and IT lead; the demo can include a session with our technical team to answer their questions directly.

Children's publishers need two things: no collection of children's personal data without verifiable parental consent (COPPA in the US, age-appropriate design codes in the UK/EU), and an app-store listing that correctly declares its audience. The standard pattern — which the platform supports — is an adult-purchaser model: the account holder is the parent/adult customer, purchases and data belong to the adult, and child reading profiles hold no personal data beyond a display name. Store-listing age declarations and privacy-label entries are configured per app during onboarding. If your list is substantially children's content, raise it at the demo so the design gets it right from the start — retrofitting consent flows is expensive.

Readium LCP — the open, passphrase-free DRM standard developed by EDRLab, of which Eden Interactive is a member. Why LCP: it protects content with real encryption (unlike watermarking, which only identifies leaks after the fact) while treating readers like customers rather than suspects — no Adobe ID, no third-party account, no device-authorisation ritual that fails at 9pm on launch night. Why not Adobe DRM: it's a closed system with per-transaction costs, a reader experience that publishers' own support inboxes testify against, and a dependency on one company's licensing decisions. Why not watermarking alone: for some lists it's a reasonable choice, but most trade publishers and agents want encryption on frontlist. LCP is also what a publisher should want strategically: because it's an open standard, your protected files aren't hostage to any single vendor — including us.

In practice, publisher direct channels have become normal — most major houses and a fast-growing share of independents sell direct — and retailers have not, as a category, punished it: your trade sales continue through the same accounts, on the same terms, and a retailer's buyer cares about your titles' velocity, not your website. The realistic frictions are narrower: systematic undercutting of retail prices on identical products is what actually irritates trade partners (the answer is value-differentiation, not price war — see 1.9), and exclusive editions are a long-established practice retailers themselves run constantly (see 7.2). It's also worth naming the asymmetry in the status quo: your largest retail partner already competes with you — for your readers' identities, attention and next purchase — every single day. A direct channel doesn't start that competition; it just stops it being one-sided.

Generally yes — exclusivity and windowing are standard publishing practice (retailer-exclusive editions, signed indie editions, format windowing have decades of precedent), and offering your own channel an exclusive edition or early window is the same instrument pointed at yourself. Check two things first: any agency or account terms that create price/availability obligations for specific retailers, and proportionality — an early window of days-to-weeks on select titles builds your channel without giving trade accounts a grievance narrative; withholding lead titles from retail for months would. The strongest direct exclusives don't withhold the book at all: they add what retail can't carry (bonus chapters, author commentary, bundles), which gives your channel superiority with zero trade friction.

No general legal obligation compels it — you set your direct prices. The practical considerations: where you sell ebooks under agency terms you control retail price anyway (and should check your agreements for any parity language); where retailers discount at their own expense under wholesale terms, your direct price may sometimes be undercut by Amazon, which is survivable because your channel's offer is value, not price (see 6.1). Our guidance is boring and firm: hold direct prices at or near RRP, win on bundles and exclusives, and never train readers to comparison-shop you.

Usually not for digital — distribution and rep agreements typically cover physical trade supply and named digital retail channels, while your own direct consumer sales sit outside them — but "usually" is doing work in that sentence: check for any exclusivity language covering "all electronic sales" or similar in older agreements. Print direct sales (if you sell physical through your storefront) more commonly touch distributor terms, since fulfilment and trade-discount structures are implicated. Practical step: a one-page briefing to your distributor and reps before launch — framed accurately as a reader-data programme that grows overall demand for your titles, including the print they carry (see 7.4) — keeps partners inside the tent and has, in our experience, never made the situation worse.

Two layers. In transit and at rest, content lives encrypted on the platform's infrastructure with access controlled per reader entitlement. At the reader's device, Readium LCP encrypts every delivered file with per-user licensing — a copied file is unreadable without its licence, which is revocable and expirable (that's also what makes lending/subscription mechanics enforceable — see 2.9). No DRM prevents determined piracy — anyone who claims otherwise is selling something — but LCP raises the effort above the casual-sharing threshold where nearly all leakage actually happens, without punishing legitimate readers with the account-and-authorisation rituals that made older DRM infamous. Review copies deserve special mention: access codes with expiring licences (see 5.6) close publishing's leakiest pipe — the emailed PDF.

Professional indemnity, cyber liability and public liability cover are in place, with certificates available on request — ask at the demo or during procurement and we'll send the current schedule the same day, so your procurement team gets what it needs without an email round-trip.